Transcript
A (0:05)
I'm Major Jackson and this is the Slowdown. I invited a friend out of town to join me on a hike. I was going on the Long Trail in Warren, Vermont. I live in a forest. Taking a walk is courteous. The invitation from me is slightly expected of those who visit. He looked skeptically and said, you do know I'm from the Bronx? I said, and he said, we don't do nature. I said, maybe it's time. And that's not true. There's the Bronx Park. Too many mosquitoes and spiders. Plus, he said, walking past strangers wigs me out. I was going to leave the conversation there, but then he asked, why do you love the outdoors? The question felt confrontational, like the time my co worker's husband at a party asked, what's with the birds? When he learned I was traveling to watch a massive migration on the southern coast of Alabama. In those moments I become unsettled. How do you discuss a space that is like a personal cathedral? I wanted to speak to the physical and emotional benefits, but that feels too much like pitching a free health checkup in the woods. Instead, I told them how I hear myself better in the forest, that my mental clutter gives way to an exceptional quiet, to a probing for traces of life beneath the ferns, along the forest floor, in the green shadows. I love the calls and trills of warblers and rose breasted grosbeaks, the rushing sound of a brook over stone, the irrational belief, some might say, of connecting with something larger. I start off sometimes in a spiritual crisis but walk out spiritually cleansed. For this reason the natural world over the years has become my life saving talisman. I feel an altering by degrees in the outdoors, whereas it is more difficult for me to encounter the sublime elsewhere, my mind fragmented by all my devices, notifications, mental buzzing and crowded thoughts. Like the speaker in today's poem, I find appreciation for any vestige of the natural world and large cities, those unexpected places that take me out of myself and land me into molecules of existence. The Trees by Jericho Brown in my front yard live three crape myrtles, Crying trees, we once called them, not the shadiest, but soothing during a break from work in the heat, their cool sweat falling into us. I don't want to make more of it. I'd like to let these spindly things be, since my gift for transformation here proves useless now that I know everyone moves the same, whether moving in tears or moving to punch my face. A crepe myrtle is a crepe myrtle. Three is a family. It is winter they are bare it's not that I love them every day it's that I love them anyway the Slowdown is a production of American Public Media in partnership with the Poetry Foundation. This project is also supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. On the web at. To get a poem delivered to you daily, go to slowdownshow.org and sign up for our newsletter and find us on Instagram @downdownshow.