Transcript

I’m Ada Limón and this is The Slowdown.

No matter how I look at it, this fall is about new beginnings. Students are going back to school and my friends who are teachers are starting their year at the front of the classroom. For me, I will begin my tenure as the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States. Like anyone starting something new, I am nervous, I hold my fear gently and try to remember the phrase, “Fear is excitement without the breath.” Which inevitably reminds me…to breathe.

When I feel myself getting off-kilter or feel myself spiraling into thinking about all the things that could go wrong, all the ways I could mess up my life, I think about the ground beneath me. That may sound strange, but once, when I was nominated for a book award in 2015, I was suddenly inundated with attention by the likes I’d never seen before. I was overwhelmed and elated, but also at a loss as to how to respond to everyone, how to rise to this occasion.

That same day, I got an email from a poet friend and mentor who had once won this particular award. She told me to wake early before I left for New York and walk in the grass and whisper to all my ancestors. And I did. And then I felt grounded again, or some version of grounded which is a little off kilter but, somehow, exactly how it should be, too.

Another friend gifted me a small pendant with a glass bottle to wear around my neck. It held earth from Kentucky and since then I’ve added in sand from Herring Cove in Cape Cod and dirt from Sonoma, California. A little grounding right there around my neck when I need it. A little reminder that the earth is with me and I am with it.

All these rituals are still with me. Just today, as I began to think about what my term might look like as the Poet Laureate, I began to feel the earth beneath me, the limestone aquifers of Kentucky, the roots of the hackberries and maples and mulberries, the mushrooms, all that life underneath me, supporting me. It is this image that I will carry now, the ground connected, the power of the great underneath, just allowing me to be where I am, reminding me that whatever happens, I am only a small part of this great and generous earth.

Today’s poem celebrates the connection between the human being and the planet. I love how this poem is offering something back to the earth that offers the gift of a fortifying breath.

My Rock
by Pat Mora

              Summer’s ending.

I sit on my desert rock, listen
              to the world’s hum.
                           Crows and ravens caw,
finches and sparrows chirp. A dog barks.

                Can I face
                            the halls of judgments?

A breeze strokes my face,
              brings me back to spiders
and lizards busy at theirs chores,
              private conversations—
sights and sounds I savor.
              This earth, my home.

High on the vast blue canvas,
                          clouds curl, float.

Taking a deep breath, I gather myself.
                            I bring what I am.

"My Rock" by Pat Mora. Used by permission of the poet.