Emily Brisse

Friends, tomorrow is June. June! Which means the students I didn't teach these past months are celebrating their freedom, the crab apple blossoms I blinked and missed this year are ripening into fruit, the thunderstorms I love — the big and juicy ones — are crackling on the horizon, and I must sneak in one more post before spring turns to summer, if only to share a few green-season quotes with you from Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden. Quite by chance, it was the first book I read after Elliot was born, and I can't imagine I'll ever forget that serendipitous match. I read this story of Mary and Colin and Dickon when I was a young girl, of course, but I had forgotten how much truth swirls off every page. There were grand intentions of writing an essay about it, or at least a poem, and sharing that with you all, but instead I have become a master at the art of clipping small fingernails and mining out ticklish spots between the delicious rolls of my son...

   

  What do you think: Would Henry have said the same thing about running (or biking )? That an early morning run  was a blessing over the whole day, too? For some reason, I have a hard time picturing HDT up-and-downing and huffing-and-puffing next to Walden Pond, a fine sheen coating his brow and collecting on that fine, fine beard. Still, I imagine were he with us this morning, taking in a September dawn such as this, he would have laced up his worn-in boots and greeted the day, heart pounding.

"For a year or two I had been looking at trees, fields, landscape with a secret, strong exaltation. In some moods, some days, I could feel for a clump of grass, a rail fence, a stone pile, such pure unbounded emotion as I used to hope for, and have inklings of, in connection with God." -- From Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro

"I used to come out on winter nights, when the sky was heavy with stars. The shadowy trees, dignified and knowledgeable, seemed as much a part of the heavens as of earth, and I'd get the feeling that it wouldn't take much of anything to step into the blackness of the sky, that there wasn't any magic to becoming a part of it." -- From A Map of the World by Jane Hamilton

"There is a privacy about [winter] which no other season gives you.... In spring, summer, and fall people sort of have an open season on each other; only in the winter, in the country, can you have longer, quiet stretches when you can savor belonging to yourself."  -- Ruth Stout

  "In a world where change seems the only constant, where the past is increasingly suspect and the future ever more doubtful, it is exhilarating to be in touch with something that 'binds together all humanity--the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.'" -- Paul Gruchow quoting Joseph Conrad From Travels in Canoe Country

Hello Bill. When I mention your name in Minnesota, there are always some folks who start to cry. And it's not because you poked fun at their habits or told the truth (often the same thing). It's because they loved you . They loved your writing, yes, but they also loved you. Who you were. As I've held your books this past year, I've turned to your picture on jacket covers and book backs, and it seems there was always a mass of hair, a deep beard, warm sweaters. Just from this, I think, had I known you I would have loved you, too. But I didn't know you, so I must send these little claps to where they will flitter through the  grasses and occasional treetops around both Minneota, Minnesota, and Iceland, two places you loved specifically and with tender detail, two places that felt the force of your intuitive pen.  When I went to my bookshelf of college texts and took from it  The Music of Failure , I had memories of my own grumblings, of immature reluctance and bore...

Hello, Paul. I've been wanting to sit down and talk with you for some time now. I opened up Worlds Within a World  last summer, and then Travels in Canoe Country,  and then Journal of a Prairie Year  and  Grass Roots. When I began The Necessity of Empty Places  I already knew I'd agree with you, even though I'd find myself continually surprised by what you had to say. So it goes with kindred souls. And I don't think you'd mind that I claim that. Other people and other places can tell your story better than me, so I'll let them. But I think it's important that I point a few other thinkers to your message. We are all so busy. It's good, before the leaves change this Autumn, to remind ourselves to slow down. "I accept, when I am in the woods, the idea that I do not completely command my life. To venture into a wilderness is to submit to the authority of nature. This may also seem a regression — adults command, children submit — but it is actually ...

"Remember, the only thing that matters is you're alive on earth." Mary Ruefle  said this within the first moments of my most recent writing workshop, and amid all the insights both she and fellow advisor  Larry Sutin  offered in our time together, this aphorism has clung the most to my daily breath.  "Remember," even though you're distracted by bills and busyness, by the laundry and lack of rice and the text-spam to delete, by the disappearance of summer heat, by the effort it takes to maintain trust,  "the only thing that matters," even though you make lists that read pay electric, garbage out, change filter, fold clothes, buy rice, block spam ,  BELIEVE in your work,  even though there is so much to do before Sunday, before the snow flies, before you get old, (the only thing) "is" (as in being  /   will you  just be ) "you're alive on earth," a place you love, a place that loves you back, and an experience—life—tha...

. As evidenced by many of the poems collected in Silence in the Snowy Fields ( 1962), Robert Bly looked toward the landscapes of Minnesota and often saw: Cornfields, cornstalks Catholic churches Box-elder trees, box-elder bugs Prairie grasses Chickens' eyes Dust Barns Norwegian immigrants Alfalfa fields Crickets Turkey sheds Telephone poles Corn stubble Perhaps not the most romantic list. And yet, the verses he called "Love Poem" go like this:       "When we are in love, we love the grass,      And the barns, and the light poles,      And the small mainstreets abandoned all night."  And to me, this seems exactly, simply, accurate . When we love — whether a person or a place — there is possibility for beauty in everything.

"Beneath the waters, since I was a boy, I have dreamt of strange and dark treasures, Not of gold, or strange stories, but the true Gift, beneath the pale lakes of Minnesota." -- Robert Bly From "After Drinking All Night"