Partnership for Earth Spirituality
Earth Seminars

The Partnership conducts earth spirituality seminars held each month in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Brief papers or other materials are prepared and posted on the Partnership's website in advance of each meeting. Should you wish to be added to the listserv receiving notification, please contact Joan Brown.


“Poetry as Window Into the Soul of Nature” through the poetry of Pattiann Rogers

March 2, 2006

Discussion Leader: Wallace Ford

Pattiann Rogers is a contemporary poet whose intuitive insights combine the art of writing, the understanding of language and the unifying of reality in such a way that our vision of eco-spirituality in enlarged, challenged and nurtured.

She speaks of her work as being "reciprocal creation", indicating the play between the various dimensions of nature. She deftly deconstructs our easy bifurcation of reality and hands us back a journey into a new, re-stitched landscape. In doing so, she brings reciprocity back into our consciousness about the human vocation.

The following 3 poems and brief essay give a feel for her important teachings and prophetic insights and will be the basis of the discussion at the March Seminar.

This Nature
by Pattiann Rogers

Bach is nature, and the Marquis de Sade is nature. Florence Nightingale and the Iron Maiden are nature. Michelangelo's Pieta, the swastika, Penthouse magazine and solar flares are nature. Pedophiles and saints equally are nature. Ash pits, boggy graves, nuclear bombs, tubercle bacillus, Yosemite Falls, abortion, the polio vaccine, all are part of the sum total of everything that is and therefore nature. Nothing that is goes against nature, because nature is the way things are. Nature is what is, everything that is, everything that has been, and everything that is possible, including human actions, inventions, creations, and imaginations. This is my definition. This nature is the nature of roaches and cheetahs and honeysuckle, the nature of a Strauss waltz, the nature of the Ice Ages, the Black Plague, the eruption of Krakatoa, the nature of the slaughter of American bison, the nature of human sacrifice and bloody rituals carried out by Aztecs, Celts, Slavs.

Nothing that exists, including language, is outside nature. We do not know an "outside nature," because knowledge itself is an element of nature. Even the word "unnatural" is part of nature (how could it otherwise be here on this page?) and is therefore self-contradictory.

An ice pick through the chest or a soothing hand on the forehead, both are natural, both gestures of nature. Wild curly dock, malaria, exploding stars, continental drift, and the construction of Hoover Dam are natural, part of what is. Violent birth and violent extinction are older than we are and natural. We know a history of both. We have sometimes been involved in the nature of both. We cannot legitimately use the word "natural" as synonomous with the words "unsullied," "pure," or "righteous."

It is no more against nature for human beings to clearcut a forest than it is against nature for Mt. Vesuvius to erupt and eliminate the town of Herculaneum. Human actions may be judged moral or immoral, wise or unwise, cruel or benevolent, heedless or thoughtful, but those are other terms and other issues. I am speaking of nature. Everything that we name noble is nature, and everything that we name despicable is nature, and our attempt to distinguish between the noble and the despicable is nature.

Calculus, astrophysics, the automobile, the safety pin, and billboards were created by creatures born of the natural world and thus included naturally in the nature of everything that is. If we create justice, it exists in nature. If we act so as to bring compassion into existence, it is real within the natural world. Divinity is of the universe, part of nature, when it is observed and noted and imagined and expressed by creatures born of nature with physical, blood-beating, light-snapping minds. We are thoroughly nature. To claim otherwise is to attempt to place human beings and everything we do in some rare unimaginable realm beyond the universe, thus rendering the power of our origins lost and our obligations vague.

Nature is everything that is. We are not and cannot be "unnatural." Our choices and our actions are never for or against nature. They are always simply of nature. Our decisions then involve determining what it is that we value among this everything-that-is, this nature. What is it we seek to preserve? to eliminate? to modify? to accept? to avoid? to cherish? to respect? to emulate? The decisions we make, how we justify and construct those decisions and the behavior that results, all these become part of the great milieu, and they have their effects in ways we may not always recognize. Our choices and our actions, whether based on aesthetic considerations, moral or spiritual considerations, economic considerations, or rational considerations, must be justified in some way other than by the claim that they are the natural world; for any behavior, even murder, even suicide, even war, even abuse of the young, can be justified by that claim. We may call these particular acts horrors, but they are horrors that are part of nature, part of everything that is, and they cannot be said to go against nature. They are horrors that are part of nature already replete with horrors. Perhaps these particular acts go against our sense of goodness or compassion, morality or beauty or justice, but they do not go against nature. Annihilation and creation are occurring constantly around us now, and they have occurred always, long before human beings came to be. Nature encompasses all contradictions.

This nature is not a single entity, not a consistent force that sanctions or condemns behavior, not a god-substitute that we can embrace or blame or escape. It composes the entire, complex myriad of ever-changing events and details, unpredictable, paradoxical, passing and eternal, known and mysterious. Nature is the vast expanse of abstractions and multiplicities; it is the void and the concrete presence, an unrestricted inclusiveness. The definition of the word "nature" even includes its own definition and the maker of its definition. It is self-referential.

I deliberately seek out the specific aspects of everything that is that I find ennobling, affirming, that engender in me hope, faith, action, and health, the chaos choose to value and praise them. Just a few of these aspects, for me, are the words of Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Whitman, Melville, Twain, Faulkner, Roethke, Jacob Bronowski, Jesus Christ; the music of Chopin, Beethoven, Bruckner, Anne-Sophie Mutter, the Takacs Quartet; the very existence of the body of preserved art, music, and literature that is my culture; the Magna Carta, the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights; arches, domes, and columns; the grace and order of an NBA basketball game; Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes; the curiosity, facility, and complexity of the human mind that results in the revelations of science; the way sunlight appears shifting its illuminations and colors on roofs and gardens and fields, making shadows of trees on the curtains-throughout the gradual coming of morning, throughout the patterns of evening, everyday, the gift of morning and evening; snow, that amazement; the surrounding great buffer of stars in which we are immersed; life in its unrelenting, ruthless, selfabsorbed, tenacious grasp on being.

We are fortunate as human beings to have the opportunity to discern and to act, to recognize and experience ourselves in this welter of terror and beauty, to add our praise, gratitude, and testimony to the totality of everything that is, to place them as if we were placing seeds in soil into the flux and form of this nature

The Dream of the Marsh Wren: Reciprocal Creation
by Pattiann Rogers

The marsh wren, furtive and tail-tipped,
by the rapid brown blurs of his movements
makes sense of the complexities of sticks
and rushes. He makes slashes and complicated
lines of his own in mid-air above the marsh
by his flight and the rattles of his incessant
calling. He exists exactly as if he were a product
of the pond and the sky and the blades of light
among the reeds and grasses, as if he were
deliberately willed into being by the empty
spaces he eventually inhabits.

And at night, inside each three-second
shudder of his sporadic sleep, understand
how he creates the vision of the sun
blanched and barred by the diagonal juttings
of the weeds, and then the sun as heavy
cattail crossed and tangled and rooted
deep in the rocking of its own gold water,
and then the sun as suns in flat explosions
at the bases of the tule. Inside the blink
of his eyelids, understand how he composes
the tule dripping sun slowly in gold rain
off its black edges, and how he composes
gold circles widening on the blue surface
of the sun's pond, and the sharp black
slicing of his wing rising against the sun,
and that same black edge skimming the thin
corridor of gold between sky and pond.

Imagine the marsh wren making himself
inside his own dream. Imagine the wren,
created by the marsh, inside the marsh
of his own creation, unaware of his being
inside this dream of mine where I imagine
he dreams within the boundaries of his own
fixed black eye around which this particular
network of glistening weeds and knotted
grasses and slow-dripping gold mist
and seeded winds shifting in waves of sun
turns and tangles and turns itself completely
inside out again here composing me
in the stationary silence of its only existence.

 

In Addition to Faith, Hope and Charity
by Pattiann Rogers

I'm sure there's a god
in favor of drums. Consider their pervasiveness - the thump,
thump and slide of waves
on a stretched hide of beach,
the rising beat and slap of their crests against shore
baffles, the rapping of otters
cracking mollusks with stones,
woodpeckers beak-banging, the beaver's
whack of his tail-paddle, the ape
playing the bam of his own chest,
the million tickering rolls of rain
off the flat-leaves and razor-rims of the forest.
And we know the noise
of our own inventions-snare and kettle,
bongo, conga, big bass, toy tin,
timbals, tambourine, tom-tom.
But the heart must be the most
pervasive drum of all. Imagine
hearing all together every tinny
snare of every heartbeat
in every jumping mouse and harvest
mouse, sagebrush vole and least
shrew living across the prairie;
and add to that cacophony the individual
staccato tickings inside all gnatcatchers,
kingbirds, kestrels, rock doves, pine
warblers crossing, criss-crossing
each other in the sky, the sound
of their beatings overlapping
with the singular hammerings
of the hearts of cougar, coyote,
weasel, badger, pronghorn, the ponderous
bass of the black bear; and on deserts too,
all the knackings, the flutterings
inside wart snakes, whiptails, racers
and sidewinders, earless lizards, cactus
owls; plus the clamors undersea, slow
booming in the breasts of beluga
and bowhead, uniform rappings
in a passing school of cod or bib,
the thidderings of bat rays and needlefish.
Imagine the earth carrying this continuous
din, this multifarious festival of pulsing

thuds, stutters and drummings, wheeling
on and on across the universe.
This must be proof of a power existing
somewhere definitely in favor
of such a racket.

THE DEATH OF LIVING ROCKS
AND THE CONSEQUENCES THEREOF
by Pattiann Rogers

The god of rocks said stop,
and all the rocks stopped still
where they were—wolf rocks, pouncing
or suckling, packed in the forest,
snake rocks singling over the desert,
rock toads, their round pebbly humps
huddled along streambeds.

They all stopped-whale boulders
impassive on the floor of the sea,
seal rocks piled shiny and herded in spray
on the shore, a rock puma, granite
teeth bared, her rock kittens scattered
and halted half way down the hill,
closed mica butterfly wings.

Whole swaths of gypsum stems
and flowerets became paralysed
where we see them now, unmoved
in the wind. Pipes of organ rocks
and the red bugle rocks beside them
posed statuesque over ravines and gulches
without music.

On the day the god of rocks
said stop, all the rocks of the earth
stood still, without further expression,
without further response. And the god of rocks,
simply a possible reflection
of his own rock creation, became bound himself,
eyes staring marble white, voice a solid
layer of shale, the words live again
soundless and locked irretrievably
on his silent, stone tongue.

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