Posts tagged with "preparation"

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Snow Man

In preparing for the next phase of the Natural Change Project, the residential in Glen Prosen, I realise I have been in defensive mode: planning to protect myself against the elements, layering up against the cold and insulating myself from all real and, fuelled by the many recent TV programmes about life in the Arctic, imagined privations. Coming across this poem has given me a different perspective. I don’t completely understand it but it seems to say something about extending our boundaries into the natural environment, shifting  in and out of the ego perspective. It reminds me that we are both part of and separate from the natural world and the realisation again that nature is always there, irrespective of us. A useful preparation, as well as the thermals and flasks. 

Snow Man
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Wallace Stevens
– from Harmonium , 1923