One if by Lyric, Two if by Tree
Connection is (just) one of the things the pandemic has made even more precious.
A Substack I read religiously is Poetry Unbound, by poet and wise person Padraig O’Tuama, who hosts a podcast of the same name (which in turn is hosted by On Being). Art that Builds a Bridge (Feb. 26) struck a deep chord in me.
“Whether I’m talking about my own poetry or someone else’s, most often I’m looking for some kind of bridge, some kind of connection, where language and image and music combine to make an encounter possible.… Language makes a temporary bridge—made and unmade and remade and unmade again—that has creativity at its heart: making truth, making possibilities, making meaning, making connection.”
YES! I almost shouted as I read. The bridging that creative writing can accomplish is one of the reasons I started “Mama Ephemera’s Muddy Feet.”
Put more eloquently: “Word connects wound with world,” said the poet Gregory Orr at a Feb. 21 online event. He shared the context of a childhood trauma that left him quiet, if not silent; his English teacher gave him some poetry, which gave him a way back to the world. (I was lucky to study with Orr in my undergraduate days.)
Through the years, I’ve often heard a person say “Poetry saved me.” Growing up, they felt out of place, different from others, couldn’t find their niche. Then, thanks to a librarian or teacher, they read a poem, or a whole book, which resonated so deeply they no longer felt like such a stranger on this Earth.
Connection is (just) one of the things the pandemic has made even more precious. Next week, I’ll attend a conference that has been known to draw upwards of 15,000 writers—both academics and the rest of us. Normally, I’d be looking forward to getting together with writing buddies, running into acquaintances, deepening friendships. This year it feels like I’m heading to a convention center full of strangers (with a few bright exceptions).
“Only Connect” *
Johann Hari’s prescient book, Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression—and the Unexpected Solutions (2018), explores the suffering we experience from losing connections with nature, with self, shared values, meaningful work and more. And, how one might reconnect.
A family physician named Igor Sapozhnikov summarized: “Throughout the book, Hari uses his training as a sociologist to explore how the Western world has changed to a point where more and more people are depressed, left behind, and disconnected.” Sapozhnikov drew lessons from the book for his patients.
“I have started to uncover why my patients are depressed by digging under the surface (and I do not have to dig deep). I have prescribed activities such as ‘church’ and ‘volunteering at a shelter’ and ‘1-moment meditation.’ This may seem simplistic, but it can help patients understand that it is not their brains that are broken, but rather depression is a sign that something is not going well in their lives.”
So, in addition to poetry (which Sapozhnikov doesn’t mention—maybe he didn’t have the right librarian?) there may be multiple bridges back to wholeness, to being part of things.
The Underbridge?
O’Tuama wanted to learn the etymology of bridge. “Before checking it out, I wondered what I’d guess, and I assumed it might have some connotation of a word for ‘over’…”
Ditto. I cannot think of a bridge without also thinking of the gulley, or river, or tracks or bay or roadway that it crosses. A bridge must hold a sort of respect for what it crosses, if it is to last and to truly bridge: To connect so that what dwells in or traverses the space crossed may continue to do so. Do we have a word for whatever moves between or separates what is connected, the way there is a word for the connector? In any language?
O’Tuama continues: “…but I was wrong: the English word bridge has connotations of wooden flooring in its etymology; the Irish droichead is linked with words for wheel and path.”
Curiosity piqued, I too looked up bridge’s etymology and found the idea of a beam or log laid down for crossing. Beams and logs come from trees, which have a lot to teach about connection.
Trees. Always.
You may have heard by now of the “wood-wide web,” which came to the attention of Western science in 1997, courtesy of Suzanne Simard’s research in British Columbia. The short version: fungi and tree roots partner—merge, more accurately—in subterranean networks to exchange nutrients and information—even the news. Such beings are called mycorrhizae.
Indigenous cultures could have told us all this—have told us, if only we’d had ears to hear. Simard herself says, “Western Canada’s aboriginal people have known about the connection between trees for a long time and have ancient language to describe it.”
[News flash: On March 1, Gabe Popkin wrote in The Nature Beat that the powerful networking Simard describes has not yet been documented in other forests (by practitioners of Western science), though it’s unclear how much effort has been made to do so. The arguments he presents are new to me, so I encourage you to read and consider his work.]
Language. Poetry. Connection. Nature. Being. Humans have a penchant for categorizing, as if we subdivide in order to name, to have something to talk about. We are then prone to mistaking those classes, parties, genders, castes and species for truth, for essential fact, rather than remembering they are merely tools that can help us walk more carefully on this Earth.
* E.M. Forster, Howard’s End
Wonderful photos! I like the idea of a log or plank. I like the resourcefulness and the whole “faith in a fragment” promise it implies. Thank you, Mama Ephemera, for your wise curiosity.