Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

I invited a friend from out of town to join me on a hike. I was going on the Long Trail in Warren, Vermont. I live in a forest; taking a walk is courteous. The invitation from me is slightly expected of those who visit.

He looked skeptically and said, “You do know I’m from the Bronx.”

I said, “And?” He said, “We don’t do nature.”

I said, “Maybe it’s time. And that’s not true. There’s the Bronx Park.”

“Too many mosquitoes and spiders. Plus,” he said, “walking past strangers wigs me out.”

I was going to leave the conversation there. But then he asked, “Why do you love the outdoors?”

The question felt confrontational. Like the time my coworker’s husband at a party asked, “What’s with the birds?” when he learned I was traveling to watch a massive migration on the southern coast of Alabama. In those moments, I become unsettled. How do you discuss a space that is like a personal cathedral? I wanted to speak to the physical and emotional benefits… but that feels too much like pitching a free health check up in the woods.

Instead, I told him how I hear myself better in the forest. That my mental clutter gives way to an exceptional quiet, to a probing for traces of life beneath the ferns, along the forest floor, in the green shadows. I love the calls and trills of warblers and rose-breasted grosbeaks, the rushing sound of a brook over stone, the irrational belief, some might say, of connecting with something larger. I start off sometimes in a spiritual crisis, but walk out spiritually cleansed. For this reason, the natural world over the years has become my lifesaving talisman. I feel an altering by degrees in the outdoors. Whereas it is more difficult for me to encounter the sublime elsewhere, my mind fragmented by all my device’s notifications, mental buzzing and crowded thoughts.

Like the speaker in today’s poem, I find appreciation for any vestige of the natural world in large cities — those unexpected places that take me out of myself and land me into molecules of existence.

The Trees
by Jericho Brown

In my front yard live three crepe myrtles, crying trees
We once called them, not the shadiest but soothing
During a break from work in the heat, their cool sweat

Falling into us. I don’t want to make more of it.
I’d like to let these spindly things be
Since my gift for transformation here proves

Useless now that I know everyone moves the same
Whether moving in tears or moving 
To punch my face. A crepe myrtle is

A crepe myrtle. Three is a family. It is winter. They are bare.
It’s not that I love them
Every day. It’s that I love them anyway.

“The Trees” by Jericho Brown from THE TRADITION © 2019 Jericho Brown. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Copper Canyon Press.