{In celebration of National Poetry Month, I’ll be posting a poem each weekday through the rest of April, and I invite you to join me! Leave a link to your poem of the day in the comments section below.}
I am searching for wildness,
proving it lives
among us
despite us.
Why do I walk slowly
in the woods, why
do I stop at the rhythmic beating
of a woodpecker, why
do I pause to take in the shape
of a leaf, or a paw print, or the
curve and drop of a stream?
Terry Tempest Williams wrote:
the degree of our awareness
is the degree of our aliveness.
I want to be alive.
If I am to live,
if my cells are to awaken
and if my breath is to expand
into my lungs
it will be because wildness
pulled me out of sleep,
splashed me with cold water,
and poured wind through
my hair, into my mouth,
deep into my body.
If I am to live
it will be because this world
also lives
tangled and pure, wildness running
through the veins.
Beautiful Katie. Even though I don’t live as wild as you, I do feel the pull, the desire for more nature in my life. Less suburbia, more open space. So we’re working on it. And for now, I enjoy the nature that does surround me – I had a great Pileated Woodpecker sighting yesterday!
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We are hearing so many woodpeckers right now! Waylon gets this look of surprise and excitement when I we hear their beating.
Everything is a balance–sometimes I feel a desire to live in town and be able to walk everywhere and have so much within arms reach. For me, it’s more about being aware of the wildness that is everywhere, no matter where I am, and by noticing it, amplifying it in my life.
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