About decluttering

Jane Hirshfield has a new and selected poetry volume, published last month, The Asking. I think it needs to go on a Christmas list, along with a handful of other poetry books. It may also mean it’s time for me to reread her Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World. That combination, together with a volume on Storytelling for a Greener World, that’s supposed to arrive this week, seems a fortuitous combination leading to a personal goal for next year, writing some greener world prose poems.

need the world be as beautiful as it is?

Photo by J. Harrington

On an old tv program, The A Team, there was a punch line that went “I love it when a plan comes together.” This afternoon, I’m feeling that way, combined with the old planners observation that “no amount of planning will ever replace dumb luck.” It has to do not only with books, but allso with computers. I need a new one and have been hesitant to get another Apple because of their lack of support for right to repair. It appears that, thanks to the Biden Administration, that’s been resolved.

Apple To Make Tools and Parts To Fix Phones and Computers Available Nationwide, White House Says 

None of the preceding offsets the major problems in the world these days, but their appearances do seem serendipitous, coming soon after I began focusing on George Herbert’s observation that “living well is the best revenge.” I’ve been spending so much time and energy fussing and fretting over events about which I can do little, that I’ve missed the significance of Maria Popova’s 14th Life Learning of 17 Life-Learnings from 17 Years of The Marginalian: Choose Joy. I doubt that it’s a coincidence that she quotes part of a Jane Hirshfield poem in her explication.

I think often of this verse from Jane Hirshfield’s splendid poem “The Weighing”: 

So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.

Nor do I find it coincidental that this fortuitous series of events has occurred shortly after the Better Half and I began serious efforts to declutter the place. Although there’s much in the world about which I can do little, brooding moodily is not an effective or acceptable alternative to exercising such control as I can over the events in my life. For additional insights into how this works, read some of Richard Wagamese’s books, especially Embers. 

Counting, This New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain To Me

by Jane Hirshfield

The world asks, as it asks daily:
And what can you make, can you do, to change my deep-broken, fractured?

I count, this first day of another year, what remains.
I have a mountain, a kitchen, two hands. 

Can admire with two eyes the mountain,
actual, recalcitrant, shuffling its pebbles, sheltering foxes and beetles.

Can make black-eyed peas and collards.
Can make, from last year’s late-ripening persimmons, a pudding.

Can climb a stepladder, change the bulb in a track light.

For four years, I woke each day first to the mountain,
then to the question.

The feet of the new sufferings followed the feet of the old,
and still they surprised.

I brought salt, brought oil, to the question. Brought sweet tea,
brought postcards and stamps. For four years, each day, something.

Stone did not become apple. War did not become peace.
Yet joy still stays joy. Sequins stay sequins. Words still bespangle, bewilder. 

Today, I woke without answer. 

The day answers, unpockets a thought from a friend

don't despair of this falling world, not yet

didn't it give you the asking

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