A highlight of the Winter Solstice Lantern Walk along the Eno River, NC, 2025.
The fear is ancient and uncomplicated, part of our human-animal inheritance…will the darkness swallow me, will it swallow us all together? Nina MacLaughlin, Winter Solstice: An Essay
Happy New Year to my friends and readers!
Here is a post full of little treasures to light up your midwinter days and usher in the New Year.
Never in my life have I seen the winter solstice celebrated with so much exuberance. Last year, on our first winter solstice in Hillsborough, North Carolina, I assumed the annual lantern walk along the Eno River would be a quiet affair with a few dozen souls. Not at all. Thousands of people showed up with the most inventive homemade lanterns I’d ever seen.
Before you read past this paragraph, PLEASE click the link below to last year’s walk. It will put you in the mood for the rest of this post, which is full of all things Winter Solstice. In last year’s video, you’ll see drone footage of the magical riverside procession, an illuminated spiral, and beyond-belief lanterns, with a poetic narration by our town’s very own Poet Laureate, Amal Kassir. (YES, our town has a Poet Laureate. More about Amal at the end of this post.)
Here is the link. Please turn up your volume, enjoy, and then hop back over here:
I’ve sprinkled quotes from Nina MacLaughlin’s earthy, primal Winter Solstice essay throughout this post, because it speaks deeply to writer and mixed-media/book artist Suzi Banks Baum, who created and leads Advent Dark Journal. This is an immersion in art, writing, nature, and daily creative practice that I enjoy during the last six weeks of the year.
I’ll write more about Advent Dark Journal in an upcoming post, because Suzi and her creation are worth an in-depth look. For now, here is a glimpse of the small collage and art projects I’ve completed as part of this experience. You’ll see that my Advent calendar has a religious theme, but Advent Dark Journal is not centered around organized religion; rather, it is a “container” of rituals for participants to explore wherever our soulful arisings lead us during this sacred time of year.
“Advent Miracle”
“Earth Holder”
These small, collaged journals and art pieces were sent off to friends – one in Australia – as soon as I completed them. In addition to the art we create in Advent Dark Journal, Suzi encourages us in new, transformational directions. Since I’ve become a regular in Suzi’s workshop, I’ve added a tradition our adult sons and partner enjoy when they visit for the holidays – a fireside Winter Solstice ritual. More about that in an upcoming post, but suffice it to say, Suzi has shown me how to weave a daily creative practice into my life in ways that promote my well-being and that of others in my life.
It is the animal in us that knows the dark. This season stirs that animal in us, and stirs the memories that live in all of us, submerged so deep, of the ancient dark, of a time before gods, before form and words and light….Winter reminds us: the dark was first.
…maybe death is all potential, a means of moving on. And on we go, absorbed into the wet warm belly of eternity, or the roaring big black void, back here as a robin or a wren, in dusted orbit around another planet’s moon, riding on the light. Winter Solstice
Nina MacLaughlin’s Winter Solstice is stellar writing, moody and mysterious. She reminds us of our primal, animal origins; ultimately, we are bound up in the life web and rhythms of the earth, whether we recognize this or not. I purchased Nina’s Summer Solstice essay as well, which I’ll read come summer.
If you are interested in writing that is more traditional, something you can read in small bits alongside your daily journaling or meditation, I recommend Midwinter Light: Poems and Reflections for the Long Seasonby Marilyn McEntyre. Each day, she includes a poem with commentary that honors this dark season, when growth seems to stop but germinates unseen, to be manifested as the light returns.
“Winter makes us see differently. Noticing is rooted in desires so easily satisfied in spring we barely feel them—for color, for movement, for the sound of birds, and things that bloom. On a walk in midwinter, we experience solitude in a different key. We are surrounded by reminders of mortality and loss, by the absence of what is lush and vivid. We are clothed in layers and aware of our bodily needs in new ways. And the quiet, sometimes, is palpable. It is a good time for prayer: the veil between this dimension and the next seems to have thinned.” Marilyn McEntyre, Midwinter Light: Meditations for the Long Season
Finally, I discovered an excellent picture book with a poem by Susan Cooper and art by Carson Ellis. Both Susan and Carson have won the highest honors for children’s books, and this particular collaboration is special. Susan’s poem “The Shortest Day” is easy to find online. I encourage you to read it. I think you’ll find that Susan’s half-rhymes and cadence create an incantation that perfectly captures the magic and mystery of this dark season.
If you would like the perfect picture book for this time of year, for yourself, or as a gift, I suggest The Shortest Day, written by Newbery Medal winner Susan Cooper and illustrated by Caldecott Honor recipient Carson Ellis.
Happy New Year!
I will return in January with more about Advent Dark Journal, as well as commentary about a provocative documentary you won’t want to miss, especially if you are an avid reader and book-lover.
As Amal Kassir says in her winter solstice poem you may have listened to in the above-linked video, “It only gets brighter from here.”
By the way, PLEASE be sure to check out Amal Kassir’s website and watch her perform her heartbreaking poem, “Broken Arabic.” Her poetry collection, Scud Missile Blues, is available from Amazon. I encourage you to consider purchasing it. We need to support our young poets, and Amal is immensely talented. Just think of all the poems she has yet to give to the world!
If you have last-minute holiday shopping to do and would like to give a fine memoir as a gift, I have a suggestion.
I spotted Ingrained: The Making of a Craftsman by Callum Robinson in a local bookstore and thought that my son’s partner, who is an amateur furniture-maker, might like it. Of course, I decided to sample a chapter. Two days later, I’d finished the memoir, having enjoyed a kind of bliss through the entire reading.
This is a superb, deeply personal book that is also suspenseful, sensual, poetic, and universal. I could smell the cedar, pine, and oak as I read. Makers will love this story, but I don’t think you have to be a maker to respond deeply to this nature-based memoir.
The neat flat-cut edge of its end-grain revealing the gently arcing lines of the tree’s growth rings. Dark reddish brown, like burnt umber or strong tea…It is a broad piece of one-inch elm…Fine close grain tumbles down the board’s length. And a tracery of spectral green streaks across it, like the northern lights.”
Callum Robinson, Ingrained
The workshop owned by master woodworker Callum and his wife, landscape architect and designer Marisa, is about to go under, thanks to the cancellation of a substantial corporate project. Already leveraged to the hilt, the relatively young business faces imminent bankruptcy.
They must change direction, and fast.
Chapter by chapter, the story expands to reveal Callum and Marisa’s world: the devoted young craftsmen who work for them; Callum’s father, also a master woodworker, who jumps in to help set the business in a new direction; the small Scottish town of Linlithgow, where their little studio and workshop reside; the beautiful Scottish forests that supply much of the timber from which their furniture is made; and the customers who eventually browse their shop and can’t resist the furniture they see.
And with its flowing organic transitions, to me the grand elm table feels more like a sculpture than a piece of furniture. To one edge of its mighty top, among the swirling purples, reds, and greens, there remains just the tiniest taste of the tree’s true form. A handbreadth of live edge and finely sanded bark, still visible in the straight, sharp, otherwise regimented lines. A perfect imperfection – a signature – like the crimped pie crust or the fingerprint in the clay.
Callum Robinson
Callum Robinson seamlessly blends the past and present as he tells of his own coming-of-age and how he found his life’s work. His story is relevant to anyone concerned with living in a deeply authentic, meaningful way. You will be rooting for these singular people who design and make furniture of great beauty that will be loved and handed down through the ages.
This is a celebration of the human-designed and handmade. Callum approaches crafting fine furniture from some of the world’s most beautiful trees as if it were pure poetry. His writing is the same.
I look forward to reading more of him.
Nostalgia is a powerful thing. An ethereal link. An ache for something long ago, something that might never really have existed. No other material I know can hold it, or radiate it, quite the way that wood can. And almost nothing made from wood will ever have as many stories locked inside as a family table. Used so often it’s almost invisible, passed down through the generations, scarred by the lives and ingrained with the memories of all those who gathered around it.
Callum Robinson
Our ponderosa pine homeplace in central Oregon, where we lived for a few years.
as we round the midpoint between autumn equinox & winter solstice, the leaves blaze lighting up the darkening sky before they dance towards the earth. the moon waxes full as we bask in the light of the beaver moon, a supermoon. soak in the luminous glow & energies.
times continue to be be unprecedentedly wild as the cold sets in. this season of release as the light fades & the leaves fall leaving a bare lacework of branches. this liminal season, a threshold.
i am reaching out with an offer of winter comfort. bolstering against both the winter chill & the heartache from the news cycle.
remember always to lean in to the plant allies and the potency of community.
Every CSA (community supported agriculture) venture is unique, but Polly Hatfield’s home-based, herban apothecary in the heart of Portland, Oregon is SO special. You can think of it as community-supported alchemy as well – read on, and you’ll see what I mean.
I was thrilled to have the chance to meet Polly and her teeming gardens, front yard and back, when I was in Portland at summer’s end.
I’d been on Polly’s mailing list for a few years, delighting in her poetic, strikingly visual seasonal newsletter, and occasionally sampling her offerings or sending them as gifts. Every year when I enroll in artist Suzi Banks Baum’sAdvent Dark Journal workshop, a packet of Polly’s homemade bath salts is tucked into the envelope of art supplies Suzi sends us. (You’ll meet Suzi and Advent Dark Journal in a future post.)
Portland neighborhoods can be one delight after another: poetry boxes, little free libraries, sidewalk chalk drawings galore, pocket gardens, and other inventive gifts to be shared with the community. But herbanenclave stands out. The moment I turned down Polly’s street, I guessed which home was the one I was looking for. Clearly, this was a neighborhood of gardeners, but one lot in particular burst at the seams with late-summer plantings.
No space there is wasted, and I marveled at how Polly and her partner managed to grow and lovingly handcraft so many offerings on this modestly sized patch of land.
syrup made from aronia berry, rose, and holy basil
nasturtium flower finishing salt (with sichuan peppercorns, smoked salt, and rose)
a “winter quiet” tincture of milky oats, ashwaganda root, rose, and wood betony
a replenishing tea of nettles, raspberry leaf, oatstraw, and other plant allies
a soaking salts blend of eucalyptus, lemon, ginger, ashwaganda elixir, and wild rose flower essence
A “breathe deeply” oxymel of nasturtium, anise hyssop, holy basil, and aronia berry
hawthorn berriesnettles
(Photos by Polly Hatfield)
Polly’s conjurings have me heading for the dictionary or to my plant and flower identification app because, quite often, I’ve never even heard of the plants and flowers she cultivates that become her ingredients.
By the way, can you tell from Polly’s newsletter sentiments and herbal conjuring names that she is not just a master gardener, but a published poet, too? (Photo by Laura Glazer)
In addition to a seasonal care package, Polly usually has small batch offerings on hand. These enticements and several others are currently available until November 21:
nocino (an Italian liquor made from immature green walnuts)
a variety of tinctures, topical balms, and salves
an herbal gomasio (look it up!) of jimmy nardello peppers, smoked salt, black sesame seed, and rose
a douglas fir elixir
Chinese lantern, Physalis alkekengi
The September afternoon when Polly and I visited, the weather was gorgeous. We sat outside in the sun and I soaked up Polly’s earth-based knowledge as she told me the story of how she and her beloved found their ideal home, planted the extensive gardens, and established such a unique CSA.
Before our meeting, I’d asked Polly if a particular book had been her “bible,” one that had contributed to a vision for her work and way of living. “Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate,” she’d said, and I ordered a used copy.
As I write this, I’m two-thirds of the way through Wendy Johnson’s classic book about gardening and Zen Buddhism (published in 2008), still wondering how I got to be my age without encountering this extraordinary title. I’m a middling, on-again, off-again gardener with grander ideas than I know how to execute. I’m an insight meditation student and teacher as well (and I admire the Zen school of thought, too.) So Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate speaks to me on many levels. Turn to any page and you’re likely to find a nugget of wisdom. You’ll never plumb all of its depths.
Author Wendy Johnson is one of the first influential, ground-breaking California organic farmers and gardeners who came of age in the 1960s and 70s. Johnson, Alice Waters, Eliot Coleman and others pioneered the farm-to-table movement. She is the founder of the extensive gardens at Green Gulch Farm Zen Center near San Franscisco and a Buddhist meditation teacher.
In Buddhist texts, consciousness is said to be a field, a piece of earth on which every kind of seed is planted. On this field of consciousness are sown the seeds of hope and suffering, the kernel of happiness and sorrow, anger and joy. The quality of our life depends entirely on which seeds we garden and nourish in our consciousness.
Growing a garden, like cultivating the wide field of consciousness, is original work. Each time we plant a garden we are returning to origin, to the source of every garden ever grown. The word “origin” derives from the Latin verb oriri, to rise, as the sun and moon rise in a cyclical pattern in the day and night sky. Originality has a still older meaning described by the upwelling of deep springwater through stony ground. Growing a garden depends on this double force of originality that is both rhythmic and permeating. – Wendy Johnson, Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate
I’ve learned as a meditator that we can deliberately and lovingly set an intention for our days. We can do the work of our intentions in a way that gives meaning and shape to our lives. I think that master gardener/herbalist Polly Hatfield and her partner are doing this every day at herban enclave. I love how the work of gardening and a way of life inevitably become woven together.
I think about other home gardens we enjoy seeing in another part of Portland when we visit extended family. They have a gorgeous new garden, and another more vintage garden that is a vital part of the Montessori school they founded, where very young folks spend lots of time playing, learning, and enjoying nature’s riches.
Portland is a city of gardens and garden lovers. Here is one of two home gardens created by my niece, sister-in-law and family. (This is the new garden.)The Montessori garden, where children spend time every day.
As I write this post at my desk, the wind is kicking up, I hear the patter of raindrops, and I’ll need to close my studio window soon. After a balmy Indian summer, the temperature here in North Carolina is expected to drop twenty degrees. We’re entering the cold, dark time, when Polly’s makings (even simply reading about them) can give us warmth and comfort.
And with that, I will let Miss Polly have the honor of signing off:
may you allow yourself to rest. to sink into a season of dormancy. & to tend your heart well.
with love & full moon blessings galore, heal // whole // holy warmly & always with love, polly
Here is a link to Polly’s newsletter, with ordering information (order by Nov. 21, 2025).
“During the Great Depression, the federal government created new agricultural settlements in a number of states, including Alaska. Farmers who had run out of other options applied for the chance to start over in one of these government-sponsored colonies. In 1935, over two hundred families were accepted for the Matanuska Colony.”
***
“She might as well have said, you know you’re going to make an offer. How can you not?A unique house. Acreage for your horse. Exquisite views. A ready-made vegetable garden. A separate plot for potatoes and a raspberry patch in a swale north of the house. Chuck and I glanced at each other with a look that said ‘this is it.’ We didn’t consider there might have been reasons that the place hadn’t sold during a year on the market…
In May 1983 we moved into the house that had been built forty-eight years earlier for the Matanuska Colony. Chuck was returning to the community where he’d grown up. I was yet another person in a long procession of migrants to Alaska.” – Katie Eberhart,Cabin 135: A Memoir of Alaska
Annie Dillard advises writers to “give voice to your own astonishment.” Katie Eberhart does just that in her memoir of Alaska, Cabin 135.
Katie was in the final stages of revising her memoir and negotiating a publishing contract with the University of Alaska Press. Cabin 135 was published in December, 2020, part of the Alaska Literary Series. It was gratifying to watch Katie find a publishing home with editors who understood her vision and wanted her book to be part of their distinguished series. A few months ago, I listened to Peggy Shumaker, editor of the series, interview Katie at a virtual reading hosted by Fireside Books in Palmer, Alaska. Their rich discussion captured the expansive nature of Katie’s story.
I’ve read Katie’s memoir twice and, with a third reading, I’m sure I’ll continue to glean new meanings and insights. This is a book I can’t fully grasp on a first reading; Katie has a singular, uncommon sensibility, and she explores her fascinations in a nontraditional narrative. Instead of a linear story, you will find in Cabin 135 a text divided into thematic sections such as Time, Cabin, Earth, Terrain, Greenhouse, Migration, Sky, Denali, and Archaeology.
Cabin 135, within sight of three mountains: Matanuska Peak, Lazy Mountain, and Pioneer Peak.
Done well, as in Katie’s memoir, this type of narrative has momentum and captures the cumulative, unsentimental emotional power of a life thoughtfully lived. I suppose my reaction is partly personal: Katie and I are about the same age, we raised two sons at about the same time, we have in our histories relationships with older, complicated, quirky houses, and we value nature and place – although for Katie, these passions arose earlier in life, and have been more intentionally explored.
In Cabin 135, you won’t see much of Katie’s husband or sons and their daily lives. But her family is there in the background; I heard the echo of little pajama’d feet bounding down the cabin’s stairs, which reminded me of domestic scenes with our own boys.
Instead of the dramas of family life, Katie focuses on time, history, imagination, geography and memory – on what we remember and why we remember it. Her story is centered largely on the parcel of Alaska frontier she called home for thirty years, and on her travels, as well. An idea I’ve encountered often in my recent study of eco-psychology is that we are moved by a place – its landscape, flora, and fauna – because it mirrors the landscape of our souls. Katie captures something of this reciprocity in her memoir.
I’m intrigued with Katie’s writing process and how much can be communicated by juxtaposing seemingly disparate ideas. Her narrative pulls me along: where will she go next, I wonder, and what connections will she make? I think, as a reader, if you are receptive to this kind of reading adventure, you will quickly become comfortable and fully committed to going along for the ride.
The fantastic literary map of Alaska, by Alaska-based artist and graphic designer Ruth Hulbert, and published by Fireside Books in Palmer. Can you find Katie’s memoir? I see a number of other books I’ve loved, or hope to read in the future.Ruth also designed the memoir cover.
In the memoir’s epilogue, Katie writes about her process:
“I write interactively, one revision after another. Each version exists, however briefly, as a quasi-meditation…
Writing provided a framework to explore place as both a literary construct and abstraction….The overlap between multitudinous narratives plus motivations, lucky breaks, and weird confluences proved fascinating, but the stories in this book represent only one possible route across a dimensional terrain that’s spatial, biological, societal, temporal, and laced with ideas – and where a small log-built house occupies a certain plot of land. As is the case with any memoir, much has been left out – omitted, ignored, or forgotten.”
A couple of ideas I want to highlight here: that each draft is a kind of quasi-meditation. I have never thought of the writing process in this way, but Katie’s insight helps me better appreciate the richness of our quirky, individual writing paths; our creative instincts, given free reign, possess a kind of logic and aesthetic sense that may surprise us.
And, secondly, across your own life span, which dramas, scenes, and moments stand out? We choose from an infinite number of moments to tell our stories. And yet we each have within us a multitude of stories.
TIME
“I wonder about the future of Cabin 135 and its surroundings. I imagine the house and the well. Or perhaps the town will overtake the house, and there will be city water, not a well. In a hundred years, the raspberry patch will be something else. Or the raspberry patch will still be a raspberry patch, but the raspberries will be different. I hope the startling flavor of the raspberries never changes.
Each summer, no matter where I am, when I bite into the first raspberry, memories flood my mind of city gardens and country gardens – my mother’s garden, my grandfather’s, and mine, but also generations of gardens. Indeed, even centuries of gardens. Gardens that no one remembers, well-tended or gone wild, and that hint at what comes next.”
Ruth Hulbert’s custom-made map of Cabin 135 territory.
Stories…offer patterns of sound and association, of event and image. Suspended as listeners and readers in these patterns, we might reimagine our lives…As long as it took for me to see that a writer’s voice had to grow out of his own knowledge and desire, that it could not rise legitimately out of the privilege of race or gender or social rank, so did it take time to grasp the depth of cruelty inflicted upon all of us the moment voices are silenced, when for prejudicial reasons people are told their stories are not valuable, not useful. – Barry Lopez
About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory, Barry Lopez
Here is my third and final reposting of my Barry Lopez Books Can Save a Life writings, in honor of his passing on December 25, 2020:
In the introduction to his essay collection About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory, Barry Lopez tells of meeting a man on a plane who asked what words of advice he could pass on to his teen-age daughter, who wanted to be a writer. This is what Lopez said:
She must read, and her choices should be whatever she is drawn to.
She should read the classics, too, but she’ll have to work harder to find stories of heroism, love, and our noblest values that are written by women.
Second, she must “become someone” and “speak to us from within those beliefs.”
Third, he advised that she “separate herself from the familiar.” After exploring other places and meeting a diversity of people, she`ll know why she loves the familiar and share this knowledge through her writing.
Early on, Lopez felt he was noticed, accepted, and rewarded as a writer in part because he was white, male, privileged and well educated. If you read his work, you’ll find he is keenly sensitive to the fact that many voices haven’t been heard because they are different or not within traditional circles of power. He thrives on traveling to the far corners of the earth and seeking these people out – artists, artisans, farmers, naturalists, explorers who live close to the land, indigenous peoples, and others.
I was mesmerized by an essay in About This Life, “Effleurage: The Stroke of Fire.” An Oregon potter and builder of a unique anagama kiln invites clay artists from around the world to fire their work. Jack doesn’t care about marketing or commercial success; he’s totally immersed in the process of making pottery out of materials from nature. Every three or four months, up to twenty artists bring their work to be fired in the Dragon Kiln. Families, friends, even pets tag along. The firing goes around the clock for several days. Building the tremendous fire that heats the kiln is an art in and of itself. Different kinds of wood – black locust, maple, cherry, Lombardy poplar, red cedar – make different kinds of fires, and keeping the fire properly stoked is a community effort of like-minded artists who put aside their egos for the benefit of the group.
Lopez says you must become someone to write. I think he would agree the kiln designer and the clay artists are “becoming” through their life’s work, just as their clay pieces are forged in the fire. It’s a process that never ends. Even the clay pot continues to change, subtly, after the firing.
Over and over, Lopez celebrates journeys into the unknown, strangers who become friends, coming home again, and the writing of the story. You see this in About This Life and in his fable, Crow and Weasel.
Recently, Lopez published a revelatory personal essay that has received a lot of attention, “Sliver of Sky,” in Harper’s Magazine, about a period of sexual abuse he endured as a child. That Lopez waited until his seventies to write about this suggests how deeply confounding and wounding it was. The trauma and years of silence may explain in part Lopez’s empathy and compassion for others who were silenced for one reason or another. And no doubt it has contributed to his sense of mission as a writer.
I’ve written about years of being silent and feeling silenced by others because of my mother’s mental illness. I think that is partly why I didn’t make the commitment to becoming a writer when I was younger. How can you mature as a human being and as a writer when you can’t work with the very material that is woven into your identity?
If we’re silenced, we’re blocked. We don’t become our fullest selves. Diminished in what we are able to offer the world, the world will be diminished, too. It is in our best interests to see that no one among us is silenced.
So I find reading Lopez to be a rare and important form of encouragement.
In an interview with Bill Moyers, Lopez says he’s viewed as a nature writer but, actually, he is writing about humanity.
“Every story is an act of trust between a writer and a reader; each story, in the end, is social. Whatever a writer sets down can harm or help the community of which he or she is a part.”
“I, SNOW LEOPARD is both a lyric and an elegy. It is easy to imagine its lines being loudly hailed in whatever country the poem finds itself in. It’s publication comes at a time when people everywhere have begun to wonder what a voice like this, suppressed for centuries, wishes to say now, in this moment when the Snow Leopard’s human brothers and sisters find themselves side by side with him. Imperiled.” Barry Lopez
Happy New Year, everyone!In honor of Barry’ Lopez’s passing on Christmas Day, I’m reposting my previous Books Can Save a Life writings about him. I wrote the following post on April 16, 2016, after Lopez visited Rochester, NY:
Barry Lopez came to Rochester this week to receive “The Art of Fact” award for literary nonfiction presented by The College at Brockport Writers Forum and M&T Bank.
If you’ve been following my blog, you know that Barry Lopez is one of my heroes, not quite at the level of Pope Francis and the Dalai Lama, but close. (See my blog’s header quote.)
Lopez is one of the very best nature writers, and if you love animals and wildlife, you’ll love his nonfiction books, essays, and short stories. He has travelled to 90 countries and has a tremendous respect for the animal world and the many indigenous peoples he’s come to know.
I wasn’t familiar with either the poet or the poem, but Lopez said that when he found out “I, Snow Leopard” had been published in Asia and Europe, but not in the United States, he had to set things right.
He felt that it was vitally important that the American people hear the words of the snow leopard in this poem. So he saw to its publication here, and wrote the foreword to the English edition.
Jidi Majia, a member of the indigenous Nuosu (Yi) people who live in the mountains of southwestern China, has won numerous literary awards. As far as I could tell from what I found online, few of his poems have been translated into English.
Majia’s poem is written in the words of a snow leopard, which is viewed by the Nuosu as a wisdom keeper, a being with “biological authority,” according to Lopez.
He told us that when he first began traveling the world and exploring, in his thirties, he viewed wild animals in an amateur, superficial, childlike way, until he learned to embrace the much more refined view held by native peoples.
A poem is a door anyone can walk through, Lopez said, and this poem is the mysterious and elusive snow leopard’s expression of grief and a warning to human kind: “Do not hunt me any longer.” Human violence toward animals puts everyone in peril, animals and humanity alike.
Before Lopez began, he said he wasn’t worthy to read “I, Snow Leopard,” but he’d try. He said that, as far as he knew, we’d be the very first American audience to hear the poem.
We listened to this exclusive reading in the soaring space that is the chapel in Rochester’s Temple B’rith Kodesh. “I, Snow Leopard” is beautiful, haunting, simply expressed and accessible even to listeners not accustomed to hearing poetry.
After the reading Lopez answered questions and spoke informally and earnestly. As we listened, the audience seemed to be hanging on his words. Here are some direct quotes I managed to scribble in my notebook:
“Each soul is essential to the warp and weft of the universe.”
“I want to see people come alive.”
“We know what to do and we have to do it now.”
Fixing our world “will take people of great courage. People like you. Because Washington is not doing it.”
“We should be holding hands.”
“The only thing that really matters is to be in love.”
I wrote down the following words, too, but I don’t recall if they are from the poem or if they are Barry Lopez’s words. I believe they are both:
“There is no other place for any of us to go.”
“I, Snow Leopard” is available on Amazon. Barry Lopez told me it is also to be published in a future issue of Orion Magazine.
If you’d like to read Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams, his nonfiction work about the Far North that won the National Book Award, is a great book to start with. I haven’t yet read Of Wolves and Men, but when I saw the mesmerizing cover photo of a wolf on display at the reading, I added it to my to-read list.
Lopez writes fiction, too. I especially liked his subversive collection of short stories, Resistance, which he wrote shortly after 9/11, about surveillance and “parties of interest” to the government.
If you want to know more about the fascinating snow leopard, Peter Matthiessen’s memoir, The Snow Leopard, is a great read.
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, with Ben Stiller and Sean Penn, is one of my favorite movies. Watch it. You might spot a snow leopard.
The role of the artist, in part, is to develop the conversations, the stories, the drawings, the films, the music—the expressions of awe and wonder and mystery—that remind us, especially in our worst times, of what is still possible, of what we haven’t yet imagined. – Barry Lopez
During the next week I’ll be featuring some of my past posts about Barry. Here is one, which I wrote in 2013:
When I began this blog I chose for my tagline a quote by Barry Lopez about stories because it rang true for me. But I’d never actually read any of Lopez’s books. So I began withArctic Dreams, which won the National Book Award.
If you want to be an armchair traveler of the world, if you love nature, if you crave being transported to another time and place by extraordinary writing, you must read Barry Lopez. Arctic Dreams has some of the most dazzling and poetic passages about the natural world you’ll ever encounter.
“The aurora borealis, pale gossamer curtains of light.”
“The mother-of-pearl iridescence of the sun’s or moon’s corona in clouds.”
“The outcry of birds, the bullet-whirr of their passing wings, the splashing of water, is, like the falling light, unending.”
You will find uncommon truths, beautifully expressed. Here is Lopez on the great Arctic explorers of the past: “The day after a little trouble on the ice it is possible to imagine, if but imperfectly, the sort of reach some of these men made into the unknown, day after day.”
“I think we can hardly reconstruct the terror of it, the single-minded belief in something beyond the self.”
“Inescapable hardship transcended by a desire of spiritual elevation, or the desire to understand, to comprehend what lay in darkness.”
“What dreams there must have been that were never written down….that remained in the heart. The kind of dreams that give a whole life its bearing, what a person intends it should be, having seen those coasts.”
If you want to write, how can you move closer to this kind of mastery of language?
As I was reading Lopez, I happened to make a happy discovery in my writing bible, Priscilla Long’s The Writer’s Portable Mentor: Lexicon Practice. Lexicon Practice involves looking up words you don’t know and words you want to know better, not in in a pocket dictionary or online, but in a mammoth 600,000-word dictionary, the kind you still see in some libraries.
(Long advises writers to search online for a dictionary published in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. They aren’t cheap, but they are a wise investment.) Copy the definitions of a word in a notebook. These old dictionaries have detailed diagrams and illustrations, and occasionally I copy these as well.
I write down the word in its language of origin, too. If it has a Latin, Italian or Spanish root, I can brush up on my foreign language vocabulary. Long instructs you to write out the sentence where you found the word and make up a sentence of your own, preferably a sentence you can use in a piece of writing you’re working on. You can choose a lexicon theme based on the work you are doing at the moment. Since I’m writing a memoir, for example, I have a lexicon with words commonly used in the 1960s – products, types of clothing, etc.
Long believes in Lexicon Practice. Otherwise, our writing derives from the uninspired language of generic, overused words and phrases we find in newspapers, magazines, advertising, and social media. As a teacher of writing, Long knows immediately when a writer doesn’t have a Lexicon Practice. She mentions Lopez as the kind of master writer we can emulate. He uses words with Old English and Old German roots, and “…he favors concrete words…that can be seen, smelled, touched, tasted, or heard. For Lopez, language is a musical instrument…”
Now, Lexicon Practice is a geeky, writerly thing, but it appeals to me. This kind of practice slows you down, teaches you to choose words with care. If you want to write rich, compelling fiction or nonfiction, you need to be in love with words in this way, or allow yourself to fall in love with them by doing work of this nature.
Culling words from Arctic Dreams was an inspiring way to for me to establish a habit of Lexicon Work. A variety of birds populate the first pages of my first lexicon: plover, whimbrel, curlew. There are many boats and nautical references: pinnace, tender, portolano chart. Geographical terms, too: archipelago, scree, promontory. (As I write this, my word processor does not recognize a few of these uncommon words and highlights them as misspellings.)
Long advises writers to compose word lists, too. Her examples: every possible synonym for blue (sapphire, smalt, cobalt, woad) and all the parts of a fiddle (peg box, side rib, bridge, button). You can work according to a theme. Chairs and chair parts. Types of roofs. Clothes for people who love the outdoors. Get an L.L. Bean catalog and find words like cargo pants, fleece, sun-washed, twill, seersucker, Mary Janes, wellies.
I found that keeping a lexicon is a good excuse to buy one of those expensive, fancy journals I love. Mine has a silvered filigree cover designed in Germany around 1800. (I haven’t kept up a lexicon practice as of 2020, but I do it from time to time for specific writing projects.)
I am now using the second edition of Pricilla Long’s The Writer’s Portable Mentor, published in 2018 by the University of New Mexico Press. It has been updated with all new craft models and to reflect changes in the publishing industry.
Here is a moving and enlightening interview with Barry Lopez on Idaho Public Television from 2019. He talks about his latest book, Horizon,(which is a wonderful and urgent read!!!) and opens up about the impact of childhood sexual abuse on his life, and what he hoped to accomplish by finally writing about it in the New Yorker as an elder. Those of you writing memoir about traumatic events will find it helpful.
Here is a link to the McKenzie River Trust, which is devoted to conservation of the western Oregon region where Barry Lopez lived. Much of the river corridor was destroyed by the fall fires. If you wish, you can make a donation in memory of Barry Lopez.
“This morning was perhaps the most unnatural-feeling and unnerving of my life, with darkness rather than daytime rolling in. People around California reported that the birds that would normally be singing were silent. On some of the days, since the freak lightning storm in the heat wave of mid-August launched this explosive fire season, the sun has been red, and when the moon was full it was also red near the horizon, but this morning there was no sun to be seen through the murk. Ash was falling, the ash of trees, forests, homes, towns, dreams burning up. In the strange light, the world around us looked ghostly, otherworldly, unnatural, unnerving, disturbing.”
There are no words to describe my grief over the fires in Oregon, California, and Washington, so I’ll defer to Rebecca Solnit and her Hope in the Dark:
“I write to give aid and comfort to people who feel overwhelmed by the defeatist perspective, to encourage people to stand up and participate, to look forward at what we can do and back at what we have done. This book was always for them. And if you’ve read this far, for you.”
“….sometimes it’s the most unlikely people who rise up and take power, the housewives who are supposed to be nobody, the prisoners who organize from inside, the people who have an intimate sense of what’s at stake.”
“Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal…”
“To hope is to give yourself the future – and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.”
Dr. Fink won a Pulitzer Prize for her initial coverage of the disaster that played out in a New Orleans hospital serving the poor during Hurricane Katrina, and she is currently doing excellent reporting on the pandemic for The New York Times.
I wrote about Five Days at Memorial on Books Can Save a Life in 2014. I’m including a condensed version of the post below, because in pandemic hot spots around the United States, critical care resources are being stretched to their limits – needlessly so, thanks to the scandalously inadequate national response to COVID-19 – as they were in Hurricane Katrina.
Immersive and meticulously researched journalism like Dr. Fink’s can make these issues real for us in a way that is immediate and clarifying.
Secondly, I’m looking to pass along responsible, innovative journalism in this climate of conspiracy theories and misinformation. For excellent reporting about our current pandemic, for example, read or listen to Ed Yong’s work in The Atlantic, especially his must-read article published today, “How the Pandemic Defeated America.”
Here’s what Yong had to say about the current role of journalism in an interview with CNN: (Thanks to Tom Jones of The Poynter Report for passing this along.)
“I think of the information around the pandemic as rapids, really fast flowing torrential water. It’s so easy to be swept up in it and feel like you’re being carried along, feeling like you’re drowning in it. What I think really good journalism can do is to act as a rock in the middle of that fast flow to give people stable ground where they can stand and observe what is moving past them without being carried along by it.”
Below is a streamlined version of my original post about Five Days at Memorial:
“He would push 10 mg of morphine and 5 mg of the fast-acting sedative drug Versed and go up from there.” – Sheri Fink,Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital
After Hurricane Katrina wreaked havoc on New Orleans, staff at Memorial Medical Center thought the facility and everyone in it had survived the storm intact.
Then the levees broke and the water came.
Darkness ensued, air conditioning stopped, and life support equipment shut down. No rescue was forthcoming from federal, state, or local disaster relief agencies or the hospital’s corporate owners. Toilets overflowed. Hospital staff occasionally heard gunshots in the surrounding neighborhood.
Memorial Medical Center had no evacuation plan for a disaster of this type, and staff were not trained in disaster management, even though the hospital had a history of flooding.
To get patients (most of them frail and elderly) to the helipad for the occasional helicopter that eventually did show up, staff had to carry them in sheets down several flights of dark stairs, through a small shaft into the parking garage, and up two more flights. This took well over half an hour for each patient.
By the time Memorial Medical Center was entirely evacuated, 45 patients had died. Twenty-three bodies were found to have high levels of morphine and other drugs. According to the account Dr. Fink pieced together, it was alleged some patients were going to die anyway – they wouldn’t survive evacuation – and so they were euthanized to prevent suffering.
Dr. Fink covers the legal and political aftermath and discusses the role of families (or lack of it if they are excluded) in making difficult care decisions when resources are scarce. She calls for comprehensive national disaster response requirements for all US hospitals.
Five Days at Memorial will leave you unsettled by the perfect storm of failure on every level, and considerably more informed about the rationing of health care resources and the nearly impossible ethical decisions that must be made in disasters when there are not enough resources to save everyone.
Dr. Fink’s book could, literally, save lives.
Racism and social justice
Two outstanding, timely works of journalism I’ll be reading and posting about soon are by Pulitzer Prize winning Isabel Wilkerson.
Wilkerson is an immensely gifted writer who spent decades researching and writing the two books below. In this powerful TED talk, she highlights the theme of her book The Warmth of Other Suns. Her Caste is getting rave reviews, and I expect will be on many a reading list this fall.
“Crisis is always a purification if we understand it correctly. The very word ‘crisis’ comes from a root that means sifting out. Crisis is a separation, a sifting out of that which is viable and can go on from that which is dead and has to be left behind.” – David Steindl-Rast, Music of Silence: A Sacred Journey Through the Hours of the Day Photo (Rochester, NY) by A. Hallinan.
I’ve been wondering how to render my long, isolating, pandemic days so they are meaningful, enjoyable, and conducive to doing the deep writing and other work I’ve been wanting to do.
It just so happens that a friend of mine recently published an essay about her practice of observing sacred pauses throughout the day based on the Benedictine practice of marking the hours. She does so not for religious purposes, but to structure and inspire her days and to be in touch with the cycles of the natural world.
Her essay motivated me to see if this approach might be helpful. Plus, I’ve long been interested in books of hours which, originally, were personalized medieval Christian prayer books that marked the sacred hours of the day.
I tracked down a used copy of a book Louisa recommended by Macrina Wiederkehr,Seven Sacred Pauses: Living Mindfully Through the Hours of the Day.
Macrina led me to David Steindl-Rast’s book, Music of Silence: A Sacred Journey Through the Hours of the Day.
Both books are rich and motivating, a pleasure to read in small bits. You don’t have to be religious to structure your day around these sacred pauses; you can make the practice your own, and I think you’ll find many unexpected benefits.
I’ve been delving into these books of hours and taking sacred pauses while also renewing my mindfulness meditation practice (with the help of an online class offered by the teacher who originally got me into meditation over a dozen years ago.) Mindfulness mediation and marking the sacred hours are both concerned with consciously embracing the present moment. The two pursuits complement each other.
Here are some of my favorite passages from David Steindl-Rast’s book:
“….the hours of their days and nights have turned into couriers for them, each with a distinctive dispatch.” “…each hour had a character and presence infinitely richer and more complex than our sterile clock time.” “The hours are the inner structure of living consciously and responsively through the stages of the day.”
“The original notion of hour is something quite different from a unit of time composed of sixty minutes. It is not a numerical measure; it is a soul measure.”
“…time is not conceived as running out, but as rising like water in a well, rising to that fullness of time that is now. It is to that centered, present living in the now that chant calls us.”
“The paced hours teach us how to pace our lives.”David Steindl-Rast, Music of Silence
And these from Macrina’s book:
“God’s angels companion you on your pilgrimage through the day. You are never alone. Pausing to remember such truths changes the hours to gold.”
“Even if you have a lot of work to do, if you think of it as wonderful, and if you feel it as wonderful, it will transform into the energy of joy and fire, instead of becoming a burden.” – Tulku Thondup Rinpoche, as quoted in Seven Sacred Pauses.
A still from the video installation “Visitation” by Bill Viola, in Uppsala Cathedral, Sweden. I took this photo on my trip to Sweden last year. “Visitation” is an extraordinary silent work that held me for 20 minutes like it was just twenty seconds. Viola’s subjects are birth, death, transformation and liberation. In this baptism by water, the subject goes from “a life of obscurity to another life where light and color envelop her, perhaps like an inner birth giving her the strength to move on.” (Quoted from the installation commentary) Some people view our difficult times as a sweeping and necessary transformation. This still photo, a sacred, single moment from the video, seems relevant to me.
The sacred pauses:
Matins or Vigils (The Night Watch) “Vigils is a time of exquisite beauty. It is a time for waiting and watching under the mantle of mystery.” DS-R
Lauds or Morning Prayer (Daybreak, The Awakening Hour)“Dawn is like medicine, and morning is a healing drink that I have to brew in my heart just as I brew my coffee.” MW
Prime (About 6 am, Deliberate Beginning)“…the monastic attitude is to begin deliberately and to do anything we do with an even, stately pace and with whole-hearted attention. This is how master artisans, weavers, experienced farmers, and other sage laborers work. That way even difficult tasks can be done leisurely and with joy, for their own sake. And then they become life-giving.” DS-R
Terce (9 am, The Blessing Hour)“Imagine you are sitting at the dawn of your workday watching your creativity blossom. Rather than trying to grab the first blossom you seek, spend time beholding that blossom and looking at it from all angles. Prayerfully reflecting on the first blossom of your day will awaken other ideas that are in the budding stage.” MW
The Sixth Hour (Noon, The Hour of Illumination; Fervor and Commitment)“The hour is rousing us to summon the courage to stay the course, to remain true to our ideals through the rest of the day.” DS-R
None (3 pm, The Wisdom Hour) “Our doing flows out of our being, and that is why it is necessary for us to learn to pause.” MW
Vespers or Evensong (Early evening, The Twilight Hour)“The way that we can actively bring the spirit of Vespers into everyday life is to light whatever lights we can in this dark world.” DS-R
Compline: (Just before retiring, Entering the Great Silence)“Preparing for the night, for going into the realm of dreams, we pray for good dreams: nourishing dreams, teaching dreams.” DS-R
As we explored Uppsala Cathedral, the organist was practicing, and we were lucky to hear Toccata and Fugue in D minor by Bach several times. The chandeliers (ljuskrona, or “light crown” in Swedish) are common in Swedish churches. Delving into the sacred hours and reading Kristin Lavransdatter reminded me of my visit to this 13th century cathedral.
Christ Church in Rochester, NY, which draws upon many fine musicians, singers and composers from the Eastman School of Music, has been streaming great music during the pandemic. I like the description of this short Bach piece and its moods by organist David Higgs almost as much as I like the piece itself:
A Letter from the virus
The powerful, poignant video letter from the coronavirus at the link below is pure poetry. Please listen: our troubled times could be viewed as one gigantic pause imposed on us by the virus for the most sacred of purposes. This version is narrated in beautiful Italian with English subtitles – as the poet I’m linking to suggests, the Italian version has more urgency and poetry than the English version:
“We have a right to feel at home here in the universe.” David Steindl-Rast
Coming up on Books Can Save a Life: A luscious, luscious newly published book. (Think: flowers; floral masterpieces; color; design; creativity; art; literature; deep ecology; learning how to see; things of the spirit.)
Caste: The Origins of our Discontents
Books Can Save A Life 