Nativity

In the dark, a child might ask, “What is the world?”
just to hear his sister
promise, “An unfinished wing of heaven”,
just to hear his brother say,
“A house inside a house”,
but most of all to hear his mother answer,
“One more song, then you go to sleep.”

How could anyone in that bed guess
the question finds its beginning
in the answer long growing
inside the one who asked, that restless boy,
the night’s darling?

Later, a man lying awake,
he might ask it again,
just to hear the silence
charge him, “This night
arching over your sleepless wondering,

This night, the near ground
every reaching-out-to overreaches”,

just to remind himself
out of what little earth and duration,
out of what immense good-bye,
each must make a safe place of the heart,
before so strange and wild a guest
as God approaches.

–Li-Young Lee (from Book of My Nights)

The strange and wild guest, the incomprehensible darkness. I lie in that darkness on windy nights listening to the trees roar, and feel myself dissolving into the near ground.

For Christmas I got a cool gift from a friend’s dog — a copy of Carla Greene’s “I Want To Be a Librarian”. Published in 1960 by Children’s Press, it was part of the “I Want to Be” career series for beginning readers.

Sorry, dog. I never wanted to be a librarian. I wanted to be an archeologist, a forest ranger, a museum curator, an artist, an historian. I wanted to write poems, have children, build my own house, climb all of the high peaks in the Adirondacks. But I never wanted to be a librarian.

How I happened to become a librarian, and a decade or so later, a children’s librarian, isn’t important. What is important, though — at least to me – is that all those yearnings, many of them accompanied by great effort, are the stuff of me.

When I remember that, I show up whole for the work I do today. That wholeness is like a container filled with rich, old soil out of which comes ideas that are fresh and vital.

So, don’t ask me if I want to be a librarian. Instead, let’s talk about whether or not inanimate things have intelligence (aren’t all cells self-organizing? Isn’t that intelligence? What’s your definition of intelligence?), or if children can develop an ecological sense of things when knowledge is separated into arbitrary subjects as it is in most schools.     

Or, as Holden Caufield from “The Catcher in the Rye” wondered, where do the birds go when it rains?  

What’s this blog going to be about? Don’t know yet exactly, but likely the issues that matter to me: children, children’s literature, the health of the environment, the relationship between children’s well-being and their exposure to the natural world, deep ecology, ecological identity, creation spirituality, progressive politics, prayer, small-scale economy, poetry, bioregionalism. To start.