"W" is for "A Wild, Kind Wonder"
and I fell away blind, into a softer knowing
(--Annie Lighthart, “Fluency”)
I had been looking forward to hearing poet Annie Lighthart read from her new book of poems, Pax, having loved her earlier collection, Iron String. I’m also a fan of the poetry series that was hosting her reading this past March: the long-running Milwaukie Poetry Series hosted by the Ledding Library in Milwaukie, Oregon.
What I didn’t expect was to fall so much in love with the poems in Pax, and by way of them to fall freshly into love with the world through their eyes of wonder; a world which the poems in Pax apprehend and reveal as being itself animated by a great, wild goodness in which we wildly participate.
So I’m going to share several of the poems in their entirety, to let them speak for themselves (though not without some reflections of my own along the way!), since that’s how they spoke to me.
In particular, I suspect that Pax’ deep resonance for me has something to do with the ways the poems repeatedly perceive and reveal ‘wildness’ and ‘goodness’ not as opposing forces, but conjoined ones, and in their conjoining, to reveal the essential nature of Good itself, of Love; here (below) in its manifestation in a kindness which is itself wild.
This is a great, wild goodness that does not exclude darkness; it is a goodness, in fact, of which darkness is a part: a wild darkness, with stars right over our heads.
A wild goodness through which even ‘peace’ is understood not to involve any stilling of wildness, nor involving an absence of conflict, but (in the title poem, below) appears instead as a frame.
Peace was the shore, it was deep in the world
Another: 
Contemplating the immediate, deep and persistent effect on me of Fluency alone, I see that it meets that place-within that understands my own deepest aliveness to be grounded in and dependent on an openness (for me is characterized by curiosity and vulnerability) that creates and refreshes my capacity for wonder.
And I felt how wonder itself is that: a kind of softer knowing, direct and at-one-with.
Then yesterday, as I took a break from working on this post, in one of those itself-wondrous experiences of synchronicity, I picked up Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic (a treatise on what Gilbert calls “creative living” that I had been meaning for some time to get around to actually reading), and was confronted with the passage (in italics) below.
The unchecked ego, Gilbert asserts (with its manifestations in greed, self-righteous judgement, envy, defensiveness, impatience, etc),
is what the Buddhists call ‘a hungry ghost’— forever famished, eternally howling with need and greed.
In contrast, Gilbert writes,
my soul desires only one thing: wonder. And since creativity is my most efficient pathway to wonder, I take refuge there, and it feeds my soul, and it quiets the hungry ghost—
I can always steady my life once more by returning to my soul. I ask it ‘And what is it that you want, dear one?’
The answer is always the same. ‘More wonder, please.’
(—Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic, p. 250)
***In the spirit of which, one final poem from Pax, with its reminder that there are other ways to live…
Wonder, interested and unafraid. And so wildly good, and kind.
More, please.
***
Postscript
As it happened, I was scheduled to follow Annie Lighthart’s March reading at the Milwaukie poetry series with my own in April. I’d already pretty much assembled the poems I’d planned to read for mine, which sequence I immediately abandoned after listening to Annie’s, in favor of a more joyful, playful, curious and grateful selection— the kinds of poems I realized that I, at least, need to be listening to these days, and for, much more.
***
Take a Line for a Walk
Then watch the way it wonders
on its own, set free
to brave the breezes, bruises
freezing rains. Some groves
of trees give shelter for awhile
then set it free—
There’s so much
matter in the world to see
and hear, all matière and
thought is part of that
and songs a plain of pleasing
noise a haze of breath
a blaze a hose a crazy
quilt of noise (—you
already said ‘noise’)
So what? A word can
show up twice, this is
my walk not yours
(—okay, you’re on
your own again, line)
Thank you. Where
was I? Blue glow
then a peachy gleam a
bird flies low above
the pond your oatmeal
in this ringing bowl
is one bite short of
gone (and now a pause
as sunrise breaks over
the hills beyond except
it doesn’t pause exactly:
watches still and still
in motion both and—
Can you feel that?
Yes? This full attention
that’s vibration also
its electrons zinging
back and forth inside
the void that isn’t void
at all in fact is ferment
foment, degradation,
zingy things that aren’t
yet ‘things’ until they
matter as a line out
walking on its own in
how it wonders in
and out of things
with perfect ease
makes matter
matter more.
—Donna Henderson
(Title is a quote from artist Paul Klee)
***
Thanks to Annie Lighthart for her permission to reproduce images of several poems from Pax in this post.
More about Annie and her wildly good poetry (including links for ordering her books) can be found on her website . And because the Ledding Library in Milwaukie records and archives all the readings in the Milwaukie Poetry Series, you can watch/listen to hers from March, 2024 on YouTube, here.
***