A Tattered Yearning
On this side of the world February is a quiet, introspective time, often accompanied by the yearning for spring. It can be a dark and dreary time, but this is fertile ground for making and creating. Creativity is fed by allowing darkness, boredom, loneliness and uncertainty — allowing these unwelcome things to rise and make something of themselves. I am thinking about how the seeds we plant now, in the earth or in our hearts, are the ones that blossom in spring. The spring needs our seeds.
“Perhaps / The truth depends on a walk around a lake”
Wallace Stevens, the poet (who had a day job at an insurance company), considered a seventeen-and-a-half-mile walk “a good days jaunt.” He walked in town, in the woods, and along highways. It was the walking that mattered. His poems depended on the enlivening of his senses, and the movement and observations that walking cultivated. It was in the early 1900s, when people walked more. And when they walked they did not have phones or earphones, and so were more attentive to their surroundings, noticing smell and sound and sight, even touch and taste. The mind was open to make space for new arrivals in the form of insight, phrases or words.