Given my recent dive into grief (see previous post, "The Vacuum"), I have continued to think about Berry's poem.
What bothers me about it is his use of nature as a crutch. Someone I know and love often tells me that ultimately, the reason they can't dig religion is because of using God as a "crutch." But isn't Berry using nature as a crutch in this poem, in the same way? Manufacturing some idea of it, such that its sole purpose is to comfort a very human feeling of grief? Honestly, I don't see the difference between God and Nature in so many claims. Nature has taken over for God in a secular time, among my scientist and nature-loving friends and colleagues.
I'm not going to spend any more time right now on that issue, but would like to propose that Berry's poem doesn't work for someone like me, whose justice and feminist-oriented views of nature, much less grief, don't quite work the same way. I've been thinking about it a lot recently, and would like to offer this revision of Berry's poem, to suggest a feminist, perhaps overly domestic version that doesn't rely on an idea of nature as a thing "out there".
Rather, I hope this rings a Buddhist bell for you, regardless of the focus on motherhood, in terms of how grief has affected my sense of "the now" and my love of the things I've already spent so much effort cultivating.
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When despair for the world grows in me
And I wake in the night at the least sound
In fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down next to them
Rest in the beauty of their breathing, while the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of daily things
That do not tax their lives with future and past
Or grief. I come into the presence of the texture of my daughter’s hair.
And I feel next to me the blinding purpose of warm skin
Content in our dark contact. For a time
I rest in the grace of Thou, and am not alone.
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If it helps to be reminded of Berry's poem:
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When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
_________________________
I wanted to challenge Berry's notion of nature as liberating us from the human. I wanted to challenge his notion of nature as a solace from the pain of daily life. I wanted to challenge his notion of the detachedness of nature from the human, and the notion of nature as peaceful, "still" like water, or feeding beautifully, as a heron would. These projections of nature are inconsistent with my grief, and they are certainly inconsistent with the solace I find in my own ideas of nature.
In grief, I have found that I find solace in the mundane, in the comforts of daily life, in the gratitude of knowing there is so much love connecting me to things around me, especially my kids and immediate family. I don't need nature for that, but nature does help me focus on those things, sometimes. And nature is IN those things, always.
This exercise of rewriting in the mode of another author reminds me of an exercise I'll never forget from seventh grade-- it was called "Imitation." We would be given pieces of literature and asked to fill in the blanks to create similar structures but with our own images and ideas. Rewriting Berry allowed me to take HIM out of the poem, and leverage this sentiment and power of his poem for my own purposes.
I can't write a poem about grief right now, but I can meditate on his.
