Noticing joy can be a guiding force, helping us name what matters in our lives. Joy, Mary Oliver suggests, helps us discern what we love, and, just maybe, helps us figure out how we want to live.
Read MoreElephant Journal: Leaning Toward Light: 2 Things that can help us Rediscover the World.
A year into the pandemic, when everything seemed very grim, Hannah, a friend who I knew from my time working at a farm in the Berkshires, called to ask if I would like to build an anthology of contemporary gardening poems. “People are taking such solace in gardening now,” she told me.
Read MoreTerrain: “Poems and Gardens as Kind Companions”
A year into the pandemic, when everything was grim, Hannah, a friend who I knew from my time working at a farm in the Berkshires, called to ask if I would like to build an anthology of contemporary gardening poems. “People are taking such solace in gardening now,” she told me.
Read MoreCNN op-ed and poem excerpts “How to rest this Labor Day weekend”
As we come to Labor Day, many of us have a small break — possibly to get one last trip to the beach, to rush to organize the next school year — and perhaps, to think about what work is, what rest is, how they interact, what we wish them to be in our lives.
Read More‘Beowulf’ and Beyond: A Poet Who Embraced Translation
‘Beowulf’ and Beyond: A Poet Who Embraced Translation
As seen in a new collection, “The Translations of Seamus Heaney,” the Nobel laureate was a prolific and skilled interpreter of other poets’ work.
Read MoreSeattle Times - Digging my way out of climate grief
This winter there were moments when I wasn’t sure I was going to make it back into my garden. I wasn’t sure I wanted to, would have time, would care. I wasn’t sure it would ever stop raining.
After six of the warmest years ever recorded in California, after five years of record wildfires, amid the driest period in 1,200 years, this year’s record snowfall, its deluge after deluge of violent rain seemed more than the earth could take.
Read MoreCNN - Opinion: A Californian’s message to East Coasters struggling in smoke-filled air
CNN — What do you do when the air fills with smoke from wildfires?
Well, if you’re a New Yorker or East Coast person and this is new to you, just know that you’re joining a reality that people across the West have been facing for several years now, in increasing chapters. In my life, we’ve experienced worsening wildfires in California and fled smoke several times, as well as just making do with it sometimes hanging over our lives for weeks.
Read MoreLA Times - Opinion: How to dig your way out of climate grief
This winter there were moments when I wasn’t sure I was going to make it back into my garden. I wasn’t sure I wanted to, would have time, would care. I wasn’t sure it would ever stop raining.
After six of the warmest years ever recorded in California, after five years of record wildfires, amid the driest period in 1,200 years, this year’s record snowfall, its deluge after deluge of violent rain seemed more than the earth could take.
Read MoreCNN - Opinion: The surprising antidote to burnout
CNN — I know they say that April is the cruelest month. But honestly, May, just before the school year ends, seems to be pretty wild, as well. How can everything on earth be due now?
Recently, just when I thought I was far too busy to take on another thing under the sun, I remembered that I had volunteered for a whole day at my son’s school to teach some poems to the sixth grade class and then to take a bunch of third graders to do weeding and garden bed-clearing at a community orchard.
Read MoreHarper's Magazine
By Tess Taylor
Art as civic repair
Throughout his political career, Joe Biden has frequently invoked his favorite poet, Seamus Heaney. Accepting the Democratic nomination for president, Biden quoted Heaney’s “The Cure at Troy,” an adaptation of Sophocles’ play Philoctetes,which posits that “once in a lifetime / the longed-for tidal wave / of justice can rise up / and hope and history rhyme.” Months later, after the brutal attack on the U.S. Capitol, Biden assumed office under the watch of fifteen thousand members of the National Guard. He did not quote Heaney, but he did suggest that his presidency might usher in one such rhyming moment, and he promised to end “our uncivil war.” Read more…
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