other deepening places
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According to The Encyclopedia Britannica, Alfred, Lord Tennyson took nearly eighteen years to fully process the grief of losing his good friend Arthur Henry Hallam. We find this in his elegiac masterpiece, In Memoriam A. H. H. While it may be Tennyson’s greatest work and certainly earned him renown for its “131 sections, … prologue,…
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My wife’s cousin sent this poem as her Christmas wish for us this year. She received it from a friend who said that no other poem better captures his wishes for his family and friends for the coming year. I love that as we end the old and welcome the new, this poem helps us…
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Merry Christmas! May we never lose the wonder of the wondrous, nor the inexplicable joy over the miraculous. E. E. Cummings’ style perfectly captures the explosive energy of the nativity and “the whole / perhapsless mystery of paradise.” Heaven come to earth! The Creator fleshed in creation. The greatest gift ever given. Richest blessings as…
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Sometimes I feel like I’ve forgotten how to be a poet or how to compose songs. In the silence that seems like writer’s block, those critical internal voices grow deafening. For example, since early October, I’ve been trying to wrestle my thoughts into a sonnet. That otherworldly rattling call of the Sandhill Cranes crossing overhead…
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Missing in action. That’s how I’ve felt, creatively (and emotionally), for the past two months. Little time to pay attention. Little time to be astonished. Little time to tell about it. I’ve failed to live by Mary Oliver’s instructions for living a life. Fall has always been a season brimming with activity: school starts, I…
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I’ve come back to Mary Oliver after she popped up in the book I’m reading for enjoyment between preparing for school and repairing our fleet of cars! The book is Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman (I know: enjoyment?), and Mary Oliver shows up on page 104. Of course, this sent…
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Having not posted anything by Mary Oliver in awhile, I wondered if she had any poetry related to Independence Day. A quick online search led me to a post on “Improvised Life: A Treasury of Inspiring Ideas.” Allegedly, a poem my wife has loved for years, first read in Mary Oliver’s Why I Wake Early,…
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The end approaches. We’ve moved past counting the days; now we’re counting the hours. Another school year, my twenty-fifth to be exact, comes to a close. In the heat of wrapping up the year and managing life outside of the classroom, my wife (at my son, Theo’s leading) sent me the following poem. Balancing the…
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On Valentine’s Day I became a grandfather. Our first grandson! My wife was blessed to be there to prepare for and help with the delivery, as well as provide extra support for the first week of Liam’s life. By late spring, I will be a grandfather twice over when we welcome our second grandson into…
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Tonight I came home from work to the day-to-day needs that swarm me almost as soon as I open my car door. The younger boys want to head to Walmart; my middle son’s basketball practice begins at 5:30; my wife and daughter have their book group meeting this evening, so we need to order pizza…
the deepening ground 