I thought myself so much to the earliest leaf and the first meadow orchis — so important that I should note the first zeezee of the titlark — that I should pronounce it summer, because now the oaks were green; I must not miss a day nor an hour in the fields lest something should escape me.
Just a thought, nothing more.
More to come.
Keep it wild and simple
AnaKWildness
Here I am! Again after a while, but I’ve been quite (a lot) busy lately. What can I tell you? I came back from my first trip to the US on Monday. Normally you would have read something like “WOW AWESOME GORGEOUS GREAT AMAZING”. But that’s not the case. More than the usual trip that tourists do (and Italian tourists usually go to New York for five days and then they come back telling how cool the States are), I took a spiritual journey and I mean literally. I went there to take part in a conference, and that’s the first unusual thing of course. And I was scared of going, because I knew that the bubble of images and hopes and dreams that I’d been building around the US would have exploded. And it actually exploded, in many different ways. First of all, it’s a place full of contradictions. And it’s very different from Europe. It’s really ‘the other side of the pond’ for a reason. I feel that Americans think in a very different way in comparison to Europeans – despite different nationalities. I felt that they risk a lot, they care a lot about themselves, they are very self-focused, and they do not know much about ‘the other side’. They are also brave and reckless. They are very smart and they know how to obtain things, which is not bad at all, but they sometimes do it by knowing the right people. There were many things that I didn’t understand at all, such as constructing tons of independent wooden houses with their beautiful gardens but if you want to go to the supermarket to buy a damn apple you have to take your damn huge car.
But I’ve also discovered so many beautiful places and I’ve felt emotions so big that I couldn’t have ever imagined. For example, we went – finally – to Thoreau’s gravestone. That was the peak of the trip. We were there, in front of his tomb. I was there. It was truly unbelievable and I cannot even explain how I felt through words. Words are not enough to express the awe in front of him.
I felt so near that porous line between reality and dream and yet I felt also so sad. So sad in front of what the US have become in comparison to the awesome nation that Thoreau imagined. He already knew the dangers of his contemporary society, and our society is just the shitty result of what he had already understood. Capitalism. Buying and selling. Buying through loans. Buying more just to pretend to be happy, just to show off, just to seem like anyone else. What’s the point? What’s the point, he would ask. I’m sure. As I stood in front of him I felt so little and helpless, because I know that we could not fulfill his dream of a better future. As my boyfriend said, however, we must try to keep his message alive. We must learn from what he did in Concord, Massachusetts, and try to bring his message to our own home, being sort of ambassadors on his behalf. I felt I want to do more for him, to celebrate his greatness and the importance of Thoreau in my life. Because, as we all said during the conference, he changed so many lives and I was so happy to show to other people how he changed and he has been changing my own perception of things, of reality, of myself.
That’s my first happy thought about my trip to the US. More will be posted. As said, I think I’ve lots of things to think about, because it’s still too close in time to be truly understood. For the moment, that’s it.
Keep it wild and free
AnaKWildness
From The Journal by Henry David Thoreau, entry: January 30th, 1852
Do nothing merely out of good resolutions. Discipline yourself only to yield to love; suffer yourself to be attracted. It is in vain to write on chosen themese. We must wait till they have kindled a flame in our minds. There must be the copulating and generating force of love behind every effort destined to be successful. The cold resolve gives birth to, begets, nothing. The theme that seeks me, not I it. The poet’s relation to his theme is the relation of lovers. It is no more to be courted. Obey, report.
Though they are cutting off the woods at Walden, it is not all loss. It makes some new and unexpected prospects.
Some days are different. Some days should be different but they’re not. Some days you are just different. And yet, every day, despite external conditions and atmosphere, you think about just one thing. One thing. And you want it more than ever, because it is like to lover’s love and passion. The passage toward North. That ultima Thule, isn’t it, Annie Dillard?
You gotta hope. You gotta do your best, no matter what.
Keep it wilder and simpler
AnaKWildness
I walked, all one spring day, upstream, sometimes in the midst of the ripples, sometimes along the shore. My company were violets, Dutchman’s-breeches, spring beauties, trilliums, bloodroot, ferns rising so curled one could feel the upward push of the delicate hairs upon their bodies. My parents were downstream, not far away, then farther away because I was walking the wrong way, upstream instead of downstream. Finally I was advertised on the hotline of help, and yet there I was, slopping along happily in the stream’s coolness. So maybe I was the right way after all. If this was lost, let us all be lost always. The beech leaves were just slipping their copper coats; pale green and quivering they arrived into the year. My heart opened, and opened again. The water pushed against my effort, then its glassy permission to step ahead touched my ankles. The sense of going toward the source.
I do not think that I ever, in fact, returned home.
from Mary Oliver. “Upstream”, in Upstream, New York: Penguin Press, 2016. pp. 4-5.
Heading upstream, despite anything else.
Keep it wild and simple.
AnaKWildness
Gradually the village murmur subsided, and we seemed to be embarked on the placid current of our dreams, floating from past to future as silently as one awakes to fresh morning or evening thoughts.
from Henry David Thoreau, 1849, “Saturday”, in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
Keep it wild and simple
AnaKWildness
Things take the time they take. Don’t
worry.
How many roads did Saint Augustine follow
before he became Saint Augustine?
“Don’t Worry” by Mary Oliver, in Felicity.
Ci vuole il tempo che ci vuole. Non / preoccuparti. / Quante strade ha seguito Sant’Agostino / prima di diventare Sant’Agostino?
And I guess we all have to follow many roads, and yet our own roads, to find ourselves. Full and rounded. Like apples. So just follow the road you think it’s better for you. Don’t let them steal your dream. Look at the aim. Be confident. Believe in you. Believe in your future. Believe that something will happen. It’s all in your hands.
Gotta believe.
And don’t stop. RUN and FIGHT.
Keep it wild and simple.
AnaKWildness
La nebbia a gl’irti colli
piovigginando sale,
e sotto il maestrale
urla e biancheggia il mar;ma per le vie del borgo
dal ribollir de’ tini
va l’aspro odor dei vini
l’anime a rallegrar.Gira su’ ceppi accesi
lo spiedo scoppiettando
sta il cacciator fischiando
su l’uscio a rimirartra le rossastre nubi
stormi d’uccelli neri,
com’esuli pensieri,
nel vespero migrar.
“San Martino” – Giosuè Carducci
The perfect autumn poem.
The mist to the bare hills / as thin rain soars / and under the northwest wind / the sea howls and churns;
Yet through the hamlet’s alleys / from the fermenting barrels / the pungent scent of wines spreads / to cheer a soul up.
On burning logs turns / the spit crackling; / there stands the hunter whistling / on the doorstep to gaze
In the reddening clouds / at flocks of black birds, / like exiled thoughts / as in the dusk they flee.
Keep it wild and simple.
AnaKWildness
Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf’s a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.
So this is life, uh? A blink, a second, and then gone, forever. Yet, this is exactly why it is so sturdy and fragile at the same time, so tight to a branch and yet so volatile, so self-willed and so casual, like a leaf swept by the wind.
Keep it wild and simple.
AnaKWildness
“You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
They called me the hyacinth girl.”
– – Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
from “The Burial of the Dead” – The Waste Land (1922) by T.S. Eliot
It should speak for hours about The Waste Land. Too much to say, too much that this poem can tell us about our own human condition. Too much that it can tell about my own life, my own condition of feeling like a dried tuber, kept warm by the safety of winter and now in the middle of a damned spring. And maybe I should introduce better this poem, in order to give it the proper explanation it deserves. However, I do not feel up to, not today maybe, not even this week probably. I feel exactly in the same mood The Wast Land highlights, that sense of impossibility, that sense of being too much alive and fragile in order to cope with all your emotions, emotions that are bringing you down. Dead by water. Even though there are dried bones here and there, and you cannot gather them all together, you cannot recreate life out of a dried bunch of nothing. And you’ll end up feeling like her, the hyacinth girl who is coming back from a fresh rain in April, from the awesome hyacinth garden with her boyfriend, both wet and seemingly happy. And yet something is missing, it has always been so, we live in a nibbled world, and we are nibbled. Of course, the sheer fact of writing makes me a bit better than her, at least I can verbalize, I can speak. But my eyes are failing too, I can neither see nor understand, blind by my own wanting and needing. Neither living nor dead. And this is how the whole world is actually living, or dying, trying not to drown, because the whole world does not want to admit that we are all going down, in one way or another. No matter about economy or statistics or articles in newspapers. And down we went. And this has always been like this, and Eliot knew that, and we used to know that. However, it is almost impossible to admit to yourself that you are going down into the abyss, into the heart of darkness, because we still keep our eyes shut in front of the HORROR! …But the horror is here, it’s in us, it is in the article about a dead cat, killed by random people in the street, it is in the latest news about terrorism and deaths, it is in the evil nature of human beings, it is in every one, in our fears and in our feeling of constant failure. And it is rooted in society, a society that always asks for more, without giving you nothing, but a handful of dust.
Stop. I stop here. I should say more, but now I cannot. Not yet. Maybe later. I will return to my waste land, the desert full of dust of my mind, unreal city.
Keep it wild, if you can.
AnaKWildness
[…] And now I will tell you the truth.
Everything in the world
comes.
At least, closer.
And, cordially.
from “Where Does the Temple Begin, Where Does It End?” by Mary Oliver (in Why I Wake Up Early)
Yesterday I walked for an incredible amount of miles in a natural reservation by the lake. And I felt that if you really let the world comes closer, it will come, and cordially. As a yellow leaf casually falling on your path. As a cat sleeping in the dim light. As a great tit singing on a hidden branch. As a dead swan by the shore of the river, half eaten and half rotten, but still white as snow. Everything will come, it must come. The only thing we can do is be ready for it. It will happen. And you gotta believe.
Keep it stronger.
AnaKWildness
Essential Facts of Life 