Many years ago, the Better Half discovered, I believe on a public broadcasting radio station, a singer-songwriter named Carrie Newcomer. This was, as I remember, back in the days when the Daughter Person was attending college, which gave the Better Half and I an opportunity to enjoy Ms. Newcomer in performance at a near campus coffee house in St. Paul. She was a delight. We have remained fans over the years and have watched her talents find additional outlets, such as several volumes of poetry which accompany her three most recent albums.
Today’s posting is going on about Carrie Newcomer because her writing offers a down-to-earth sanity that is sadly lacking in too many other parts of contemporary life. Just the other day I bought her most recent CD and book of poems, entitled Until Now (↑). There’s a release tour that follows the album and book, with a Minneapolis date in a few weeks:
If you’re brave enough to attend live performances these days, you should definitely consider getting tickets. As noted on the web page for Until Now,
“We have all lived through a time of great unraveling,” Newcomer says. “Yet, with great disruption comes a possibility for change. We can’t just be healed; we must be transformed.” In her songs and poems, Newcomer tells the universal human story of loss, resiliency, spiritual connection, and hope with the grace, compassion, and humor that characterizes her work....
If you, as a number of us have, are searching for an optimistic response and ways to adjust or adapt to these trying times in which we live, consider becoming familiar with the perspectives offered by Newcomer, and her friend and mentor, Parker J. Palmer, as an antidote to the pervasive gloom, doom and madness instilled by the multitude of crises we face.
Making Sense
Finding what makes senseIn senseless times
Takes grounding
Sometimes quite literally
In the two inches of humus
Faithful recreating itself
Every hundred years.
It takes steadying oneself
Upon shale and clay and solid rock
Swearing allegiance to an ageless aquifer
Betting on all the still hidden springs.
You can believe in a tree,With its broad-leafed perspective,
Dedicated to breathing in, and then out,
Reaching down, and then up,
Drinking in a goodness above and below
It’s splayed and mossy feet.
You can trust a tree’s careful
and drawn out way of speaking.
One thoughtful sentence, covering the span of many seasons.
A tree doesn’t hurry, it doesn’t lie,It knows how to stand true to itself
Unselfconscious of its beauty and scars,
And all the physical signs of where
and when It needed to bend,
Rather than break.
A tree stands solitary and yet in deepest communion,
For in the gathering of the many,
There is comfort and courage,
Perseverance and protection,
From the storms that howl down from predictable
Or unexplainable directions.
In a senseless timeHold close to what never stopped
Making sense.
Like love
Like trees
Like how a seed becomes a branch
And compost becomes seedlings again.
Like the scent at the very top of an infant’s head
Because there is nothing more right than that. Nothing.
It is all still happening
Even now.
Even now.
By Carrie Newcomer 2020
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Thanks for visiting. Come again when you can.
Please be kind to each other while you can.
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