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    • Pegeen
      Top reader this weekReading streakScoutScribe
      4 years ago

      “...it is merely a matter of observing nature’s ever-presence no matter where you are.” I recently was in Brooklyn with my daughter and her husband. We walked their dog Scully all around the neighborhood and I was absolutely delighted by the tree lined streets, the inventive gardens and small parks. It was amazing how just turning a corner away from the crowded businesses there was this natural aliveness waiting to embrace us.

      • kellyalysia
        ScoutScribe
        4 years agoWriter

        Yes! I love finding nature's way pushing through unexpected places. Even more so than going "off the grid" at times!

    • bill
      Top reader of all time
      4 years ago

      Beautiful. I love this writing because it converges head-on with a bundle of ideas and energies that I've been working, ceaselessly, to unravel over the course of the last several months: how to live, basically.

      Perhaps one day in ten years, while talking to a friend who is frustrated by her teenage child, I will think of the mesquite and the saguaro and feel that familiar, prickly heat at the corners of my eyes.

      Interesting. That reminds me of a passage from Mary Karr's introduction to The Wasteland by TS Eliot:

      "I read it [The Waste Land] to hear a noise that tells me about certain states of mind so horrible I live much of my life trying to deny their existence though they swarm at the periphery of my eyes during late-night startles. These states are indescribable if you live through them and all but unknowable if you don't."

      I can't divorce the awesome power of the natural world with the hellish scene of destruction that's going on right now. I fear that it makes me a drag to be around. Which, in turn, basically just means that I have more work to do. __

      One of my all time favorite poems is Denise Levertov's "Candles in Babylon." Recently, the poem has taken on a new meaning for me, especially in the context of this on-going reckoning with Mother Nature that we're all going through right now. Here's the poem:

      CANDLES IN BABYLON By: Denise Levertov

      Through the midnight streets of Babylon between the steel towers of their arsenals, between the torture castles with no windows, we race by barefoot, holding tight our candles, trying to shield the shivering flames, crying “Sleepers Awake!” hoping the rhyme’s promise was true, that we may return from this place of terror home to a calm dawn and the work we had just begun. __

      Last thing: Jia Tolentino on Jenny Odell is an absolute feast: https://readup.com/read/the-new-yorker/what-it-takes-to-put-your-phone-away

      • kellyalysia
        ScoutScribe
        4 years agoWriter

        I love the poem. Thank you for sharing!

        much more work indeed is ahead for us all...