When the World is Too Much

On days when I feel, like the poet, “that the world is too much with us,” I often turn to one of a handful of poems that through the years have brought me a measure of solace and peace.  Today is one of those days: the news of the world is all about “guns and computers.” “…getting and spending, we lay waste our powers, little we see in Nature that is ours.”  Today I turned to the poet Mary Oliver, but she didn’t speak to me in a way that she usually does. Seeking another way for comfort, to escape from the barrage of bad news, I took myself to a well-trod path by a nearby pond. “I went to the woods (to) see if I could not learn what it had to teach.” Hardly ten minutes had passed when I heard the unmistakable “krunk “of the great blue heron, arriving on its pterodactylic wings. It settled onto a graying, water-bound stump, standing there, majestic; a silent statue on its wooden plinth, gracing me with its presence.

“Ahh”, I sighed, or it might have been “Amen”; and walked on. Scrubby bushes bordered the path, now and then opening up to allow a  narrow window of water, where a duck was gliding along. My first thought was, ho-hum, it’s probably just another mallard or black duck, such an ordinary sight. However, I reminded myself, that while I’ve seen many thousands like it in my life, I had probably never seen this one before.  So I raised my binoculars to see, instead, in full multi-colored plumage,  a “wood  drake (resting) on its beauty on the water.” A complete surprise: first, the “pop” of the iridescent green, russet, tan and its red eye; next, astonishment that on an early autumn morning, the drake appeared in full breeding plumage.  But then, what do I know. Nature never fails to amaze me.

I am rarely disappointed by the poem that I read each morning, which is why today was an exception.  Yet never did I expect that in the woods, pondside, I would find the right poem waiting for me, the very poem I needed. It was there that Wendell Berry’s “The Peace of Wild Things” had taken form, become alive, manifest to me on this ordinary day, during a quiet ramble.

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 waters.

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.

This poem hangs, illustrated and framed, above my bed. A mantra, you could say. So how can I, how could anyone explain the synchronicity of my sightings today with the creatures of a poem that is often my lodestar? “Fools give you reasons, wise (ones) never try,” because there is no logical explanation. So, therefore…

“When turning and turning in the widening gyre …(when) things fall apart, …when the center cannot hold”: your center, my center, our nation’s center; when our planet itself is barely holding on, teetering on the edge of “mere anarchy, loosed upon the earth”, then…

Go to the woods, sit with a poem, defy rational explanations and lose yourself in wonder. For a time, “rest in the grace of the world,”  and be free.

A note: I have quoted a scattering of unlikely bedfellows in this essay. In order they are:  William Wordsworth, Mary Oliver, Wordsworth again, Henry David Thoreau, Wendell Berry, Oscar Hammerstein, William Butler Yeats.