Author: James A. Pearson

The day after the election was called I went for a walk in the local forest. It was a cold day. Thick clouds had layered the sky since morning. But just before the sun went down it slipped beneath the gray and lit the trees in a beautiful, heatless glow.

Something about the whole autumn scene harmonized with how I was feeling after the election.

It was cathartic to see the world celebrate. But it was fleeting, too. This wasn’t a turning of history’s tide. It wasn’t a new spring.

If anything it was a small, needful inflection point in the same collective autumn we’re all still in. But maybe it could be a reminder that inflection is still possible. That we can—bit by bit—bend the arc of this country. And unbend deadly arc of climate change.

But only if we put in the work. Because it’s not gonna happen without us.

Where We Are Now

The last light finds the tops
of forest trees, making
oranges and golds at the end
of a short, gray day.
All the bigleaf maples have agreed
to drop their big leaves,
which rattle down through hemlock tangles
to the places they’ll dissolve.

This is not a beginning.

I used to think it was silly how
some people wore themselves out
with dances and rituals, beseeching
the spring to come back around.
Now I’ve seen enough to understand
that we are promised nothing.

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Voting in this election is critical. But it’s not enough.

This poem doesn’t pretend to be a full prescription for what our country needs. It’s just my way of acknowledging that all electoral choices are imperfect. Because even more important is what happens between elections—the long, slow work of building a culture of love and justice for our politicians to live up to.

And the better we do that work the better our options will be next time elections come around.

What To Do After Voting

Take back that part of yourself
you lent to politicians.
Peel their slogans from your mouth
and pledge allegiance to
the mother down the street
whose kids have grown out
of their summer shoes again.

And if you’re going to raise a flag
let it be the flag of forgiveness,
the flag of our complicity
in so much we say we’re against.
Under that flag you and I
can build a small new world
and nurture it as it grows.

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As I watched the wave of COVID-19 build I felt a deep sadness growing in myself.

There would be so much suffering.

And now that wave has started to break. I have friends who’s livelihoods are threatened. I have acquaintances who are sick and fearing for their lives. I have friends of friends who’ve already lost people they loved.

And there are so many people I don’t know who are right now living their own stories of fear and loss.

But I can’t go to them. As someone with asthma I can’t even volunteer for simple things like trips to the grocery store. Or I could, but I’m choosing not to. Choosing to protect myself.

And I can feel the gap in my body. The gap between how my warm mammal body wants to respond and what I’m actually choosing to do.

Because we show up for the hurting not just to hold them, but to hold the parts of ourselves that feel their pain.

And as this wave of suffering rolls through the world I can feel that I have a choice. I can close my heart and try to protect it like I’m protecting my body. Or I can hold my heart open, even though I can’t go to them, even though I don’t know how long this will last.

This (very) short poem is a reminder to myself which choice I want to make.

A New Practice

To not be able to move
my body towards the scared,
the lonely, the grieving—
this is a new practice
in holding my heart open
longer than I know how.

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A couple weeks ago, as the full weight of this crisis started to settle on me, I organized a meeting of a small contemplative group I’m part of. But with only an hour left before the meeting I couldn’t figure out how to open it. What words or images could possibly meet people where they’re at right now?

Then I remembered a line I’ve heard David Whyte use in various talks. It’s the first line of Dante’s Divine Comedy where he says, “In the middle of the road of my life I awoke in a dark wood where the true way was wholly lost.”

I felt my body relax. That was it.

We’ve all suddenly found ourselves in the middle of an uncharted wilderness.

This poem grew out of that recognition. And the further remembering that we are not separate from the wilderness around us. That there are deep, wild parts of ourselves that know how to live with danger and uncertainty.

I hope it helps you feel a little more grounded in this time of swirling uncertainty, as it did for me.

Surrounded

In the middle of the road of my life I awoke in a dark wood where the true way was wholly lost.

-Dante

Look how this wilderness
swept in around us—
while we slept,
while we paid the rent,
while we ordered another round.

By the time we looked up
all our paths were gone. The forest
presses in on all sides,
every direction an equal mystery
of tangle and dark.

Breathe now.

Breathe down into 
your wild body, 
into its sudden alertness, 
its burning need to keep you safe.
There are parts of you that know
how to stand still in this place,
parts of you that will know
which step to take.

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My body’s been holding a lot of anxiety lately. I search for information, get anxious, so search for more information, and the cycle continues.⁣

Last Thursday I took a break and went to a local park that has a few hundred acres of old growth forest. This poem came out of that short trip. I hope it gives you a deep breath in the midst of it all, as it did for me. 

Meanwhile

Meanwhile the world’s still doing spring
like nothing’s happening. There was sunlight
on the forest floor today, and the sounds of birds

welcoming themselves home to another place
they still belong. My fear found no corroboration
in the old growth Douglas firs, who seemed

as steady as ever. Not even the swarms
of little hemlocks clawing towards the light
echoed my alarm. They all just let me be there

with all the hornets buzzing in my chest.
Some mirrors are big enough to show you
how even the end of the world really isn’t.

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Mary Oliver died one year ago today. I think Wild Geese might have been the first poem that spoke to my adult self. Not that my adult self knew what to do with it. But it called from just over a far horizon that was barely coming into view. It gave me something to muddle towards.

It’s hard to imagine a better compliment for a piece of art. Giving each other something to muddle towards is—at least in my experience—about the best we can do. And Mary Oliver has given me many.

When I heard she‘d died I had a visceral sensation of something huge and essential crashing down. So I started this poem that day. But it took coming back to it a few times over the past year before it felt shareable:

There are trees
in the forest near my home
that hold the world together,
their roots married
to the bones of the earth.
The little boy in me knows
they are eternal.
The man I’ve become
has seen them fallen,
their ancient trunks
softening, the borders
between themselves
and everything opening,
slowly opening.
If only she could tell us now
what it’s like to fall.
How would the sharp praise
of her breath shape
that long, slow exhale
of becoming what so
astonished her?

On Saturday some friends and I marked the winter solstice together. We met just before sunset in a local forest, with the darkening waters of the Salish Sea just visible through the trees.

Winter was the first season I ever felt in my soul. Or at least the first one I was aware of feeling.

And since then the seasons have become a deepening source of wisdom and consolation in my life. They’re an inheritance we all share. Something in you knows how to winter, just like the deer and the eagles and the bigleaf maples know.

This poem speaks to my soul-level experience of winter.

I started it a few weeks ago and finished a workable draft just in time to share it for the solstice. But part of me has been writing it for a long time.

—

Now the leaves have fallen.
The trees are pulling their aliveness
back in from their branches,
down into their fortress trunks
and the dark, subterranean closeness
of their roots.

Every year they let go of
exactly what everyone says
is most beautiful about them
to save their own lives.

The time will come
when you, too, have to drop
all the ways you’ve made yourself
worth loving,
and finally learn how
to sit quietly
right in the center
of your own small life.

Only there can you cry
the tears your life depends on.
Only there will you find
the tiny seed
that holds the whole mystery
of you, and cradle it
in the warmth of your body
until the spring.