Author: carmenbugan

The nature writer Sigurd Olson seemed to have spent his time on earth gathering singular moments from the rush of time, crafting them in unforgettable words, so that we too can experience the healing wonders of nature.

The first time he has heard the ‘singing wilderness,’ as he calls it, Olson was seven years old. He says: ‘It was near the tip of a bold peninsula that reached far out into Lake Michigan, and though I was only seven at the time and knew nothing of the need of solitude, or the hunger I have known since, the response was there.’  There, at the edge of a pier, at the end of deep woods he ‘entered a life of indescribable beauty and delight’.  Here are some passages, which speak far better than what I can offer in a description:

“A school of perch darted in and out of the rocks.  They were green and gold and black, and I was fascinated by their beauty. Seagulls wheeled and cried above me.  Waves crashed against the pier. I was alone in a wild and lovely place, part at last of the wind and the water, part of the dark forest through which I had come, and of all the wild sounds and colors and feelings of the place I had found. “(p. 8)

That first moment occurred at the age at seven.  Here we are later in life when the perception is keener, when the solitude is akin to memorized joy, when the observer has achieved poetic mastery, and when we can sense the love of nature in the depth of the images he writes:

“Gradually the streamers of rose and mauve in the east changed to gold, and then the sun burst over a spruce-etched hill.  At that moment the river was transformed into a brilliant crystalline boulevard stretching to infinity. The air was mountain air that morning, and my feet were winged.  I was in the forbidden land, land of the spirits, a place to approach with awe and perhaps with prayer. “(p.14)

And later still:

“The movement of a canoe is like a reed in the wind. Silence is part of it, and the sounds of lapping water, bird songs, and wind in the trees. It is part of the medium through which it floats, the sky, the water, the shores.

A man is part of his canoe and therefore part of all it knows. “(p.77)

And farther North:

“Shafts of light shot up into the heavens above me and concentrated there in a final climactic effort in which the shifting colors seemed drained from the horizons to form one gigantic rosette of flame of yellow and greenish purple. Suddenly I grew conscious of the reflections from the ice itself and that I was skating through a sea of changing color caught between the streamers above and below. At that moment I was part of the aurora, part of its light and of the great curtain that trembled above me. “(p.185)

This book caught me by the heartstrings, and part of me wants to memorize every page of it. Whether it’s simply the nostalgia I feel for Lake Michigan, that one Black Sea that had sustained me through the first years of exile in the States, when I pined for the sound of the farm life in the mornings–the roosters calling across the village– or the coin of the moon that hung above the precipices of the Carpathian mountains of my childhood, I don’t know.  I don’t know if Olson speaks to me because I am increasingly anxious with every Ar Quality Index warning that I receive in my inbox during the summer season, or when I return from the beach saddened because it is often unfit for swimming, here where I live now. But these worries aside, I feel grateful to have this book, and to be able to return to Olson’s meaningful, beautiful words, where I could find solace even if I am struggling to breathe in the heart of the city. I am grateful that his work has been and will remain a catalyst for change, that it has raised awareness about the need to safeguard our magnificent national parks, where, as he says, we too can hear the singing wilderness and feel renewed.

Source: The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between | Harvard Review Online

Source: The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between | Harvard Review Online

Releasing the Porcelain Birds: Poems after Surveillance, Shearsman, UK, 2016. An interview on the BBC World News about the book: An interview about working with the files on NPR: PRAISE FOR …

Source: Releasing the Porcelain Birds: Poems After Surveillance

23 Feb 2017 10:21 AMSanda Ionescu (Administrator) Guest post from former GWG member, instructor and great friend Carmen Bugan, now living in the US. For a beautiful review of her latest coll…

Source: Finding Stability in Literary language

Here is an example of poetry as a celebration of language:  ‘Poem in October’* by Dylan Thomas.  I will only quote a few lines so that I do not break any rights rules:

  ‘My birthday began with the water-

Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name

      Above the farms and the white horses

                       And I rose

                   In rainy autumn

And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.

High tide and the heron dived when I took the road

           Over the border

                  And the gates

Of the town closed as the town awoke.’  

Oh and here is memory:

‘….

And I saw in the turning so clearly a child’s

Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother

          Through the parables

                Of sunlight ….’

I love the image of walking abroad in the shower of one’s days: the walking through time, ageing, each day a raindrop that falls as far as the cloud will shed it–think of raindrops on people’s cheeks, raindrops on wooden houses, on the grass.  There is such a physical connection between the soul of the speaker and the soul of nature here, all embodied in this language that takes you flying. And then, I wonder, as I have young children, what’s it like for them to walk ‘through the parables/ of sunlight’?   What a blessing this poem is!

*(lines quoted from the Norton Anthology of English lit.*Vol. F)

This past weekend my husband went around the house and changed all the door handles. These doors are over seventy years old, none of them close properly, and it seemed to me that new door handles, new door knobs for all the closets won’t make any difference. I advocated leaving the doors always open, this way we don’t have to deal with the handles!   I teased him: ‘If you spent that much time updating our relationship, we’d be again just like newly married.’  He said, ‘That’s just exactly what I am doing!’

Then I started thinking about doors and handles.  A good handle, a brand-new one might at least make you feel like you’ve updated something.  The new handles replaced the old hand prints and the old memories, the traces of the other people who had lived here before, with something that now is ours. (We have updated the whole house, mind you, before we got to the doors, so let’s say that structurally the house works!) It feels good to grab into something that fits comfortably in your hand to open and to close the door.  Maybe we are opening new things into our relationship too–at least the desire to make things work, to make them more comfortable.

Thinking about my marriage brought some lovely memories of my father who spent almost the entire time he was at home, trying to fix it.  We children broke everything, he fixed everything, and nothing was ever too complicated for him to do, whether that was building a whole heating system or a brand new fence, which my sister and I used for gymnastics and as a volleyball net, with all the children on the street. I have no idea if my mother turned everything my father did around the house into metaphors but I have been doing this all my life, putting new words into old structures, like family, forever re-arranging feelings.  The doors may still not open all the way or close properly in my writing either  but at least we have a way to move them.

It’s coming into the end of the day.  My daughter runs around the house, thumping from one window to the next, shouting at the rest of us to go see the snow, which began falling in thick layers.  The grass is getting white, the little path from the door to the road is disappearing, the trees are whitening too, the roof of the house next door.  I can tell by the bounce of her voice, the song she invents as she goes from one person to the next urging us to look outside, that her mind is recording the movement of the flakes, their dance.  She switches languages as she runs from me to her father and back to her brother, her thoughts take off the runways of Italian and English filling the house with bright, melodious words: snow, guarda il cielo, pappa!  At one point in her life will she remember this snow, this house, among her first memories? She is now at the age of first memories that become permanent.

My child is stirring my own first memories. When was my first memory of snow?  It must have been at my grandparents’ house in another language yet, a language that calls the snow with the word zapada.  I must have been wearing socks knitted by my grandmother to keep me warm against the cold of the clay floor covered by a straw mat. We must have looked out of the small kitchen window through the stars made of ice that clung there most of the harsh winters.  I walk to the window and look through this snow, at the snows to come, the hope of the many snows to come, for my daughter, and for me.  There is something oracular about tonight’s snow, or let me say that I earn for something oracular in tonight’s snow…