And I'll end with this poem about a whole lot
of different kinds of love.
All of them are good.
It's called biophilia that word that Wilson gave us that
refers to the human tendency genetic.
I mean, he talks about there's a genetic tendency
for human beings to want to affiliate with other species,
creatures of other species.
Biophilia.
On the day I found the snake mouth orchids, little explosions
of organic joy blooming in the sphagnum bog,
you were walking 1,000 miles away
and found a half grown gopher tortoise,
head collapsed on dozer paws, asleep beside the trail.
No dreams to dream, you wrote, just evolved too soon.
There it lay in the awful smolder of wildfire and summer
heat waiting for its mind to change.
But I was dreaming about you.
A closeness that distance didn't erase, but underscored something
written that I needed to read over and over,
reading myself away.
Sometimes I wonder if I should trust
how quickly my mind has changed from hermitage to love nest,
as if I could explain the marriage of my solitary ways
with the hopes for love that I still harbor.
I want everything with you to be you.
My birthday today--
52.
Number of cards in the deck, weeks in the year--
a completeness in the number reminds me
of that holy ratio the mystics quote to convince skeptics
that the universe wants order and proves its desire in pattern
and form.
I walked today across the breakwater-- granite
blocks that encumber and gentle the tide to swim in the reed
lined channel where I love feeling
the gentle tug of planetary motion, my arms pulling
with or against it in the silky brine.
A busload of kids from the city arrived, parading out
along the great stones, dressed in bright yellow t-shirts that
made them look like daisies blooming
for a mile across the water to the distant curl of sand.
The girls screamed at spiderweb spanning the rocky gaps
and the boys said, man, that water feels good.
Last in line came a boy who is stupid, or blind,
or just incomplete.
His senses slow, movements timid,
every step a challenge to the fear
that kept him closed so tightly inside his awkward body.
He could not move freely even in the open air
of the beautiful world--
sea glittering like fish scales, marsh grass electric green
in sunlight, the girls, the gulls, and the children
singing their cantatas.
An older boy walked the slow one along,
instructing him-- step here, now lift your body up--
and listened to the unfinished words the other spoke,
saying back to him their meaning; patiently, so
patiently,
one child led another, just held that hand
and looked around enjoying the day, his kindness bringing him
into the joy of it.
"Has anyone known as sorrow like mine?"
asks the old hymn.
And everyone knows the answer is supposed
to be no, because every sorrow known is the deepest
solitary woe.
Until one hears the words sung to a melody,
and a room full of strangers begins to weep,
at first in sorrow, but then seeing others weep,
knowing that the answer is yes.
And in the form of that sharing the tears are for joy.
When you wrote me about the tortoise,
how it lay in a forest that had been
the bottom of an ocean, only the ghosts of fishes for company--
If it couldn't dream, could it see the invisible the way I can,
holding you in mine half a continent away?--
I knew you loved the world's beauty and mystery
in a way that made me love you.
And I knew I was finished waiting for my life
to catch up with my art.
All that love dispersed to bog orchid, migrating butterfly,
and eucalyptus outgrowing its bark.
All that cultivated wonder at the Earth's dizzy recapitulation
of the theme no sorrows can stop.
All that paying attention to the beauty of the small,
teaching: it's in our nature, love.
Just as it's in the blackberry's woody canes to bear fruit,
in the black throated green warbler's throat
to sing its certain, patterned song.
Every mystery of planet, or heart,
every longing that ever led you where
you needed to go in spite of your best intentions.
Every act of bearing witness, lament or praise adding up
to knowing that what we love--
hard wired, generative, biologic power--
could teach us how to love, bright and awake to each other,
alive under the surprising sun.
Thank you.