 So, I think we'll go ahead, it's about five minutes late, that's, when do you start church? The service? We have many beginnings. Right on? Rocking hair test. Well, it's delightful to be here. Pong City is one of the sort of genius features of Montpelier and obviously Kellogg Hubbard Library does an incredible job of putting it together, but I think they also got clever or smart or whatever this year by doing a kind of open source and allowing people to bring projects or events to them, which is a great way of doing it, because I think they used to organize them and then somebody would complain, well, you choose me for anything, you know, or whatever. But they've done a great job and I think it's worked really well. Is that your feeling about it? I think people have been having a good time making connections. Yeah. I think people are meeting new people and talking about poetry and that seems great. Yeah, that's great. And Joan, we're delightful, delighted to be here. Thank you so much for allowing us to partner with the church. I have to say, as a congregational minister for years, my parishioners all suspected I was a Unitarian and they were pretty much right. That's my daughter and many of my grandchildren. And so this feels like very at home. I'd like to give a shout out to the library, Kellogg Hubbard Library, because there was a really good article in Tell Me the Bridge. Yeah, yeah. Really a couple page spread on the purpose and the offerings of poetry. So I think that was a great idea. So I think we're small enough for, let's just quickly introduce ourselves. Because this is a workshop type format and I'd love to do that. I'm George Long in our car, middle sex. And he's a poet. And a poet of poetry. A half Susan Sassman, also from middle sex, got her spouse and I'm like a poet appreciator. I'm Laura Goessler, also from middle sex. Wow. Interesting. We live on Culver Hill Road. I'm a retired UVM librarian and a beginning sort of aspiring poet. Right, your poet. Yeah, great. Wonderful. Hi, my name's Margaret. I actually live a bit south in Barnard, Vermont. Oh, great. And it's just, I actually just rented an office though in Montpelier. And I just kind of was looking for things to do and people to meet and see what it's like. And I enjoy poetry and spiritual things as well. Can you say your name again? Margaret. Thank you. I'm Sandra. I live in Montpelier. And I think poetry month is wonderful. Great. I'm Vita. I live in Worcester. And somebody said at a workshop that I can have a last week of reading that Sam read out that she was a closet poet. And I think it probably just describes me. I've been writing poetry since I was six. Well, you've got at least a foot out of the closet. But anyway, I'm looking forward to this and really happy to leave all of you. I'm Sam Stock, I'm a poet and a teacher at CCV. And a city councilor in Mary City. And just one re-election to the city councilor in Mary. I'm Casual Higgins. I'm a scholars' grandchild. I'm Ryan Higgins. I'm also a scholar here. Emily Higgins. And we all live in Waterbury. Gaia, currently from East Montpelier and also a poet. I'm Rocky. I live in Montpelier and was drawn in by the invitation to look at wonder as a marginalized experience. I'm Joan Javier Duval. I live in Montpelier and I'm the minister of this church. I'm really glad to have this workshop happening here. If you weren't going to, would you say a word about this person? Yes, about her recording. Do you want to introduce yourself? Yeah, I'm Finn Cook from Montpelier. I work for Orca Media. And I will be recording this wonderful meeting here. Great. And if anybody has any concerns about that? Just to be clear for everyone, to be posted on Orca Media. Okay. So it's, I don't know what I'm doing. I mean, I think, and I don't think there's any, and in a sense I maybe hope there isn't any really structured way that we think about wonder or awe. We could use that word just as well. And there is somebody who's out now talking about awe and got interviewed by Krista Tippett and the eight kinds of awe and stuff like that. I'm not going to do that. But that's not what I'm doing or here to do. Although it's useful. One of the things that this person does talk about is there are various vehicles through which we experience something that opens us up to something bigger than ourselves and somehow also grounds us in the sense of, oh, that's who I am. That's what I am. That's the way I want the world to be. And those are really the features of it that seem to me what I'd like to have a chance to talk with people about today. And I do think it's marginalized and channelized. Forgive me if this is offensive to anyone, but sometimes the Christian church has taken those mystical experiences and kind of standardized them. Okay, this is a conversion experience. And once you have this experience, you have come to the Lord and now you believe everything that the church says you should believe. And it's sort of like an access through that opening into something that's a little bit more restrictive and channelized or sometimes very restrictive and channelized. So the experience of wonder, we don't know how to deal with it. We don't think that we control it in the sense that, okay, Thursday morning I'm going to have this mystical experience or this great insight. So what I've done is just pick a bunch of poems, really just kind of a super, well not superficial, but just a quick run through my file of special poems. And so if anybody wants to read one of these at some point during the time that we're doing the readings, we can do that if you haven't brought something of your own. There we go. But I wanted to read the first one, which just by Derek Wolcott who was born and raised in St. Lucia and in Trinidad and then taught for years at Boston and Montenegro. But love after love, it's sort of somewhere in your pocket. Which packet's the love of body? No, I'm sorry, in the other one, the other. Second to the last page. The second to the last page, yes. And would anyone like to read it? I'd read it. Okay. Okay. Love after love, Derek Wolcott. The time will come when with elation, you will greet yourself arriving at your own door in your own mirror and each will smile at the other's welcome. And say, sit here, eat. You will love again the stranger who was yourself. Give wine, give bread, give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you. All your life whom you ignored for another who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes. Peel your own image from the mirror, sit, feast on your life. So one of the aspects of this is that poems about wonder usually just be a puddle of tears or often do that because there is some kind of trigger of, for me I think I describe it as recognition. It's like, oh, that's. And I think there's an element that I would call contradiction in wonder and that the experience of wonder contradicts our normal experience by opening up something that feels real in a way that ordinary life doesn't. And it contradicts that despair, the grumpiness, the horrible news, the pandemic, whatever, but it sort of says, oh no, there's something different. And the contradiction is in part where, for me, the emotions come forward. I'm going to tell the story of it. We watch, Susan gets me occasionally to watch The Finding Your Roots with, I mean, the cyst at this point in my life or any name of anything. And he had Angela Davis on and he did this interview, you know, but if you add, I don't know whether anybody has seen it, but he does this interview with. Basically, he tells the story of someone's life to them and reveals it in the, in this book that he's prepared for that. You wanted to say your name? My name is Sarah Bergeri. I apologize for being with you. Great to have you. And Angela Davis, you know, who we all knew as kids is, you know, wonderful, but very often very angry, radical. He discovers that one of the white men who, you know, probably forcibly had a relationship with an ancestor of hers, entitles her to be qualified for the daughters of the American Revolution. And for me, that was an amazing, and she smiled, she struggled, she said, oh my God. And then she said, I don't know, but my sense is that she said in a sense, okay, I'll take that. And then there's this way that she claimed, you know, her whole history and said, okay, that's a part of it. And it was, that was a moment for me of what I would call wonder. Anyway, that's a lot. Any comments or thoughts about, yeah, go ahead. For me, it was looking in my bathroom mirror. Yeah. I'm 81, and I was struggling when I turned 80. Uh-huh. I've got that coming up, so I'm waiting. You know, it was weird to be the same age as old people. That's not my life. I don't know where that's from, but it's a great life. But anyway, my grandmother would come to the bathroom every morning in that big mirror, well-lit. And I would just look at her, and I'm like, what? Because I look so much like her, that I didn't realize I looked like her. But suddenly I'm 80, and 81, and I'm her. You know, all the, anyway. And it was just, now it's wonder. Now it's like accepting. It was a journey to get there, but she kept showing up every morning. And I was like, Effie, come on. And this poem has the mirror in it too, right? Yeah, so that was big. So that's a great story. So the other thing I think I want to say is, this is, poetry doesn't have any monopoly on wonder. What I am saying is, I think it's actually a very useful way of finding access to it, and maybe an openness to it that some of the other modes of communication we get don't offer. I would say there are others. Music can turn you into a puddle, and the right words, and the right song, or just the right notes can do exactly the same. So there's no monopoly to poetry. But what I wanted to do is talk about poetry as one access to it. This is not about poetry and wonder equal each other, or this is the only way to get there, but it is sort of what we're looking at today. So the other thing I want to talk about briefly is that, as I've said, wonder gets used in different ways and gets abused or denied in different ways. So I wanted to read a couple of poems about my experience growing up as a pre-choice kid, as a minister, and then as someone who left the news. So that's sort of what I'm doing. I'm still going to do a little bit of that. Hope it's not too much, and we can stop after each poem and people can ask. So I'm going to start by reading Beloved Body. Our second spring in Hardwick, I was 16 and lusting hopelessly after Jackie LaCour. I wasn't supposed to fall in love with a Catholic because they'd make you raise your children for the Pope, my father said. So when I offered half joking, full of hope, to give back her pictures if she paid for each one with a kiss. And she said, yes, without hesitation, I panicked and sent them to her in the name. Every Sunday my father stood in the confidence of his black robe, poured the unction of his words over the congregation. I watched from the choir faces like familiar rocks along a shore, part waiting for, part submitting to the tide. His determined giving began three years before after the fire claimed our home. He started preaching like his father, steadily got mushroomed in our family, finally moving in like a determined aunt who used to visit only occasionally, but now had come to set things right. It was a weekend in that second spring. I was in the house alone. I woke, senses quickened, heart thrilled with an astonishing, astonished patience. A sweet taste haunted my mouth, fed me like no food I could remember. I knew for the first time I am at home in this beloved body. Knowledge, not insistence. Even sadness ruckled. My mind filled with promises, hands restless to rest, to bless. It stayed for days, still echoes. No name for such amazement so I called it love, clothed it in a white robe called conversion, which is the only category I had for whatever had happened to me. I don't remember the pictures clearly or how I got them black and white snapshots of girls I knew clowning at a slumber party. Jackie stopped me in the hall at school standing close to thank me for them. She smiled, said she wanted to be friends. Suddenly there was no danger. Taste of her lips, shape of her breasts went with her as she left. I began to think I could survive under cover of goodness. I felt the holy promiscuity of saints, a yielding, terrible and all-consuming that's both delight and subtle flight. That summer she went out with Anila May. It seemed like power to take fear, train it to be generous. They seemed to love me for it. It felt pure. I needed something pure. I never thought of it as sacrifice. For the first time I could taste the metallic residues of one. I don't know, it's sort of a complicated poem, but it's about how that experience for me, it was too big for me. I didn't know what to do with it. I didn't know how it fit into my life. Part of what I did was turn it into being a good person. And that seemed like a good way to survive in that environment. And I don't think there's a lot of virtue in that, although it's probably a better choice than some. But it did end up let somehow losing some kind of connection. And that's the only thing that I talk about. Any thoughts or anybody? Can you talk about the transformation of that experience into the poem that you shared? I think the way the poetry works for me, poetry is the way I process. So I wrote this poem originally, this poem is titled Conversion. And then I said, no it's not about conversion, it's about wonder. So it's a later life process of going back to an experience and reinterpreting it and doing it within the years that I've been working on this poem, which are not as many, it's quite a few, but not as many as my whole life. I don't know whether that's responsive. Do you talk about some of the structural choices you made in the poem? The poem was once much more structured and I broke it up, but that's something I've been doing with all my poems. Sort of, I'm giving up on commas, semicolons, you know. You go. We have line breaks and gaps, and I like capital letters and periods. So they're okay, they work alright. And then the placement tries to be open to just the rhythm of the thought and the language. Though I noticed for the first time in your reading this that the pauses were in different places than the flow of the reading. So just to notice that. So then I went off and went to seminary and got married and became a minister and was a minister for years. And this is a poem that there are many other poems in between which we will not inflict on you today. And this is called Comforter. And this is after I had rather dramatically left the ministry, left my marriage, didn't really leave my kids, but I think it felt like that for a long time. And this is called Comforter. And I was in a relationship with Susan. Across route 100 from the yellow barn and outbuildings that were once the dairy farm for the state psychiatric hospital, a cedar hedge guards Waterbury's graveyard. And I think now I clear it's the Catholic graveyard. I think the sign says that. I ask you to stop the car. It's midwinter, but I imagine a cluster of family and separated by the open grave, the one who by profession offers comfort. It's the moment after the last words have been said, the men who waited a distance leaning against the pickup truck, smoking cigarettes, shift at this pause, watch the living have a way. Their longhandled shovels can begin their work. I watch as they watch for my own distance. Every time I hoped the loveliness of grief might heal me, the sudden tumult of children's tears, old men crying with the ungainliness of buildings coming down. I held the fine tool of the ceremony in my hands, asking without asking. They left me with silence, taking their lives back home. Two, I remember the summer when this farm was still making milk for the hospital, thick cream for coffee, and work for the inmates. I was an intern anxious to help the unfortunate. What I learned was how to change bedclothes for the dying, to clean excrement gently from the folds of unsure wealth. One night on the admissions ward, I held a glass of water toward a man with eyes too wild ever to see. I learned to be almost good enough to quiet those wild eyes, to help the hand breach from its darkness toward the glass. And I learned the quiet bargain of insistent goodness, how it can only think of leaving when it believes its work is done. Yesterday, a streak of winter sun crept across our bed, I lay down in that sun and called to you from somewhere, you came and touched me. So that's about... It's a phenomenon that I don't think is familiar to everyone, but I think a lot of human service people end clergy like the insistent giving the giving yourself almost away and somehow losing yourself and just trying to come to terms with that and find that when I left the ministry, I suddenly could feel sadness. And I dealt with grief all the time, but I could feel sadness in a whole different way. The kind of priests who aren't allowed to marry or have relationships. It's difficult for me. Maybe if somebody chooses that, or chooses more open relationships or something like that, but yeah, it's very hard. I liked the phrase you used. The phrase you use that clergy and others who offer assistance often find themselves giving themselves away too much that they don't know themselves. Is that what you want to say? That's exactly right. It sort of goes back to that hint of the metallic taste even when I was a kid, when I started figuring out how to do this as a survival mechanism. And maybe that's because it is a bit of a survival mechanism. If you were constantly to feel that level of empathy and grief that you're trying to console people with in your role as a caregiver, it's kind of, well, I can look at the clergy around here. It's hard to maintain that level of intensity all the time. So I guess it kind of speaks to that question of still looking for yourself while giving yourself away. You can't stand up there and cry during the service. You're not welcome to ask. Or you can. You can. Wonderful respect. Wonderful. I did this more. Good for you. So, you know, we're working on it. I think you can do that kind of work and not give yourself away. I actually have boundaries that keep you sort of honest. And I'm not trying to make a general statement about public service or, you know, deep caring or professional helping relationships I'm talking about. But what I want to ask is for me, was where did the wonder go in this, you know, that experience of wholeness. So I have more. Were you going to say? No. I was raised Catholic. Well, I was raised Catholic. So it's kind of fun. It's just fun to be listening to. So what does it feel like? Oh, I don't know. I think the fall doesn't give me a lot of, there's so much ritual. For example, now I do spiritual healing and I work with ritual a lot still. So I think it instills that in me. I think there's a lot of problems. I don't go to church anymore as a Catholic. I also can't handle things like humanitarian services. I'm like, this is coffee hour. You know, like, you know, bringing in all the children stuff. So absolutely. And I hope the stuff about my father, you know what I'm saying. The rampant anti-Catholic stuff. And it did go both ways. But it was definitely Protestant judgment of Catholicism. And I didn't mean that to be a recording of some kind of truth. My family upbringing. Yeah. I'd suggest maybe just read either when we talk with God or Poem of the World. Yeah, I'm not going to read all of this yet. So, I'm going to read the Poem of the World, which, you know, we'll get back to that. This is a poem I've worked on again and again and again. This, I think, is sort of the clearest statement of where that sense of wonder has evolved into something that is almost a daily experience. So that's what I... Maybe that's where it wants to go and what it should be. I'm not telling anybody what it should be. The Poem of the World reveals itself like a dose of tapping ice till she can drink. Startles like a rust of purple on this falls for Cynthia Leaves, though it may have used that small voice every year unheard. Blinks like red and blue potatoes dug this morning drying in the sun, testing their startled, untrained eyes. It's the unexpected tickle, the fit of shared laughter in our urgency of touching that becomes another way of making love. It's an ocean beach of pebbles that suddenly starts singing each stone its own tink together, a glorious, indifferent song. And it's the voice of each bird I have only heard as morning chorus, landing with its own song and bright, perfect body in my brain. It is even, now I begin to see them, the subtraction of birds, taking summer with them too busy to announce they're leaving. The poem of the world wants me to wake in my own body. It is astonished I might let these supple bones grow brittle. It is the sudden thing I trust. So, that's it, the other poems are there we can get to them, but I do want time for people to share. So, thoughts at this point? I'm still thinking about a minister's comic and that's like, what? That's just so different the way I was raised. It would have been nice to sit in that church. Yeah, yeah. Scatter something I've noticed in the poems you shared is how embodied they are and how I think for me, wonder and awe and I was raised Catholic had a much more disembodied kind of quality. And even though like, I think Catholicism and even Christianity is like what a fleshy religion literally of the flesh focused on this person. However, wonder and awe as an embodied kind of emotion and quality something that for me came later in life. But it's so alive in your poems just how incarnated they are. And like in the last poem the part of it that actually struck me the most was about just the detail of holding the glass of water toward the man and the eyes. And so I just really appreciate how this role and embodied your communication and expression of wonders. I do think Christianity often purports to be about the flesh about our bodies and our presence and our humanity. But it also rigorously abstracts and virtue becomes not the details of connecting and being intimate but some abstraction about what's good. And I won't speak for other traditions. I think Mary to someone who's Jewish I find Susan's sense of family healing and restorative to me in that sense of intimacy and history and cherishing ancestors and stuff. I wasn't raised to be good at that. I have a number of these poems here but do people anyone who's brought something that they'd like to share that sort of expresses their sense of wonder or you can just tell stories too. I don't know if this is really a poem but it does raise a couple questions for me. And you'll see what they are in just a moment. This is something Vermonters can relate to it's called Birches. You live out in the country many people here do middle sex. Birches. If you want to close your eyes just for a second the sun catches the birches even for a moment that drab winter day just melts away their paper bark a canvas for your thoughts and visions here in this darkest time of year branches gleaming white dazzling bright in contrast to her neighbors whose stalwart evergreen spikes last throughout the year and deck our halls with Christmas cheer. Stop here it's a haiku or go on. Along with our thoughts powered outage from the storm deep reflection brings protection remembering what we've heard from those who know the word pure silence within we begin again freed of expectations we make new relations with ourselves and those we value regardless of where they are what culture they represent fellow creatures worthy of respect then bird flies by above the tree interrupting reverie. So the question is was I better off stopping at the haiku point which was way up there or was it helpful to get to the end and so that was one question so I'll stop right there. And there's obviously a correct answer. Really I guess depends so right but in your experience as poets anybody? Just sort of I like that you had us close our eyes it was easy to get lost in the sounds and the rhyming I would like to see it written I think that would help me. Yeah it would be interesting to juxtapose those two experiences but I love the cadence of your reading as well. And that's actually my other question is that I tend to write on my phone and then it goes fast and then I'm like well that's so fast and everybody keeps giving me books that are empty pages for telling me to write down and I don't have time so I guess that's the question. And then you go give me your phone. It is so fast and I can edit it so quickly so I don't know that's probably my second question. I really like that you had embedded a haiku in another poem. I thought it was a poem. That wasn't intentional it was really me saying hey should I stop here? I think it's nice that it keeps going. It's like Tonkas that has a haiku at the end except here's a second beginning. Right. There's a Megan O'Rourke poem that when I first read it I gasped at the ending like you know I read a lot of poetry it doesn't happen that often. I thought it was an incredible she does this incredible shift at the end I was trying to find it well that's not going to work because I can't remember the title. Megan O'Rourke is her first book Half Life and there's a poem midway in Half Life that just went It was such an extraordinary revelation the way she shifted in that poem because I also think I worked a lot in human services which I have to say was pretty traumatizing but I was you know mostly it was grim and all the statistics about you know if you grow up in poverty and your father has a drug problem and you know all these things okay it'll affect your future in this way but so I teach at CCB and I had this kid in my class well he's not a young adult in my class and he was talking we'd like to change your perspective he was talking about his his experience being in foster care and I thought that's a really familiar story I think I must have known him when he was young and sure enough so what was great was that you know the likelihood of you being in foster care and even making it through high school radically reduces right but here he was not only had he didn't make it through high school but now he's in college he got a place to live which is not easy he was getting help raising his family and I was just like that's wonderful that's about the human potential that you know you can lose if you read all the research you'll lose your wonder of what can happen in people's lives and I also want to say thinking about ministers are not supposed to cry teachers are not supposed to cry or smile and I used to teach in New York City and I was pretty good about the no crying but on September 11th the principal read this loudspeaker thing about people who had died like in our building and I cried and I was like what do you expect like don't do that in the middle of the school day so yeah teachers also human services and not supposed to show them options I was doing a workshop and I started talking about this family and I could feel a tear start and I thought let's back away from that one but it is hard you talked about wonder contradicts um and I think this is I think sometimes I think wonder can be marginalized because it contradicts and you're not supposed to cry and you're not supposed to smile and you're not supposed to um you have these big emotions in the context of our very formal systems that are supposed to perform the tasks um and even in listening to the poem about that that with the haiku it reminds me of my own experience of being in the woods and not being certain like well should I should I turn back now and go to the meeting should I stay out should I see what's over that next ridge and so the yeah um I'm really enjoying listening to these experiences that I've been sharing wonder is disruptive to systems and maybe there should be more wonder in our systems there's room for improvement but it also makes sense to me in a different way today why my own experiences of wonder were squelched like stop experiencing wonder we have places to go and stop asking me those difficult questions um um we have feelings that we need to manage that's the word we've managed the frost poem stopping by a woods on the snowy evening is a little bit I mean that may be why it kind of resonates as deeply as it does you know why so many people but I have promises to keep in my house to go before I sleep and Robert Frost also has a birches poem yeah oh he does yeah I was wondering yeah any others Susan? yeah I'm going to read a poem this is Grace Paley's posthumously published collection and I'm going to try to read it without crying because every time I read it I'll write it but you don't have to but I may not have to and it's a isn't sort of Sarah so this is called my sister and my grandson I've been talking to my sister she may not know she's been dust and ashes for the last two years I talk to her nearly every day I've been telling her about our new baby who is serious, comical, busy, dark my sister out of all the rubble and grit that is now her my sister mutters what about our old baby he was smart, loving, so beautiful yes yes I said listen just last week he stopped at just last week he stopped at my hallway door he saw your small Turkish rug he stared at it he fell to his knees his arms wide crying genie, oh my anti genie remembered her heart whisper came to me thank you Grace now speak to him tell him he's still my deepest love so it's interesting how it's nature it's human interactions it's all kinds of contexts but I think one aspect of it is it's almost all the specific for me it is it's the specific the generalizations usually don't get me unless they're really big enough well it's the surprise that's the surprise I mean that's what in that poem for me it's the surprise of the surprised connection that people have whether you're alive or dead or you know that's the wonder but to your point too about it being specifics it's like you're seeing things differently all of a sudden all of a sudden there's ordinary things you're seeing something different in them seeing them differently or something like that that brings on this sense of wonder that just maybe wasn't there in the moment before absolutely I see that in your poetry a fair amount other people yes Sarah you can go first what? my wife had a just recently a 100 year old great uncle not uncle but great uncle your grandmother's brother and just recently she's in her 70s it was a sense of wonder to have this person still living since she was a little kid so he sent out blowouts of people who had visited him during his 100th year and he put them back to date Cynthia and me and our dog and him have a good life and then soon after that his daughter Cynthia's second cousin called and said that he was starting to fade she said we'd better come over it was just over in New Hampshire so we got there he died 10 minutes before we got there and his grandson weeping his daughter was there and there was a sense of wonder that he was dead now he had just died that he had lived 100 years and done this fair well mainly not just to us but to many people that's interesting as far as almost unknowing other part of this person which is again quite amazing Sarah? I have two, they're very short and I should say I grew up in the northeast kingdom which has inspired a great appreciation of nature in a sense of wonder so the first one is short and the second one is a little longer and this is actually about East Hill Road we've got some middle sex people amphibian migration, Vermont headlights cut through twilight on a mud dirt road picking out wood frogs bellies bared towards home wet white prowls of small damp boats are sailing through the puddles stiff backed with hope that's almost tight I'm losing my prescription glasses in a lake in Vermont in August and sitting on an islet waiting for my cousin to canoe back with other prescription glasses the glass raft carrying my seeing sank bore all perception to the depths of the lake my double-crossed eyes are crooked turned away from sun's white flipper burn water skews up a flat-papered wall where snakily silver wavewoods crawl now the loons have looped three times since my second sight went down so I latch one lid and wait that's great I can't relate to both of them going well that feels very visceral yeah this is asking my son, my grandson, that I said what is the amphibian crossing? like, where is it? I have the papers for the first time today oh yeah if you're on front porch forum in many pounds in Vermont, you get the notices about any other poems? John, did you have anything you wanted to do? um no pressure? I wanted to read a book oh actually I was just thinking about wonder and talking about books who are the ministry teachers human services and how exhausting it certainly can be but I remember having done some human service work yourself oh of course my hope, yeah but I was thinking about the times that people that I was there to support to be the duper that brought me wondering there was a young woman she was around 19 who had never lived independently she lost her mother, her aunt and her grandmother in a horrible tragedy and her mother had actually been her guardian as well graduated from U-32 but never learned to read or write so she was really vulnerable anyway we were driving down the road and once again trying to find a home for her she started taking phone calls on herself from her mother who had just died this tragedy several days before and at first I was like no, this is crazy and then the sense of wonder came over me, my gosh she's talking with her mother and that is real and it was sometimes often as I got further on in the decades of my work I hoped for to be open to that and I hadn't ever thought of that until we discussed the wonder so sometimes it isn't and I think important to be open to the wonder of learning that we gain from that intimate connection with someone who has great need and to stay with that rather than think of ourselves as doing good right there's a line from Carole says if I should see a man coming towards me to do me good I should run as fast as I can I'm so really happy but I did bring out the poem of James Crews it's in the anthology of Home City and it's in pursuing a title awe and I did my homework I looked up in Webster the definition of wonder and awe and all that but anyway James does a much better awe it's a shiver that climbs the trellis of the spine each tingle of bright white morning glory breaking into blossom beneath the skin it can happen anywhere anytime even finding the sleeve of ice worn by a branch all morning now fallen on a bed of snow you can choose to pause pick it up hold the cold thing in your hand or not she would tell us that wonder and awe are decisions we make daily hourly minute by minute in the tiny offices of the heart tilting the head to look up at every tree turned into a chandelier by light striking ice in just the right way I thought that was an apt awe and totally what we've been talking about do you know where that's posted is that in the in the current Home City where's that posted I thought you'd take my grandson by that in the window where is it where is it actually posted in the store you can look them up James Cruz C-R-E-W-S and where is James the location is I can't I thought in that we can get but if you go on the website okay C-R-E-W-S thanks did you find it are there others James James she was one where it's physically posted you know it doesn't tell it doesn't find the website yeah um I'll share something I've noticed with a lot of what people share there's a lot of wonder and the transition between life and death family members there's 27 states dreaming go ahead yeah no I just think and they saw me I'm actually pregnant with my first baby and that's then seeing it on the ultrasound that was like oh my god like moving and like little being and it's like wow just really knocked me soft soft yeah and going with the discussion about specifics you can't get much more specific than that yeah so um I wanted to read one poem that's in this by Lucille Clifton who is just just astonishing where what or somebody else can be I'll read it cutting rooms curling them around I hold their bodies in obscene embrace thinking of everything but kinship collards and kale strain against each strange other away from my kiss making hand and the iron bed pot the pot is black the cutting board is black my hand and just for a minute the greens roll black under the knife and the kitchen twists dark on it's and I taste in my natural appetite the bond of live things everywhere what I love about this poem is her own experience of her own blackness and that is the way into the glory of the world and then the gift of sharing it in a poem so that not black you get to go there too you know and that just feels like that kind of opening that you know I don't know that doesn't happen a lot we don't we're not doing a lot of that we're not finding that kind of opening for each other and in each other so that's what blew me away about the poem and when I mentioned it Joan said this is one of your favorites I I think we have to close fairly soon I wanted to read one other so what I would say is all the things that make wonder seem exceptional or marginal or inaccessible bullshit it's what makes us a lot you know it's sort of the bedrock it's not it's not like this strange place you go to and I think about what do we need to survive you know the human destruction that we're we're all aware of and living with and it feels like it's more than goodwill it's more than it's not that it isn't these things but it's goodwill it's new strategies but it's so much more it's a shift much deeper and different than that and I suspect this has something to do with it so this poem I read is by William Meredith and it's called The Illiterate and I read this poem and then it hit me I liked it and then it hit me once and then it hit me again so I'm just going to offer that does somebody want to read this okay touching your goodness I am like a man who turns a letter over in his hand and you might think this was because the hand was unfamiliar but truth is the man has never had a letter from anyone and now he is both afraid of what it means and ashamed because he has no other means to find out what it says than to ask someone his uncle could have left the farm to him or his parents died before he sent them word or the dark girl changed and want him for love it afraid and letter proud he keeps it with him what would you call his feeling for the words that keep him rich and orphan and beloved it feels to me like this obviously that's the experience of someone who might be illiterate so at the surface level that's obvious but what struck me about the poem touching your goodness is what it starts with and so it's something about not knowing how to come to terms with someone else's goodness and being illiterate in some sense about that which just feels like a very good the man doesn't actually exist the man is in his imagination he's just like this character there's no actual illiterate person right and what it seems to me to me to be talking about is when I think about it in the context of what we're talking about with wonder that goodness that we encounter with wonder is like we don't know what to make of and I think we feel sometimes illiterate and we sort of hold the letter of experience and you never open it it says though awe and wonder are a highly suspicious act we don't trust it I have a sense that in our culture it's not so permissible to express wonder and awe where we are in this particular world right now so he grabbed it one with the beautiful beautiful and I think about Robin Walkimer and a tradition that's grounded in gratitude that's not really what my tradition is grounded in it's grounded in salvation from what? I struggle with that it's interesting our culture is afraid in many ways of in fact wonder and awe it doesn't know how to deal with it or quote somebody said manage it I thought that was well said but we also in some cultures especially the idiot savante the idiot savante that rain man and other cultures too there's this element of worship not worship is not quite the word but I don't know what the right word would be welcoming and honoring giving a special place to those that exhibit extraordinary qualities which we don't understand and can't really maybe accept it's quite interesting the whole savante idea in our culture some of this is touching on that on that level perhaps makes us uncomfortable that whole contrary this so any that we're really at our time and I thank everybody for being here any last final comments thank you very much thank you John for hosting this welcoming us here the fireplace without the fire is just the right has enough wood fires for this year