One shared horizon

A few weeks ago I indulged myself by spending a couple of hours reading essays written by readers of The Christian Century magazine. They had been invited to reflect on the subject of indulgence—sometimes even admitting to dripping layers of ice cream, cookies, caramel, and chocolate.

  The essay I enjoyed most came from a man who lives in the small town of Watertown, Wisconsin (halfway between Madison and Milwaukee). He had indulged himself by driving several miles to hear the American poet Galway Kinnell give a reading at a local university.

  What he said he had been most looking forward to was letting the burly voice of this 1982 Pulitzer prizewinner “enter [the] ear, travel to the brain, and tell truths that could only be conveyed by the sonic delicacies and irresistible nuance of poetry.”

  I happen to know the poem Kinnell read, “Saint Francis and the Sow,” which includes these lines about the bud that “stands for all things, even for those things that don’t flower,/for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;/though sometimes it is necessary/to reteach a thing its loveliness, …” (Houghton Mifflin).

  And that Wisconsin essayist’s indulgence was not unlike my indulgence in the poems of another lover of nature, Nancy Wood, who once said, “Examine a newborn leaf and find a map of a universe/So vast that only Eagles understand.”

  This writer, poet, and photographer, who devoted more than fifty years of her life to cataloguing the lives of the rural inhabitants of a vanishing part of the American West (including Native Americans) went on, “Borrow a cloud and drift high above the Earth,/Looking down at the smallness of your life” (“Knowing the Earth,” Spirit Walker, 1993).

  I met Nancy only once, at a dinner party at her daughter India’s home in Boulder, and soon learned that there was nothing small about the life she had lived.

  It was a typical winter’s evening in Colorado—dry, bitterly cold, and snowy—and within ten minutes of our meeting, Nancy and I had talked each other up to the fireside where we stayed for the next three hours.

  I can’t remember whether we allowed ourselves to be prised apart for a hot meal, but I still vividly recall much of what Nancy told me about the rituals and connections she had explored as a poet. 

  These thought journeys were summarized in her preface to Shaman's Circle, her sixth book of poetry, in 1996. Nancy suggested that most “non-Indians” were out of touch with the magic of the seasons, the subtle rhythms of the earth, and the daily blessings of the natural world.

  We hardly notice birds building nests, green leaves budding, or the way a river swells with life in spring, she observed. We are too busy to care.

  “But care we must,” she insisted, “for we are inextricably tied to nature, and to one another. We have to rediscover ritual and, in so doing, rediscover ourselves.”

  Before India’s other guests had tasted their main course, I had come to respect the poetic rituals to which Nancy had paid homage in no fewer than twenty-eight books about the American Southwest.

  Clearly, that region's wilderness and Native American spirituality had shaped her view of life and inspired her prolific output: 

Examine a newborn leaf and find a map of a universe

       So vast that only Eagles understand. …

Borrow a cloud and drift high above the Earth,

       Looking down at the smallness of your life.

(“Knowing the Earth,” Spirit Walker, 1993)

When I look back on that winter’s evening in Boulder, I wonder what our hostess might have been thinking as she hesitated to interrupt the fireside conversation.

  As she drifted closer, might she have been ever so softly mouthing her favorite lines from another of her mother’s poems?

My help is in the mountain

Where I take myself to heal

The earthly wounds

That people give to me.

(Untitled, Hollering Sun, 1972)

  Or was she remembering the impatience with which she suffered the tedious hikes she and her siblings were expected to take with their mother—always slow, ever so slow, with those nagging, repetitive interruptions from upfront: "Look!" “See!" “There!” “Look!”

India might also have been remembering (with sweet ruefulness) how she did precisely the same thing years later on hikes with her own kids.

  Those hours I spent virtually alone with Nancy Wood crackled and popped as merrily as the wood fire in that Boulder hearth, but Nancy and I never met or spoke again. Our gleaming, breathless exchanges were never to be extended or completed. She passed away in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in March, 2013.

  Since then, India, who holds a masters degree in business from MIT, Boston, has been writing a personal memoir that touches on several other aspects of her mother's life. Its working title is The Dinosaur’s Daughter, and tells how she grew up with a bus-sized allosaurus which now “rules” the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. She views her book as an attempt to “rediscover her authentic self, a teenage lost world of whimsy and nature.”

  Now, as I look back on Nancy’s writing, and especially her approximately 350 published poems, I glow with gratitude for the ways she has taught me—and through her books continues to teach me—about my authentic self.

  It was an evening I cherish, and one I suggest, without effrontery, could be relived in the closing lines of what I believe is Nancy’s best love poem.

         She would have dismissed any such assessment with a shrug of her shoulders, but I think there would have been a conspiratorial twinkle in her eyes as she agreed that during our fleeting friendship

Time made a ladder out of grass

Beauty encircled two lives and

Love created one horizon.

(“Love,”Spirit Walker, 1993)

The extracts from Nancy Wood’s poems quoted in this Post are reproduced with the kind permission of the Nancy Wood Literary Trust, www.NancyWood.com.