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Putting in the Seed by Robert Frost

Posted by Diane Morrow on May 11, 2014 in Uncategorized

So I’ve been thinking about Matthieu Ricard’s question: Look into the deepest part of yourself. Can you sense the presence of a potential for change there? The image that comes to mind for change is a seed—and especially the way it looks when the seed is planted and splits open and the shoot first emerges and the seed pushes up and then bends over at the top. I went looking for a poem about a seed and looked and looked and couldn’t find what I wanted and then stumbled upon this poem by Robert Frost, “Putting in the Seed,” one which I’ve never come across before. It begins: You come to fetch me from my work to-night When supper’s on the table, and we’ll see If I can leave off burying the white Soft petals fallen from the apple tree. (Soft petals, yes, but not so barren quite, Mingled with these, smooth bean and wrinkled pea;) Who would bury white soft petals? And then it occurs to me that maybe they were simply on the ground while he was planting, and got turned into the earth with the bean and pea seeds. Petals buried but not barren. Petals going back into the earth with the seeds. In any case he seems to be juxtaposing the idea of burying with that of planting. The blossoms barren—but not quite—because of the way he’s mixed in the seeds. The poem continues and finishes: the final eight lines to make fourteen, signaling a sonnet, and the rhyme scheme fits (ABAB CDCD EFEF GG). There’s such art in this—how he manages to stay within that structure and yet the rhyming doesn’t intrude in any way. There’s a sense of a voice speaking. And go along with you ere you lose sight Of what you came for and become like me, Slave to a springtime passion for the earth. How Love burns through the Putting in the Seed On through the watching for that early birth When, just as the soil tarnishes with weed, * The sturdy seedling with arched body comes Shouldering its way and shedding the earth crumbs. When I imagine Robert Frost himself as the speaker of the poem I also can’t help but think of him planting those seeds in the face of other burials. The poem, I believe, was published in Mountain Interval in 1920, which would have been well after the loss of both his parents and some sixteen years after his three-year-old son, Elliot, died of cholera, and some thirteen years after his daughter, Elinor, died at three days old. And maybe part of the reason love burns is because it’s a love that knows what can happen? I went looking for a poem about a seed and the potential for transformation and I was not at all looking for one about death and burial, but this is what I found, and now I am seeing the two mingled in a way I hadn’t before—like the white soft petals mingled with the seeds. Seeing that the one can be next to the other—the potential for transformation occurring next to loss, mingled with loss, and perhaps in the face of loss. I wonder if Mr. Frost ever thought of his poems as a kind of planting of seeds. _______________________________________________________ The poem...

Tuscany

Posted by Diane Morrow on September 2, 2011 in Uncategorized

Some years ago now, while staying alone in a cabin at Wildacres, a retreat center in the Blue Ridge Mountains, I had a dream about a former patient who I will here call Nora. In the dream I’d gone to visit her. There were several of us visiting, sitting on chairs and couches. She was presenting a slide show. I understood this was a slide show of places she’d been. When I woke, I had the sense, as one does sometimes after dreams, that I was meant to be paying close attention, but on first waking I couldn’t, for the life of me, remember any of the individual pictures. Nora was a teacher, fifty-seven years old, bright, very articulate. She had a PhD in art history, was conversant with entire centuries I know next to nothing about. She also had metastatic breast cancer. She liked, she told me once, to read Samurai novels, these novels, I learned, set in seventeenth century Japan. She told me that she liked the way the setting in these novels was inextricably entwined with the action, so that you were always acutely aware as you read of the slant of light in a particular scene and what flowers were blossoming, and whether, for instance, a particular petal had fallen. Nora, herself, was acutely aware of setting. She had a strong sense of aesthetics, a love of visual beauty. For several years she’d owned an art gallery in Manhattan. She’d come to North Carolina with her husband, taught art history at the School of the Arts here for several years, and then taught Language Arts in one of the middle schools, this until she got her diagnosis of breast cancer, and then got word that it had spread into the liver and into the bone. Two years prior to the dream in which she’d showed me her slides, she’d put no small amount of energy into planning a trip to Commonweal, a retreat center in Bolinas, California considered by many to be the premier cancer retreat center in this country, a stunning place located on sixty acres in the Point Reyes National Seashore. She was very much looking forward to it. But just a little over a week before she was to leave for Commonweal, Nora fell down in the driveway of her home and broke a vertebra, this landing her in the hospital and effectively canceling her trip. The next time I saw her she told me that she knew now that that had been her last window—her last chance to take a trip of this magnitude. Her belly by this point was swollen from the tumors that herd arisen in her liver. Her bones ached. She was, she told me, very very tired. But she also told me this. That not long after she broke her vertebra, and came to realize she was not going to make it to Commonweal after all, she had a series of dreams. These were dreams, she said, about places she’d traveled. Tuscany figured largely in one of them. When this series of dreams ended, she told me she understood now that all of the places were deep inside her, the memories, that she carried these places with her now, and it would no longer be necessary for...

Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv

Posted by Diane Morrow on March 9, 2009 in Uncategorized

A book about the healing and restorative effects of nature The thesis of this book is directed toward children. It combines research and speculation to argue that exposure to nature is essential for healthy childhood development and that many children now suffer from something Louv calls “nature-deficit disorder.” He makes a good argument. Including an argument that nature is not only important for children. One argument he makes is that many tasks we engage in have a tendency to deplete our resources for directed attention. That we, in turn, get something he calls “directed-attention fatigue”. He then goes on to argue that being out in nature restores this fatigue by offering us involuntary attention or fascination. Non-task-oriented experience. To cite just one piece of evidence, he reports on a study done in Sweden. Hartig asked participants to complete a forty-minute sequence of tasks designed to exhaust their directed-attention capacity. After the attention-fatiguing tasks, Hartig then randomly assigned participants to spend forty minutes ‘walking in a local nature preserve, walking in an urban area, or sitting quietly while reading magazines and listening to music,’ the journal reported. ‘After this period, those who had walked in the nature preserve performed better than the other participants on a standard proof-reading task. They also reported more positive emotions and less anger. Forty minutes in nature as an antidote to “directed-attention fatigue.” This sounds like good medicine to me. And now, with the beginning of spring—at least in my hemisphere—it would seem like the perfect time to try it...

from Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

Posted by Diane Morrow on March 2, 2009 in Uncategorized

A novel about loss and home Last week I wrote about the movie, Finding Forrester, and the notion of using someone else’s words to ease one’s way into writing. Borrowing another writer’s rhythms as a way of beginning. So this week I found myself looking for passages that are particularly evocative. This is such a personal thing—finding passages that resonate. Maybe each person has to search for themselves to find the right piece of writing from which to continue writing—or from which to leap. But here, in any case, are two passages that I found. They’re from Marilynne Robinson’s lyrical novel, Housekeeping. She is probably better known now for her more recent novels, Gilead, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005, and a kind of sequel to that novel, Home. In 1980 she published this brief novel, Housekeeping, about which Doris Lessing says on the cover, “I found myself reading slowly—this is not a novel to be hurried through, for every sentence is a delight.” It’s the kind of novel that makes me want to pay attention to paragraphs and sentences, to reread them, to linger over them. Copy them. Learn from them as I type them in. First, the place, from page 9: It is true that one is always aware of the lake in Fingerbone, or the deeps of the lake, the lightless, airless waters below. When the ground is plowed in the spring, cut and laid open, what exhales from the furrows but that same sharp, watery smell. The wind is watery, and all the pumps and creeks and ditches smell of water unalloyed by any other element. At the foundation is the old lake, which is smothered and nameless and altogether black. Then there is Fingerbone, the lake of charts and photographs, which is permeated by sunlight and sustains green life and innumerable fish, and in which one can look down in the shadow of a dock and see stony, earthy bottom, more or less as one sees dry ground. And above that, the lake that rises in the spring and turns the grass dark and coarse as reeds. And above that the water suspended in sunlight, sharp as the breath of an animal, which brims inside this circle of mountains. I love the sense of layers here. The layers of the lake, which fit well with a sense in this novel of layers beneath layers. The novel doesn’t so much move forward—though it does that too—but rather it lays down one layer upon another upon another. Here is a passage about the narrator’s grandmother, from the same page. A portrait: It seems that my grandmother did not consider leaving. She had lived her whole life in Fingerbone. And though she never spoke of it, and no doubt seldom thought of it, she was a religious woman. That is to say that she conceived of life as a road down which one traveled, an easy enough road through a broad country, and that one’s destination was there from the very beginning, a measured distance away, standing in the ordinary light like some plain house where one went in and was greeted by respectable people and was shown to a room where everything one had ever lost or put aside was gathered together, waiting. She accepted...

Finding Forrester

Posted by Diane Morrow on February 23, 2009 in Uncategorized

A movie about writing and transformation I don’t usually write about movies here but I stumbled across this movie last weekend and I find myself thinking about it this afternoon more than any particular piece of writing. The movie is about a young African-American man, Jamal Wallace (played by Rob Brown) who meets a reclusive writer, William Forrester (played by Sean Connery). It’s a feel-good movie, directed by Gus Van Sant, who also directed Good Will Hunting. (Personally, I like Finding Forrester better). The essence of the movie is this: Jamal meets William, they develop a mentor-student relationship, and both lives are changed. I won’t elaborate on the plot here, or give away the ending. I do think the movie is worth a look. Perhaps what’s most relevant here is a writing exercise that Forrester gives to Jamal. He sits the young man down at a typewriter and tells him to begin writing. Then Forrester waits. Nothing happens. No keys are clicking. Silence. Eventually, what Forrester does is to go get an old essay of his own and he tells the boy this (paraphrased from memory): Start with my words—type those—and then when you’re ready start typing your own. I like that a lot. That connection between reading and writing. Not just reading in order to begin writing—but actually beginning to take someone’s words on—at the level of the fingers—keying them in—and using that as a bridge into one’s writing. Choosing a passage that has the right rhythms—the rhythms one wants perhaps in one’s own writing—and beginning with those words. Hearing them in one’s head as one keys them in—and then at some point taking off on one’s own, like a swimmer going off into the water without being held up by someone else’s hands. It seems like such a simple idea, but I don’t think I’ve ever actually tried it. I think I...

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