Photo by Thea Kohout.

Two Saturdays ago some twenty former residents and members of our Advisory Board gathered at our house in Austin for what we hope will be the first of many annual “Resident Reunions.” We envisioned this gathering as a chance for them to get acquainted with each other (and each other’s work), and also an opportunity for us to thank them for being willing to take a chance on what is still, after all, a fairly new and ad hoc residency program. (We’re in our fourth year of accepting residents.)

The gathering was also a reminder of how many things have changed since we first came up with the idea for a residency program at Madroño Ranch. Our naïve original vision involved hosting eight residents at a time, gathering around the table every night to eat, talk, and listen—to receive and offer nourishment, both literal and conversational.

That vision, we realized fairly quickly, was not practical, for a number of reasons (have you ever been asked to be witty and brilliant every single night for two weeks in a row?), so we scaled back; now we usually have one or two residents at a time, and we don’t require them to report for dinner and be witty and fascinating. Communal connection cannot be forced, but that doesn’t mean it’s not important.

Hence the idea of a residents’ reunion. We’ve had forty-three residents so far, from a range of disciplines, including poetry, fiction, painting, journalism, paleontology, film, music, photography, forest history, oceanography, drama, book arts, and environmental law. In the future, we hope to have even more: theology, architecture, choreography, who knows?

At the gathering at our house, five former residents—visual artists Mary Baxter, Stacy Sakoulas, Bill Montgomery, and Margie Crisp, and environmental writer David Todd—volunteered to do brief presentations on their work and what a Madroño residency meant to them. (Many thanks to Margie, who’s also a member of our Advisory Board, for putting the slide show together!) Three other former residents—writer Spike Gillespie, paleontologist Julia Clarke, and science writer Juli Berwald—got up and talked briefly about their work without visual aids. (Juli ended with a limerick of her own composition about jellyfish.) Wonderful food (from caterer Brandy Gibbs of Austin’s Fine Home Dining), beer, and wine were consumed, stories were told, and connections were made.

Photo by Thea Kohout.

But don’t take my word for it. Here’s what poet Sasha West had to say:

What a wonderful and inspiring evening! Everyone I talked with was so interesting—and doing such worthwhile work in the world. Worthwhile and beautiful…. Madroño has been a catalyst for so many people at this point. And as their (our) work goes out into the world, hopefully it will be a catalyst for many more.

And here’s what Margie said:

I had the chance to meet writers whose work I’ve admired for years, chat up old friends (and, yeah, get a little gossiping in too), meet my hero [and fellow Advisory Board member] Tom Mason, and yak with other visual artists. So much fun.

“Good food, good wine, good conversation, and great, great work coming out of the residency” was the assessment of Advisory Board member Shannon Davies, the Louise Lindsey Merrick Editor for the Natural Environment at Texas A&M University Press. David put it even more pithily: “tasty food and drink, fun company, and great show and tell.”

It was everything we had hoped it would be, and more. Because while part of the point of a residency program like ours is to offer an opportunity for reflection to creative people who need it, and while we may need time and space away from the demands of the quotidian to brainstorm, reflect, and create, we are also social animals, and we need other people to talk and listen to. We need to hear ourselves articulate our own arguments; as Oliver Sacks put it, “We speak not only to tell other people what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think. Speech is a part of thought.” We need to bounce ideas off others so we can hear what they sound like and assess their effect. I believe that community is or should be as much a part of creativity as is individual inspiration; the most brilliant idea in the world is useless if it is not brought forth and shared. That’s why our mission statement mentions “solitude and communion” (emphasis added).

It was a pleasure and a privilege for us to host the first annual residents’ reunion—these are the coolest people we know!—and we hope that at future gatherings even more of these fascinating, thoughtful, creative folks will come to meet and share their work with their peers. It was one of the most enjoyable parties we’ve attended in years, and we can’t wait for the next one.

What we’re reading
Heather: Brian Doyle, Mink River
Martin: Robert Macfarlane, The Wild Places

Some say you’re lucky
If nothing shatters it.

But then you wouldn’t
Understand poems or songs,
You’d never know
Beauty comes from loss.

It’s deep inside every person:
A tear tinier
Than a pearl or thorn.

It’s one of the places
The beloved is born.

April was National Poetry Month, which might or might not be a silly thing, but it has prodded me into thinking about poetry and my erratic relationship with it. When I received my two degrees in English, I was emphatically a fiction person. Poetry made me anxious because I could never figure out how to read it or what it was supposed to mean. My poetry textbooks from college and grad school are studded with frantic and useless annotations: cross-references to other poems by the same author, details about textual corruptions or variations, or underlinings directed by the professor that have no meaning for me now. Only rarely did I mark something just because I liked it, and then I worried about having made such a bold declaration. What if it didn’t mean what I thought it meant? What if someone discovered that I just didn’t get it?

I still have no idea what many poems mean, but I more often read poetry than fiction now. I use poetry when I teach and pray. I even read it just for fun. I sometimes write the kind of poetry that gave me brain freeze twenty-five years ago. How did this sea change come about? It began, I think, when I went to seminary and was forced to confront the Bible, a book I had never read and suspected that I wouldn’t like and feared would make me stupid. (I still wonder who was on the admissions committee that admitted me: Groucho Marx?) At first the familiar structure of the classroom allowed me to keep it at arm’s length. Memorize, analyze, parse, criticize. What do you do with a God who smites and punishes and condemns? Who needs his ego massaged with praise all the time? And yet I couldn’t help noticing that many of the psalms, the Song of Solomon, and the Jesus who considered the lilies all addressed a force they considered entirely trustworthy, entirely beautiful, the genesis and end of all desire. I could not see what they saw when I read with a lens of suspicion. And, despite my distrust, I wanted to see what they saw.

I began reading aloud, in groups, slowly and repetitively. It was sometimes helpful to have literary and historical information to draw on, but I was more often hobbled when I came to passages like this from the Letter to the Hebrews: “Indeed, the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And before him no creature is hidden, but all are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account.”

It was beautiful. I knew that it was somehow true. I had no idea what it meant. Yet over and over, I found myself run through by the language of scripture, knowing I had been wounded but unable to bind or even find the wound. In the company of similarly riven souls, however, I started finding another way, not so much to read as to be read. Instead of seeking experience—that giddy adrenaline ride of a narrative—I found a place from which to see my own experience, my self in relation to a much greater whole. I was like a one-eyed creature that had been given another eye; reality began to acquire a previously unsuspected dimension.

The April issue of The Sun contains an interview with Philip Shepherd, a British writer and actor, whose career has led him explore the implications of the little known fact that human beings have two brains, one in the head and one in the gut. This is not a fanciful or metaphorical claim. Nuerogastroenterology, a new medical field, studies the web of neurons lining the gastrointestinal tract that send signals to the body independent of the cranial brain. Shepherd is not a medical professional but uses the research in the field to examine the cultural and philosophical implications of this “pelvic brain.” Says Shepherd:

Our culture doesn’t recognize that hub in the belly, and most of us don’t trust it enough to come to rest there. Our story insists that our thinking occurs exclusively in the head. And so we are stuck in the cranium, unable to open the door to the body and join its thinking. The best we can do is put our ear to the imaginary wall separating us from it and “listen to the body,” a phrase that means well but actually keeps us in the head, gathering information from the outside. The body is you. We are missing the experience of our own being.

The intelligence of the pelvic brain is not rational, conscious, analytical or abstract; rather, it arises in the way an enormous flock of starlings alters its course like a single organism. Well, you might say, I’m not a flock of starlings. But we all have an astonishing sensitivity—a sensational sensitivity—to our perpetually changing environments, astonishing in its almost invisible routineness and its capacity to integrate multiple levels of information. It’s an intelligence we often take for granted or don’t acknowledge as intelligence at all, but it allows you to negotiate your way through space, to remember passages of music, to understand arithmetical relationships, to love or know joy. Our task is not to privilege one brain over the other but to learn to coordinate them, according to Shepherd. He uses a lovely analogy to illustrate what this coordination looks like: the astronauts who took the first photos of the earth from outer space brought them back to earth, giving us a new perspective on our planet’s fragility. We responded with environmental initiatives. We were sensitized.

Culturally speaking, though, Shepherd says that those of us who inhabit the “first world” are like astronauts who are stuck in orbit around the head, unable to descend back home to the belly, where the gathered information can be integrated and sensitize us to the great complex flow of the world we inhabit:

Our culture has a tacit assumption that if we can just gather enough information on ourselves and the world, it will add up to a whole. But when you stand back and look at something, there is always something hidden from you. The integration of multiple perspectives into a whole can happen only when, like the astronaut bringing the photo back to earth, we bring this information back to the pelvic bowl, back to the ground of our being, back to the integrating genius of the female consciousness. The pelvic bowl is the original beggar’s bowl: it receives the gifts of the world—the male perspective—and integrates them. As you bring ideas down to the belly and let them settle there, they sensitize you to who you are and give birth to insight. Our task is to learn to trust that process.

The belly brain as begging bowl, receiving the gifts of the world. In some Buddhist traditions, monks are mendicants who own nothing but their robes and their begging bowls, in which they receive offerings of food or other gifts from the lay community. These gifts are not considered alms but rather are part of an exchange in which the community supports the monks physically and the monks support the community spiritually. So quite literally, every human being carries a begging bowl to the world, an intelligence that establishes itself in emptiness, in poverty, in suffering, in sensitivity, in loss. Without that bowl, we have no place for the works arising from the cranial brain to incubate and mature before they enter the world. Without cross-pollination from the pelvic brain, the fruits of the cranial brain are stunted and distorted, rooted in the illusion that we are separate from the natural world and thereby at odds with it. Aligning the two intelligences gives us the opportunity to see holistically, with the depth of binary vision.

Given my initial take on the Bible, it seems poetically just that it should lead me to a less literal, more personally demanding way of reading, one that required some self knowledge before I could make any sense of it. Like scripture, good poetry is a gift in the begging bowl, pressing the reader to claim hunger and absence before the equally great gifts of abundance and presence come to view. In his wrenchingly beautiful volume of poetry, Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved (from which the poems at the beginning and end of this post are taken), Gregory Orr looks at the world with at least two eyes, that trinitarian third eye of the heart figuring somewhere in this body of stern and tender wisdom. I don’t mind that I don’t understand it all; reading it, I find that I have been seen, known, understood.

I guess I’m fine with National Poetry Month.

The beloved has gone away.
Always, this is the case.
Each moment turns on its hinge
And loss is there, loss
Announcing itself as absence.

But that’s because we’re looking
Backward, looking in the wrong
Direction: so desperately clinging
To a last glimpse of the beloved,
As if loss itself is what we loved.

And all the time the beloved
Is coming toward us, is arriving
Out of the future, eager to greet us.

What we’re reading
Heather: Gregory Orr, Poetry as Survival
Martin: Rachel Hewitt, Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey

In the endless heat of late summer, sometimes it’s hard to remember that Texas can be a cool and beautiful place—but it can, as we hope this poem will remind you.

The lake’s complacent waters bloom before
the glamorous, unhurried progress of
the snake that makes its musing way toward
the bank on which I stand. My soul’s
geography does not resist its presence
on this luminous cool morning—in fact,
invites it in to join the doe that barks
a warning to her fawn, the turkey yodeling
for a mate, the feathered migrants, tender leaves,
the crackling, stretching meadow grasses.
This gracious equilibrium,
where everything belongs,
where pressure between worlds is equalized
and I can hear and see them both, arrives
without annunciation, invitation, effort.
Even in the yearly banishment
from paradise, when a bleached sky buzzes
with the sucking Texas heat, when every
blessed thing apparently has spines
or fangs or concentrated venom—even
then my arid heart dehisces and allows,
at times, the snake its place stretched out and sunning
on white limestone ledges, admits the
sibilant pronouncement that all is well,
which usually goes unheard.

Only now, at fifty, do I register
interior terrain materially,
see that mine is littered with capricious
wreckage of tornadoes; feel the pre-storm
suffocating calm that makes it hard
to breathe; inhale at night the jasmine
and its drifting ache; or move through shining
winter briskness where every chore’s a pleasure.
Now I scan horizons and prepare
for seasons newly gleaned, knowing they will
drench and parch, delight and wrench, approach
and pass. Snakes have always lived here, always will.
I see them sometimes now and sometimes watch
their agitating grace without a lurching
of my heart, but here is the kingdom
of the coiled presence. Here abide the mark
and potency of flood and flaming sky.
I am their host and guest; they don’t belong to me.

They are not mine, but are. This is not a metaphor,
but is: language bearing loads past bearing.
Every body is a word exhaled toward violence
and beauty; every body vibrates in
reception, a veil through which the wind
between the worlds whirls. At this intersection
grow fruits of silence, stillness, from the soil
of singleness, where snake and lake and sky
on either side of self’s divide sing in unison.

What we’re reading
Heather: Elaine Pagels, Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation
Martin: Sam Kean, The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

Sometimes—maybe even often—I wonder why in heaven’s name it ever seemed like a good idea to open a residency for environmental writers and artists. It can seem like an awfully precious response to the unholy forces in the world, to the seemingly implacable powers that sneer and smear and humiliate, ravage and amputate, and leave sterility in their wake. Surely there are better weapons, ones more powerful and direct, to fight the battle. Let’s face it: writers and artists don’t get a lot of press as warriors.

To top it off, this is Holy Week, when those demonic powers seem to have won. Today is Good Friday, and the Word is tortured, broken, murdered. Silenced. It’s a day that can be particularly horrid for writers, killing any impulse to communicate.

And yet, and yet… we spent last weekend at the tenth annual Poetry at Round Top festival at the Round Top Festival Institute, in the rich rolling countryside between Austin and Houston. Just the drive to Round Top presaged a mythic encounter, the possibility of resurrection: despite the extreme drought conditions in central Texas, patches of courageous bluebonnets and Indian paintbrushes bloomed. Later than usual, apparently aware of the scorching to come, live oaks and pecans unfurled their precious leaves, whose sweet green humidity was instantly thrashed by stiff dry southern winds. Wildfires are blazing across the state: the morning we left, we smelled smoke from the Rock House fire in Marfa, 450 miles away. And yet spring unfurls its banners.

“So what? And, by the way, mythic encounters are so-o-o-o 1970s,” says the legion of demons in my head.

“Shut up,” I explain, thinking they might be right. It’s not as if spring has any choice. What’s courageous about doing what you can’t help doing?

My little herd of demons kept up its background sneering once we got to Festival Hill, a strikingly beautiful and eccentric campus of older wooden buildings enlivened by lavishly unlikely additions: stone grottos and follies, great tumbling fountains, stone cherubs and goblins and saints, whimsy and careful craftsmanship everywhere.

“Nice,” they said. “You’re doing a lot to challenge Big Ag and stop carbon emissions by ooh-ing and aah-ing and hanging out with a bunch of poets.”

“Shut up AND go away,” I said, enunciating carefully.

They thought that was funny.

We all settled down when Ed Hirsch shambled up to the podium. Hirsch is a much-published poet and teacher and author of How To Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, a “surprise best-seller” only to those who haven’t read it. He’s one of those gifted speakers—warm, passionate, wise—who makes you wish that he could keep talking until he has nothing left to say.

He spoke about the power of lyric poetry to “allow the intimacy of strangers,” sometimes separated by centuries, even millennia. Lyric poetry, created in solitude, calls wildly unlikely community into being. He recounted his first contact with the power of lyric poetry, when he was electrified reading one of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “terrible sonnets.” He—a Jewish student at Grinnell College in the 1960s—was stunned to find someone—a British Victorian Jesuit priest, long dead—who could describe his feelings of isolation and distress better than he could himself.

Even deeper than the jolt of recognition, the young Hirsch became aware that Hopkins had made something from his desolation: “Holy shit!” he remembered thinking. “This thing is a sonnet!” He felt Hopkins’s “tremendous generosity to take that isolation” and create something of beauty from its wretched depths “so that I might come along later to be comforted.” Poetry in its very structure is hopeful even when it despairs, Hirsch believes, because poets must imagine “a reader on the horizon,” someone to whom the poem must be directed, in order to write at all.

Poetry as an act of generosity to strangers, as the creation of intimacy across divides of time and culture: these hospitable acts require courage, especially in a fearful time.

“How convenient for your chicken-hearted, lazy soul,” said my loitering demons.

“Don’t you slander chickens, you morons,” I replied irritably, having forgotten for a minute that they were there.

“Oh, we’re cloven by the thrust and parry of your rapier wit,” they smirked. “Oh, we’re slain!” And they fell all over each other, howling.

“Oh, shut up,” I said.

The next morning—Sunday, no less—we sat in the beautiful deconsecrated chapel used for more intimate readings, sunlight pouring through the neo-Gothic windows into the meditatively dim sanctuary. We listened to Chris Leche, a poet who has taught in war zones for the past ten years. She read three of her own poems along with a stunning essay by one of her students who was fighting in Afghanistan. He wrote about his struggle not to stand too long in the soul-destroying acid of hatred, most vividly triggered when he saw a ten-year-old Afghani boy, face filled with rage, stare at him and then pointedly pull a finger across his throat. Even as fury for revenge rose in him, the soldier remembered that this was a child, a child whose soul was already poisoned and dying. His words were like smelling salts to those of us seated in the sanctuary, jolting us into consciousness. This soldier had reached across time and distance and shaken us awake.

After Leche and several others (including our new friend Barbara Ras) read, we watched a documentary entitled Every War Has Two Losers about the great American poet William Stafford, who was born in 1914, the year in which World War I erupted, and died in 1993. (That’s him in the photo above.) From his youth, he was convicted by the certainty that violence cannot end violence, but only perpetuate it. He was a conscientious objector during World War II and spent the war in camps for conscientious objectors in California and Arkansas. He spent the rest of his life bearing witness to the possibility of peace as positive force, rather than a mere cessation of war. In the introduction to the book of the same title, Stafford’s son Kim, also a poet, writes:

as a child my father somehow arrived at the idea that one does not need to fight; nor does one need to run away. Both these actions are failures of the imagination. Instead of fighting or running you can stand by the oppressed, the frightened, or even “the enemy.” You can witness for connection, even when many around you react with fury, or with fear.

Many contemporary poets influenced by Stafford’s willingness to stand in the uneasy role of witness were interviewed in the film, including Robert Bly, Coleman Barker, Naomi Shihab Nye, Maxine Hong Kingston, W. S. Merwin, and Alice Walker. They all pointed to his insistence that we do the hard work of imagining “the enemy”: that we wonder about his family, his childhood, his children; that we imagine what might have led him to consider us as enemy; that we refuse ever to lose sight of his humanity, of his hunger, joy, and pain. The discipline of always imagining the enemy as clearly as he could imagine himself left Stafford, like the spring, unable to do anything but bloom with love of neighbor.

Stafford wrote: “Save the world by torturing one innocent child? Which innocent child?” He wrote: “Is there a quiet way, a helpful way, to question what has been won in a war that the victors are still cheering? … Or does the winning itself close our questions about it? Might failing to question it make it easier to try war again?” He wrote: “Keep a journal, and don’t assume that your work has to accomplish anything worthy; artists and peace-workers are in it for the long haul, and not to be judged by immediate results….”

He wrote and decades later I, like Hirsch first reading Hopkins, was electrified. I felt seen, known. When my demons woke up and started jeering, I asked them politely to come in. I wanted to know (maybe) where they were from. Ha! they said. You wish, they said. Yes, I said. When I’m brave enough, I think I do.

So many courageous poets at this festival, living and dead, bore witness to the glory and depravity of the human condition. Such a community of witnesses. Maybe spring really will come again (even if just barely this year). Maybe Jesus really will rise from the dead. Maybe it’s not ridiculous to open a residency for environmental writers and artists, to provide a haven for those whose efforts might electrify others to work for beauty, for harmony, for wholeness. For salvation.

What we’re reading
Heather: Barbara Ras, The Last Skin
Martin: Emma Donoghue, Room