A CONTEMPORARY SPIRITUALITY

January 2023

In exploring feral spirituality my intuition is a trusty guide.  It led me to ask for a Christmas gift of Louise Gluck’s ‘Poems 1962-2020’, which I duly received. People who write poetry often seem to have something of the feral about them, perhaps as they feel beholden to no-one but their muse.  I’ve begun dipping into her book and my intuition has led me to gold again.  Louise Gluck loves gardening and one of her collections is inspired by her garden.  There are two poems in it that immediately stood out for me.  In each the voice is that of a plant in her garden, it speaks to a human listener, the poet, offering its wisdom, and the poet, by implication, is thankful.

That rang a loud bell for me. As a feral priest I’m exploring what a priesthood to all of creation might look like: for me that means the landscape, the vegetation, the animal life and so on, as well as the humans.  My assumption is that God can speak to me through all of creation, and that all of creation seeks my blessing in return. It’s proving a rich experience, and one full of gifts. Its a challenge to ask myself what God might be saying to me through this landscape, this building, this tree, this plant, this animal. The answer is usually not obvious & often difficult to discern but I’m relishing working on it, and its changing my response to the environment around me. So I’m delighted and affirmed by reading the poems of a woman who listens to & is nourished by the plants in her garden, and who is bold enough to share what she learns.  Thank you Louise Gluck and God bless you. 

Here are the two poems:

The Wild Iris

At the end of my suffering 

there was a door.

Hear me out: that which you call death

I remember. 

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting. 

Then nothing. The weak sun 

flickered over the dry surface. 

It is terrible to survive 

as consciousness 

buried in the dark earth. 

Then it was over: that which you fear, being 

a soul and unable 

to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth 

bending a little. And what I took to be 

birds darting in low shrubs. 

You who do not remember 

passage from the other world 

I tell you I could speak again: whatever 

returns from oblivion returns 

to find a voice: 

from the center of my life came 

a great fountain, deep blue 

shadows on azure seawater. 

We see a photograph of some Snowdrops pushing up out of a covering of snow.

Snowdrops

Do you know what I was, how I lived? You know 

what despair is; then 

winter should have meaning for you. 

I did not expect to survive, 

earth suppressing me. I didn’t expect 

to waken again, to feel 

in damp earth my body 

able to respond again, remembering 

after so long how to open again 

in the cold light of 

earliest spring —

afraid, yes, but among you again 

crying yes risk joy 

in the raw wind of the new world.

I had just finished writing this when I received an email from my friend Keith, sharing this link with me:

https://rumblestripvermont.com/2022/09/armands-garden/

The synchronicity made me chuckle.