A SPACE TO WANDER IN MIND AND HEART AROUND THE BEAUTY, POWER, FRAGILITY, AND PRECIOUSNESS OF OUR EARTH

For me, poetry, art, literature...as well as science, facts, investigative reporting inform my thoughts and my actions in this world.  In this blog I will allow myself to intersect with all the voices that speak within me and, hopefully, those voices might touch others into action to protect and preserve our earth. Bernice Mennis

Bernice at Earth Day Glens Falls

from The Way of Life according to Lao Tzu, #29
        translator Witter Bynner


Those who would take over the earth
and shape it to their will
never, I notice, succeed.
The earth is like a vessel so sacred
that at the mere approach of the profane
it is marred.
And when they reach out their fingers it is gone.
For a time in the world some force themselves ahead
and some are left behind, 
for a time in the world some make a great noise
and some are held silent,
for a time in the world some are puffed fat
and some are kept hungry,
for a time in the world some push aboard
and some are tipped out:
at no time in the world will a man who is sane
over-reach himself,
over-spend himself.
over-rate himself.








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December 14, 2020
The poet W.S. Merwin asks how to "say what can't be said," knowing that if he wants to tell what the forests were like ​(he)will have to speak in a forgotten language."  He writes: "I think there's a kind of desperate hope built into poetry, that one really wants, hopelessly, to save the world . one is trying to say everything that can be said for the things that one loves while there is still time." 

And that is what I/we want: "to save the world"--our world, our earth, our home-- knowing that "the words never say it, but the words are all we have to say it." and that "Poetry is really to say what can't be said."  That is what poetry allows--not rational or literal but another language that somehow finds its way into our hearts.  There are the facts, the science, the information, the record heat,  warming oceans, melting ice, floods, wildfires, catastrophic hurricanes, the history, the charts the photographs, podcasts, films... all showing what is happening, capturing what is being lost,  the endangered and the now extinct, what was and is no longer, even in language or memory.  And in this blog and our website we will speak in that language because it is vital to speak what is real, to chronicle what is happening, gather information and resources, raise questions, see interconnections, and explore actions that we can and must take locally and nationally "to save our world."  But also, i do have that "desperate hope" in the words of poetry to make us feel what we may have forgotten, to give us the words that can, somehow, get us closer to our deeper knowing, to remember what we may have almost lost but still can perhaps save. 

So in this first blog,  Gerard Manley Hopkins "Binsey Poplars"  (felled 1879)

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;
   Of a fresh and folded rank
           Not spared, not one
           That dandled a sandalled
     Shadow that  swam o sank
On meadow and river and and wind wandering
   weed-winding bank.

O if we but knew what we do  
        When we delve or hew--
   Hack and rack the growing green!
          Since country is so tender
    To touch, her being so slender,
    That, like this sleek and seeing ball
    But a prick will make no eye at all
    Where we, even were we mean 
                      to mend her we end her,
        When we hew or delve:
After comers cannot guess the beauty been.
   Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve
       Strokes of havoc unselve
           The sweet especial scene,
       Rural scene, a rural scene,
       Sweet especial rural scene.

I know of what Hopkins speaks.  I have felt that.  He gave me words that I say aloud.
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