“And I am thinking: maybe just looking and listening / is the real work. / Maybe the world, without us, / is the real poem.” —Mary Oliver Thirty minutes after the sun dropped behind the mountains last night, I set out westward on the trail around McIntosh Lake, huddled in my coat and gloves, walking into nightfall. As the sky darkened, I noticed my shadow stretching out subtly before me. Turning around to see where the light was coming from, this far from the street, I saw the moon rising in the east, nearly full, bright as a headlamp. It stopped me with its familiar yet mysterious beauty.
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“I want to take slow steps.” - Mary Oliver In “The Poet Dreams of the Mountain” (Swan, 2010), Mary Oliver grows weary of the hectic pace of daily life and longs to spend a lifetime slowly climbing some old gray mountain, resting along the way, and seeing all that we so rarely see—the stars, the unclothed rocks, the silent poetry of the trees. “I want to take slow steps,” she says.
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About the Blog
These are the personal reflections of Jay Valusek on the process of Lectio Poetica, on nature, on poetry in general, and on some of words or phrases from poems we have used in our local gatherings. Archives
January 2017
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