How beautiful the things are that you did not notice before!
A few sweetclover plants
Along the road to Bellingham,
Culvert ends poking out of driveways,
Wooden corncribs, slowly falling,
What no one loves, no one rushes towards or shouts about,
What lives like the new moon,
And the wind
Blowing against the rumps of grazing cows.
~Robert Bly from “Like the New Moon I Will Live My Life”
“A devout but highly imaginative Jesuit,”
Untermeyer says in my yellowed
college omnibus of modern poets,
perhaps intending an oxymoron, but is it?
Shook foil, sharp rivers start to flow.
Landscape plotted and pieced, gray-blue, snow-pocked
begins to show its margins. Speeding back
down the interstate into my own hills
I see them fickle, freckled, mounded fully
and softened by millennia into pillows.
The priest’s sprung metronome tick-tocks,
repeating how old winter is. It asks
each mile, snow fog battening the valleys,
what is all this juice and all this joy?
~Maxine Kumin “Almost Spring, Driving Home, Reciting Hopkins”
The Robert Bly poem reminds me to see in a new way
as I travel the road to Bellingham, Washington
(not Bly’s Bellingham, Minnesota).
My eyes scan for the unnoticed and unremarkable,
along these rural byways I traveled decades to work,
now only to meetings or shopping –
when feeling the need to wander and wonder.
Forty years ago in my twice-daily
hour-long Seattle traffic commute to reach my clinic,
I could only pay attention to the cars around me,
blinkered to all else happening.
Since moving north to Whatcom County,
I try to notice what small things
I might keep handy in my memory for another day,
like a jar of canned peaches in our root cellar,
just so I won’t forget,
ready to pull them off the shelf someday
so I might share
their sweetness with someone else.
Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement.
…to get up in the morning
and look at the world in a way
that takes nothing for granted.
Everything is phenomenal;
everything is incredible;
never treat life casually.
To be spiritual is to be amazed.
~Abraham Joshua Hershel
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