Instructions for Living a Life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
–Mary Oliver, Sometimes
Finding poetry in the wild
A lifetime or two ago, I lived on the untamed coastline of Big Sur, California. Several times a month, I ascended steep switchbacks for thirty minutes to arrive at a rocky perch under a beloved, sprawling coast live oak. From that lofty vantage point a thousand feet above sea level, the Pacific Ocean, bounded only by the curvature of the earth, hints at its staggering immensity. Carpets of lupine grace the hills in spring, and far, far below, humpbacks ply the jagged coast in summer. If you are lucky, a California condor, surfing the breeze on its ten-foot wingspan, might pass within a stone’s throw.
I came to this place, kept coming to this place, to pay attention and be astonished. And, invariably, I fell deeper in love with the world.
An invitation to explore with a poet’s soul
I invite you to do the same. Whether your next exploratory venture brings you to foreign lands, an alpine trail, or the busy microcosm of your garden bed, explore with the eyes and soul of a poet. You need not write, read, or even like poetry. You need not compose sonnets to glaciers or pen a haiku about broccoli (although such efforts are certainly welcome). The invitation is simply to open wide the gates of your senses and let the world affect you.
First as an educator, then as an organic farmer, and now as a psychologist, I have spent much of my adult life thinking about why humanity has made such a royal mess of the ecosystem and whether there is any way we can shift course. One rather unexpected conclusion: the world needs more poets.
How we lost our connection to nature
Western culture, in particular, has engaged in a long, largely unspoken process of objectifying non-human nature; the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution sent this propensity into overdrive. The animism of our pagan and prehistoric ancestors gradually gave way to the Judeo-Christian assumption that humanity stands apart from nature. Henceforth, our task was to “fill the earth and master it.” It has taken several millennia for the chickens to come home to roost, but the ultimate implication of a culture built upon objectification was expressed succinctly by the Standing Rock Sioux writer Vine Deloria: “If you see the world around you as a collection of objects for you to manipulate and exploit, you will inevitably destroy the world while attempting to control it.”
The magic of poetry: transforming objects into subjects
Poetry performs a kind of magic trick: it can transform objects into subjects. While objectification flattens and reduces, subjectification opens worlds within worlds. Objectification of nature sounds much like former US President Ronald Reagan when he purportedly said, “If you’ve seen one redwood, you’ve seen them all.” Subjectification sounds like the English Romantic poet William Blake: “To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour.”
While not a panacea, the poetic gaze can help us swim against the current of objectification. Poetry of and about place may inoculate that place from wholesale manipulation and exploitation by giving voice to its unique essence. If appreciation of that unique essence takes root among the many and/or among the powerful, subjectification serves as a protective shield, or perhaps as an extension of the planet’s immune system. The poetic verse of John Muir stirred the poetic soul of Teddy Roosevelt and helped save Yosemite Valley. The journeys taken by the 17th-century poet-explorer Matsuo Bashō, father of the modern form of haiku, have become revered pilgrimage routes in Bashō’s native Japan. Poetic voices such as Jaime de Angulo, Robinson Jeffers, and Henry Miller sang the praises of my beloved Big Sur, helping stave off overdevelopment and protecting its essential wildness. Closer to home, Cumberland Forest’s trail network is a warren of whimsical poetics: Space Nugget, Bucket of Blood, Fuji Jim. We love and protect Cumberland Forest because we experience it not as an object valuable for a number of board feet of timber, but as a subject with its own personality and inherent worth. This is the result of a cumulative, collective effort of paying attention, being astonished, and telling about it.
A countercultural act for a fragmented world
To experience the world with the eyes and soul of the poet is a countercultural act. The patience and attention it asks of us flies in the face of cultural and technological forces that demand (then slice and dice) our attention. Yet few efforts are as worthwhile, and necessary, as weaving back together strands of our fragmenting world, creating the preconditions for what Margaret Wheatley terms “islands of sanity in the midst of a raging destructive sea.” To explore the world poetically invites us into a deeper relationship with place, people, history, and ourselves. It is this relational web of subjects that holds together. The world as a collection of objects does not cohere; it falls apart.
And so, for the sake of coherence and sanity, astonishment and beauty, give yourself permission to stroll through the world as a poet.
You may even want to carry these lines along with you as company:
I don’t know what a prayer is / I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down / into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, / how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, / which is what I have been doing all day. / Tell me, what else should I have done?
– Mary Oliver, The Summer’s Day.
