The Swifts Preach to St. Clare
“Peace Comes from Dropping Slow”
“A Glimpse of the Underglimmer”
“Things I Didn’t Know I Loved”
Introduction •
These poems are invitations.
When I long for expansiveness and connection to something far greater than my own daily concerns and struggles, a walk by the sea or in the forest expands me.
We live in a time when Earth is threatened on so many fronts by human development. Slowly we seem to be awakening to the truth that our personal well-being is intimately woven together with the well-being of all creatures and plants. Many of us might have been taught by our religious traditions that humans have dominion over nature or that animals don’t feel pain or have souls.
The more we cultivate our own intimacy with the wild, the more we open to different truth. Wildness doesn’t mean we have to go out into the forest or travel long ways; the wild is a place within us.
Each poem here is a doorway into this inner wilderness, a call to sit and be present to what we discover beyond the borders of our neatly controlled worlds. Wildness is vulnerable,