WEBVTT

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So this will change
the mood a bit.

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You know, when we come
here, we are always

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asked to pick some
book from the shelves

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and recommend it because I
knew I would be reading--

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and it's an impossible
task because I

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walk through those shelves
and I see so many books

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that I would love to stop
and sit down for three days

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and only read that book.

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And your book, after
book, after book.

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But I decided that
my recommendation

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would be a big selected poems
by the Norwegian poet Olav Hauge

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because I knew I was going
to read this poem tonight.

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So it comes not from a
quote from one of his poems

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but from those little
biographical notes they

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put in anthologies and things.

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So there was this
sentence about him.

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He spent his whole
life in Ulvik working

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as a gardener in
his own orchard,

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and somehow that struck me.

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And so-- by the way, Robert
Bly visited Hauge in Norway

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and said that on this
little eight-acre apple

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farm where he lived was the best
poetry library in the country.

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"In Ulvik."

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"I too would like to work as
a gardener in my own orchard.

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Every Friday, I would pay
myself a decent, living wage,

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taken in foldable cash
from my own wallet.

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And sometimes, if
the weather was bad,

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I would give myself the
day off and thank myself

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for my kindness and answer
myself, it's nothing,

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nothing, go on now, put your
feet up, find somewhere warm.

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And then I would go back into my
house and think of my kindness

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and wonder if my gardener
was warm now also.

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And if I was right to let myself
go away from my own orchard's

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tending even so
briefly, and each of us

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might be thinking, too, of
the apples, cold and wet

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and hanging an outside wind and
fattening on their own trees

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without us.

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And one of us first,
then the other,

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might start to wonder a little,
while pushing a cut of cured

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applewood into the fire, about
loneliness and separateness

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and what it is lives outside
one person's skin and inside

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another's.

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