Poems and Other Writings

This page is dedicated to "singing" the landscapes of our inner ecology and earth to life. Each month, together we'll explore a new poem or piece of writing. We'll see how language that focuses on the particulars of the outer wilderness, can return us to the truth of our inner wilderness.

Please feel free to ponder the questions elicited by the piece below. Memorize a stanza or two. Write a poem of your own. And, if you like, please email me with your own observations, poetry, and thoughts. I'd love to hear from you.

April 2008

The Meadow Across the Creek
From The Great Work, By Thomas Berry

I was a young person then, some twelve years old. My family was moving from a more settled part of a Southern town out to the edge of town where the new house was still being built. The house, not yet finished, was situated on a slight incline. Down below was a small creek and there across the creek was a meadow. It was an early afternoon in May when I first looked down over the scene and saw the meadow. The field was covered with lilies rising above the thick grass. A magic moment, this experience gave to my life something, I know not what, that seems to explain my life at a more profound level than almost any other experience I can remember.

It was not only the lilies. It was the singing of the crickets and the woodlands in the distance and the clouds in an otherwise clear sky. It was not something conscious that happened just then. I went on about my life as any young person might do. Perhaps it was not simply this moment that made such a deep impression upon me. Perhaps it was a sensitivity that was developed throughout my childhood. Yet, as the years pass, this moment returns to me, and whenever I think about my basic life attitude and the whole trend of my mind and the causes that I have given my efforts to, I seem to come back to this moment and the impact it has had on my feeling for what is real and worthwhile in life.

• Write about a place that has influenced your vision of the world
  
  
• Spend time in a favorite place in nature and ask it to speak to you about what is real and worthwhile
  
  
• Do the following experiment: Spend half an hour in a shopping mall paying deep attention to how it makes you feel about yourself and the world. Then, shortly afterwards, spend a half hour in a nurturing natural environment and do the same thing. What do you notice? Do you experience the world and yourself differently in different environments?
  
  

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