Ellen Bass on the Power of Poetry

reactive or distracted me. They fuel me when I feel depleted and I need a way to recharge. Spiritual habits combine the science of behavior change with the wisdom of spiritual principles to help us feel calmer, more at ease, and more fulfilled. Spiritual habits have enriched not only my life, but also the lives of the clients I've worked with

in the Spiritual Habits program. Normally, this work is done with private clients in a one on one setting, but I've decided to again offer a group version of this program, the benefit being twofold. First, you get to connect with others and create a supportive community as we dive into this content together, and secondly, I can offer it to you at a much lower price point. Enrollment is open now through July nine. To learn more. In sign up, go to group dot spiritual habits dot net. It comes

down to this. When we learn how to take action on and apply spiritual principles to the moments in our daily lives, the way we live and experience our lives radically changes. I hope you'll give yourself this gift and join me for this special edition of the Spiritual Habits group program. Again. That's group dot spiritual habits dot net or click on the link in the show notes. Poetry is out loud, I mean we put it on a page so that it can move around more easily. Welcome

to the one you feed Throughout time. Great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit but it's not just about thinking

our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guests on this episode is Ellen Bass, a poet, nonfiction author, and teacher. She's the author of many collections and books, including Like a Beggar, The Human Line, and Mules of Love. Ellen's poems also appear frequently in The

New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and many other journals. She's been awarded three push Card Prizes, the Lambda Literary Award, the Pablo Naruta Prize, and the New Letters Prize, and also teaches in the m f A Writing Program at Pacific University. Her newest collection is entitled Indigo. Hi Ellen, welcome to the show. I'm delighted to be here. Thanks so much for inviting me. Yeah, it's such a pleasure

to have you back on a second time. I really enjoyed our first conversation and I'm happy to do it again. We're gonna jump into your new wonderful book of poetry called Indigo here in a moment. But before we do that. We'll start, like we always do, with a parable. There's a grandmother who's talking with her grandson and she says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that

are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second. He looks up what his grandmother says, grandmother, which one wins, and the grandmother says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in

your life and in the work that you do. I really think that's a wonderful parable, and that things that I'm relating to, especially right now, is the fear one, because although we certainly have enough greed and hatred in the world as well, that we are looking at the terrible brutality and murder and injustice, and you know, all of us, I think who care at all, are really trying to take stock of our own lives and see how we can work for the values that are for

kindness and compassion and justice and love. So it seems like a perfect time for that parable and personally, what I really relate to is the polarity of fear and love and fear and gratitude. It's been a few months now that we've all been in this state, never before encountered by any of us in our lifetime, including those of us who have lived a pretty long time, and I'm noticing that gratitude is one of the things that most allows me to manage fear, and love is maybe

a close second with they're holding hands. So I'm really noticing that that it doesn't help so much to save myself, will you know, you don't need to be so afraid. But when I can refocus and get my food trough, you know, over towards the gratitude realm and the love realm, it's been helping me a lot pretty much. I think every evening I feel low level but noticeable anxiety, and I feel really fortunate because during the day I don't really feel it. You know, I wake up and we're lucky.

We live in Santa Cruz and if we get up early enough, we can take a walk down by the ocean, and uh, my gratitude for that, now, that's a real my cup runneth over, and I'm, you know, very busy during the day. The opportunities to share poetry and teach and uh here poetry, read poetry are so great now, and so I'm very busy. But there's that evening time where that fear starts to vibrate a little, and that thing that helps me the most is feeding that other wolf. Yeah.

I think that's a great place to start talking about gratitude and all the wonderful things that so many of us have in our lives. I want to start here with the first poem in the book. It's called sous Chef, and I'm gonna have you read some full poems later, but we're gonna pick a couple of lines out of

some early poems. And I love this poem because you're describing basically cutting up vegetables and you're giving them a lot of attention, which we know paying full attention to what we're doing is another antidote for the emotion and thoughts that tend to run away with it's being really present, and I love that. The idea of the SIUs chef is that someone else is telling you sort of what to do and You've got a couple of lines in here that really resonated with me as I thought about

spiritual practice. And I'll just read a couple of the lines that jumped out to me, tell me what to do. I'm free of will. Let me escape my own insistence, and I still have opinions, but I don't believe in them. And I just love those three lines, particularly, let me escape my own insistence. You know, how much better does life go for us when we stop insisting that things be a certain way. Indeed, you know, I'm a pretty strong willed person, so I'm speaking from personal experience there.

I love that phrase free of will, which comes actually from a bonny Rate song, and the part of I still have opinions, but I don't believe in them. This is, I think, pretty funny. Our second George Bush President, actually said that line, and I had it on my refrigerator for years. It was, you know, clipped out of the newspaper because of course the newspaper was showing him as a kind of you know, idiot for saying something like that.

But I just always kept saying, you know, this is one place where Bush and I exactly exactly agree, and I don't think he meant it the way I mean it. But but you didn't who knows. But yes, I can't

start myself from generating opinions. I read and listened to Pema children a fair amount, and uh, she's always talking about things like when you walk down the street, you just constantly you know, you pass a person on the street, you know nothing about them, but you immediately have a feeling of being drawn towards them or being repelled from them, or neutrality, and you know that they were just forming opinions all the time. And so and I am a

very opinionated person. I come from opinionated family, but I have learned not to invest too heavily in those opinions and to notice them but not always feel that I need to root for them and try and make them as vocifer. This as possible makes me think of something my zen teacher said to me recently. I just turned fifty in the last couple of weeks, and he said, you know, when I turned forty, I stopped caring what other people thought of me, and then when I turned fifty,

I stopped caring what I thought of myself. And I just thought that was I thought that was a really it just brings up that idea. But yeah, yeah, that line about insistence, I feel like makes me feel like I heard audio Shanti the spiritual teacher wants say something about that like that, you know, we've got to let go of our insisting all the time. That really stood out to me in that poem, and I loved that idea.

Moving on to another poem that brings up a theme that's pretty common and spiritual traditions is it's a poem called Reincarnation, And I'll touch the first line, which I think makes me laugh every time I read it, and then I'll jump into the part that talks to me. He said, who would believe in reincarnation if she thought she would return as an oyster? Eagles and wolves are popular. I love that. But then you go on to say, humbly, the oyster persists in filtering seawater and fashion in the

daily irritations into luster. And I love that idea of the grist for the mill. It's the how do we take these things that seem like they're a problem to us and turn them into luster, into the pearl. And I'm kind of curious how you look at doing that in your own life. I think that's my practice as a poet, to take suffering and to make art. Making a poem gives me a way to grapple with my experiences, to come to terms with them, to explore them, and to try to go deeper into them rather than to

resist them. Uh. You know, all of which are the things that the spiritual teachers talk to us about. And I find that in a poem, all of those things are what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to understand something that i didn't understand before. I'm trying to be more present, trying to be more deeply rooted into my life, whatever that is. And sometimes it's being more deeply rooted in something celebratory and wonderful. There there's some odes in here.

There are some um, some praise poems, uh, and also some elegies and poems that grapple with loss and suffering and pain and fear and worry and all those other emotions. So when I'm making a poem, even if the poem is about something painful, when I'm working on the poem,

actually Jane Hirshfield talks about this. She calls it the secret joy of writing poems that there's a joy that we don't talk that much about that we feel when we're making a poem, when we're making art, no matter what the subject is, there's a zen idea right that says in the first idea, best idea, right. You know, there's musicians that are like, get it in the first take, right, And then you get somebody like Leonard Cohen who's like, well, I wrote a hundred and fifty verses to get to

the four you've got here? Do you lean to one of those sides more than other? Into the Leonard coh inside. Um. There's one poem in here called Failure. Ironically that took me twelve years of versions to write, and I wasn't working on it constantly over those twelve years, God forbid. But I did make my first try at it talking about this experience I had when I was a young girl and I couldn't get the poem to work. And a few years later I tried it again. A few

years later again. But when I say try, I mean like really, you know, I worked on it for a few months each time, and then I just say, no, it's not there. And sometimes when I'm teaching, I like to go back and show my students some of the process so that they can have a more realistic idea about why it's so hard for them. And I tell them it's hard because it's hard. Uh, you know, it's not hard for you. It's hard. It's it's hard for not every single writer or poet, but the vast majority

are on the letter coin side way more. And then after that many years, I was able to find a way into the poem and out of the poem which I hadn't been able to find before, and to discover what the poem was really about. I had a hint that it was in the failure category, but sometimes I sort of think to myself, well, I just had to have more failures before I could manage this poem. Yeah, boy, you brought up a few different things in my mind there. The first that I think is so important is what

you said. They're about that it's hard. We've got a coaching client that I'm working with and we were talking about impostor syndrome and she said something that was really interested, and she said that they did an impostor syndrome workshop at her university and then they played bingo like every time you heard a phrase that you thought in your head, you wrote it down. The person who won was the person that everybody looks up to. They all think like, this guy is, you know, he's it, and he won

impostor syndrome bingo because he had all those things. And it made me think about, like, I've talked to enough wonderful artists and poets and writers like yourself who all say, yeah, I've done it before, but I still sit down in front of a blank piece of paper and it's hard. And I think that that's so important for people who are working on anything in life that's valuable, whether it's art or anything else, it's hard. If it's worth doing,

it's hard. A lot of us interpret the fact that it's hard to mean we're not good at it, we're not meant to do it, we can't do it, versus realizing like, that's the way it is for most everybody. And it's the people who managed to grapple with the hard consistently enough that leads to something. It's very true. And because poetry is the art form that I know best, I can speak you know most knowledgeably about that. But

I'm sure that it's true across the board. But in poetry you have to really have a high tolerance for failure. You really have to have a certain kind of crazy personality where I think it's worth it to, you know, hammer away at a one page poem on and off for twelve years because you care about investigating that experience and you want to find a help what it's all about, and you want to make art out of it. Um. You know, there's so many other things that people can

do with their lives that are more obviously rewarding. I mean, I'm sure to be a master gardener or a great surfer, you also have to work really hard, but I think that you see beauty and delight quicker in the process. You don't have to be working at it for decades in order to plan a garden and have the joy of that garden growing. But boy, a mediocre poem just is mediocre, whereas you know, a garden that's just not really perfect, it's still a wonderful garden. So it's not

for everybody to have that much failure. You know, it takes me, you know, to write forty or fifty poems takes me six seven, eight years. And if you think about how many words. That is, when you think of all the white space and that I write all the

time proportionately, it's hard. Yeah. Well, my girlfriend and I were talking about this before we started the episode, and she loves poetry, and she was saying that poetry is so amazing because it can conjure up this huge world and these really big emotions out of very few words.

And I think that's speaking to what you're saying. Why it's so hard as you've got, it's very constrained, it's not a lot of words that yet still has to cause this big thing to happen, has a very very high bar, because the bar is really that when you write a poem, you want to be changed. You want to be a different person at the end of writing that poem than you were before, and you hope that

that will be true for the reader as well. So, of course, you know, we don't like at a personality transplant, but we want, in some perhaps small but very real way and sometimes a big way, we want to be different after we write that poem, and we want to have discovered something that we didn't know before, and we want to be changed, We want to be enriched and enlarged. So those few words, they have to do some heavy lifting. So let's have a poem. This one is called taking

my old Dog out to pee before bed. And I love this poem for a whole lot of reasons, but one is I'm a deep lover of dogs, so I've had the privilege of going through several dogs through their entire lifespan, and there's something beautiful about that taking my old dog out to pay before bed. Zeke's hips are too ground down to lift a leg, so he just stands there. We both just stand looking into the darkness.

The moon silver's his thinning fur. Orion strives across the heavens, his own dog trotting at his heel, and a great live oak reaches over from the neighbor's yard, dense black limbs silhouetted against a paler sky, single voluptuous remnant of forests? Can a tree be lonely? Zeke tips up his muzzle, sent streaming through two hundred million olfactory cells as he reads the illuminated manuscript of night raccoons prowling down the street.

Who's in heat? We're just out for a stroll. Handsome still, he reminds me of an aging movie. Star with his striking white eyebrows and square jaw. He always had an urbane elegance, a gentleman who could carry off satin lip hills and a silver tipped cane. Tonight, an ambulance whales. Someone not so far away is frightened in pain, trying to live. We're trying to die. And then it's quiet again. No birds, no wind. We don't speak. We just wait alive together until one of us turns back to the

door and the other follows. It's so beautiful, so wonderful, and unlike in the poem, we do have a bird. You are crows. Yeh, yeah, we've got some excited crows here in the yard. I'm been in loud and clear. Yeah, crows are remarkable creatures. My girlfriend I just started reading the book called The Genius of Birds by Jennifer Ackerman. It's all about you know, basically, you know, for a long time we basically thought birds were dumb, you know, like bird brain, um. But boy, that they are not.

It's stunning some of the things birds can do, crows in particular. We just started. But it's it's a lot of fun so far already. Oh, that's a good recommendation I couldn't read it. Yeah, lots of people really love that book, So we shall see. I'm going to read just the first part of another poem of yours and um, and then we can kind of just discuss it a little bit. It's a poem called enough, and it's a it's a fairly long poem, so I'm just reading the

first paragraph or two. But there's a part of it that I just had to get into this conversation. So enough, No, it will never be enough. Never enough wind clamoring in the trees, sun and shadow handling each leaf, never enough, clang of my neighbor hammering the iron nails, relenting wood, sound waves lapping over roofs, never enough bees purposeful at the throats of lilies. How could we be replete with the flesh of ripe tomatoes, the crushed scent of their leaves.

It would take many births to be done with the that nous of that? And I just I love that last line in particular, take many births to be done with the that noess of That reminds me of a phrase I hear in Zen often. Thus, nous, do you like hearing other people read your poems or you like, oh my goodness, you've got the you've got the emphasis wrong on that. No, I think it's wonderful because poetry is more popular than it's ever been in my lifetime, and it's still not like movie or you know, TV

or you know football. So hearing someone else read my poem, the first thing that I'm thinking about is, you know, they care enough about this poem that they even want to read it. So that's like you're way ahead of the game, just starting right there. And then it's interesting to me, you know, how does someone else receive it.

I've been reading a book recently by a man named Virlin Klinkenborg, and it's called Several Short Sentences about Writing, and he says that it's important to know what you mean to say, but it's crucial to know what you have said. And so when I hear somebody read my poem, I'm more aware of what I've actually said, not what

I mean to say, but what I've said. So that's special to That's like a little peek into what is the poem doing out in the world, because sometimes the poem does things that we're what I'm is thinking about. That's the poem doing it, not me and what I was thinking or what I meant or why I cared about it, but what is it doing when it's out

on its own. So that's very interesting to me because it's something I made, So that makes me think of I've often heard from people that when you read a poem, that it's really helpful to read it out loud, that there's something about hearing it. Oh yeah, it's all about hearing the words and the sound of them. When your mouth makes the sound, the sound is different out in the world than it is inside your head. Do you read poetry that way? Of course? Absolutely? Yeah. Poetry is

out loud. I mean, we put it on a page so that it can move around more easily, but it really wants to be out loud. As the writer, you can't tell what you have. This is true for prose writers too. You can't tell what you've got there until you read it out loud. Grace Paley used to call it the speedy eye and the slow ear. We read just with our eyes. There's a way in which we

can just grasp, you know, in kind of grouping. We don't really hear it word by word and syllable by syllable, and when you read it out loud, you hear what you didn't hear before. And so when I'm writing a poem, I'm I'm always reading it out loud through all the drafts. And when I read poetry, I'm often reading it out loud.

And if I've read the poem silently to myself a number of times and then read it out loud, It's always shocking to me how I hear things that I hadn't heard before, even though I might think I'm sounding it in my head. The wonderful poet Frank Gaspar calls that part of the word in your mouth. He calls it the mouth feel. What would you like to read another one for us? I'd love to. How about we

do the long recovery? It the long recovery. When she would come home from the strawberry fields, I'd empty the dirt from the cuffs of her jeans, scrub the mud ground into the knees. It made me want to tongue the sweat of her throat, taste salt in the dusty crevices. No, no, I say now to my dumb sex that, like a dog can't understand. I know I'm less than a speck on the planet, the planet, less than a spec and

so on. Is it sacred or insane that I matter so much to myself that she matters so much to me? What use is my turning her again and again towards the sun. I'm old enough to know there's nothing we love without incurring the dead of grief. The maple leaves just edged with crimson, the bright yellow breast of the warbler. It's sweet, sweet, sweetie, cry her hand as she lifts a cup riddled with veins, rushed, the loose skin, almost transparent, almost familiar as my own. How can I hurl myself

deeper into this life? Why do I think there's something better I could be doing? I missed her. I miss her. I believe in her animal scent. I believe stars burn in the blank day sky. I believe the Earth rushes through space so I can't feel the slightest breeze that's so lovely. The line in there is its sacred or insane? That I matter so much to myself that she matters

so much to me? Is such? I just love that because it's both right, I mean, I think it really is both add a pretty deep spiritual experience not too long ago. And the main thing that I came back from that with the only thing I could really say was that it's like it felt in the midst of it that everything was so utterly insignificant and so utterly sacred at the same time those things were both true

in the same moment. And and I it's you know, I just felt that so deeply, And when I read that in this poem, it just really brought me back to that moment. Yeah, it's it's both and and then the other line, which I think is basically, if I could sum up everything I'm trying to do in spiritual practices, how can I hurl myself deeper into this life? You know? That makes me think of Dogan's phrase, enlightenment is intimacy with all things. M That's beautiful. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,

that's that's really the job description, isn't it. That we're trying not to resist the life that we have and instead for all ourselves more deeply in to it. And when it's rough, that is a big challenge for me, and I think for most of us, but just for me, just say, it's really hard, but it helps to know that it's what we're trying to do. And I even almost sometimes find that really difficult moments are are hard,

you know, to to hurl ourselves deeper into. But I almost feel that, like for me when it's really difficult, I can kind of lean in. It's almost just the more prosaic, just sort of black moments that I find it so much harder to hurl myself into, you know. And and I found quarantine to be interesting because it's like, well,

there's nothing happening. I'm not going anywhere. I've been grateful to be a Zen student during this, you know, I start to go, well, there's just nothing happening, and then I go, wait, hang on a second, that what would my if I if I said that to my zend teacher, what would I get? Right? I would get everything is happening right now, pay attention, you know. And and I love that, you know. The next line you say is why do I think there's something better I could be doing?

You know, boy, is that the curse of a lot of life. There's something better I could be doing. I don't know what it is, but something I think that's really insightful. What you're saying about the blah moments, or even the neutral moments, or even the sort of mildly nice moments. You know, sometimes I'll be well, taking a walk along the ocean. I mean, that's glorious, and will I be there? Am I in my body? Do I feel my feet walking? Am I looking at the ocean?

A lot of the times, I'm embarrassed to say, how many of the times? UM thinking about something else? Oh? I remember to put that on my calendar, you know, Oh I have to do this. Oh, you know, I should kind of think about what I'm going to say to so and so. You know, I mean all kinds of things. When you know, I could be looking at the whole Pacific Ocean out there later out just for me, so to speak, and I'm not even really appreciating it.

The beautiful thing about a poem like the one we just heard is it reminds us in a way, and it stirs in us, at least in me, in a way that saying like these moments are really special, you should pay more attention. Like I can say that, and I can understand that intellectually, but when a piece of art comes along like this, it gives it a different lens.

It brings it more to life. I think the thing about poetry that I love is that good poets, great poets, and I think you're one, observe the world so closely, and they teach me how to do it. It teaches me how to look more deeply. There's something in the way that a poet sees the world, the way the poet basically zooms in on something very ordinary and causes it to become sacred and beautiful, that teaches me a little bit about how to do it. And that's one

of the most important things to me that poetry can do. That. Again, a spiritual teaching can tell me to do, but poetry sometimes teaches me how in a way that I can't articulate. I was talking recently about an article that I read a while back, and it talks about metaphor and metaphorical language, which you know, even when a poem it doesn't have

an actual metaphor in it, it's still metaphorical language. Uh. And they did some brain imaging and when you read something that is a metaphor, the part of your brain that responds to the texture of touch lights up. And when you read something that gives you the idea of that, But isn't a metaphor or in metaphorical language, that part of your brain does not that way in which it reaches us, It reaches us through I know how to say this word. The riotal operculum is the part of

drain that I love that sound. I hope I can put that in the poem. So it is literally affecting us the way physical touch affects us, whereas the idea of it just goes into our thinker, whatever the thinking is. YEA fascinating totally, And of course in a poem too, we're trying to say something without making it reductionistic, without reducing it to some kind of slogan or you know,

cliche or sound bite or something like that. You know, we're trying to actually say something that is not really sayable, but we're trying to get it into words without losing its complexity. You said that you will spend I know this was an extreme, but twelve years on a on a poem. I'm you know, I'm I know. They don't all take that long. How do you know or do you even know? When you've got it right? I'll just

say this and then actually you talk. I was reading a book, a far side book the cartoons, and he was showing in that book some early sketches he had and how they turned into cartoons, and he in a couple of times was like, and here's where I polished this one too much. I can see now that like I should have left it alone, you know, so so

I guess you know. My question is how do you have a sense of like, Okay, I'm there, this is ready, this is done well as a poet, unlike um, a visual artist or you know it maybe at the extremes somebody sculpting in marble. We if we overdo it, we can go backward. Uh. And that is really very wonderful. So you don't ever have to worry about going too

far and uh and over polishing. As long as you save all your drafts, you can go back to the last time when it's still had a and um, you know, then see if that actually was the right place and you went too far. Sometimes I just know, I mean, sometimes there's just something you can almost feel the click where it clicks into place, and you just know that's it. You've got it. And sometimes I know I haven't got it. My wife is a very insightful reader, and her criticism

is really valuable to me. And I would never show her early drafts because she's not a teacher. She doesn't look and see what the potential in that poem is. She looks It's like what Klinkenborg was saying. She sees what is actually there, not what I might hope to have be there. So but that further along. And I showed her a poem one time and she kind of hesitated.

She looked up at me and she said, I don't feel changed, and uh, we just both burst out laughing, because you know, I didn't feel changed either, but I was kind of hope that maybe there was more there than I thought. So sometimes sometimes I know that the poem is not working. I think more often I'm in a kind of middle range, and I'm thinking, maybe maybe

it's coming along. But I'm fortunate to have a couple of friends who I quote friends, and a couple of poet friends, and one friend who isn't a poet but who is a very devoted reader of poetry, and she will give me some feedback, and then a couple other

quote friends will give me some feedback. And that's very helpful to me, not that I always will do exactly what they say, but hearing what they say is a kind of a sounding board, and sometimes they're just exactly right on, and I can just do what they say and there it is. But that helps me a lot, and sometimes it takes me quite a while to see. In this book, there's a couple of poems that write

at the eleventh hour. I lopped off about three orders of the poem, and it took me years to see that I and I always thought, oh, I don't know, I kind of like something about this poem, but I don't know. I don't think it's quite right. And then once it shed everything it didn't need, I actually felt very good about it. I know that there are poets who are more able to make those assessments without any outside reflection from others, and I think that would be

wonderful to have that barometer exactly that way. But I do rely someone help. But knowing what to do this is what I tell my students when they're getting a lot of different kinds of feedback, And I tell them that knowing what to do with the feedback you get is an art in itself, because you just do what people say, unless they're my student, and then they should

just do what I say. If the feedback is coming from your we can see each other and the room you're in is just filled with books, and there's books stacked on your desk. And it's always so distracting to me to be talking to anybody with a bunch of books in the background, because I'm like, what's that book? I wonder what those books are? But everything is right. Two walls are Florida ceiling books, and there's still not enough room. Right before the pandemic, I was about to

go through and I'm sure you have too. I really like this term a lot death preparation, and um, I'm not really preparing for it um on a on a you know, deep level, but on just the clutter level. My mother would always go through things in her house and you know, get rid of paper, papers and stuff that you and she said, you know, I don't want to leave all this mess for my children. And so I feel like I have so much stuff in here that I have to start now because otherwise I'll we'll

just leave too big a mess. Yeah. I saw a President Obama did a live stream yesterday. I wanted to see what he had to say about everything that was happening, and I was I mostly followed him, but there he was in front of a bookshelf, and I again I found it distracting, like what's back there? Like I gotta know? So I was curious too, Yeah, so why don't we wrap up by having you read one more poem for us? And I think that we should go with I think it's the poem that closes the book. Isn't it any

common desolation? So we'll we'll use the it's the last poem in the book, and we'll use it as a way to wrap us up here. Any common desolation can be enough to make you look up at the yellow leaves the apple tree, the few that survived the rains and frost. Shot with late afternoon sun. They glow a deep orange gold against blue so sheer. A single bird would rive it like silk. You may have to break your heart, but it isn't nothing to know even one

moment alive. The sound of an oar in an oar lock, or a ruminant animal tearing grass, the smell of graded ginger, the ruby neon of the liquor store sign warm socks. You remember your mother her precision a ceremony. As she gathered the white cotton, slipped it over your toes, drew up the heel, turned the cup. A breath can uncoil as you walk across your own muddy yard. The big Dipper pouring night down over you, and everything you dread, all you can't bear dissolves, and like a needle slipped

into your vein that sudden rush of the world. That's so beautiful. It brings so many different things together. I of how it brings together the things that are difficult in the world, and just the overpowering beauty of it. Sometimes. Thank you, Thank you so much Ellen for agreeing to come back on. It's been a pleasure to have you back on. The book is called Indigo by Ellen Bass. I'd highly recommended to everybody well. Have links in the show notes. Thank you so much. It's always a pleasure

to talk with you. It's just wonderful to talk with you. Eric. Thank you, Bye bye bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support now. We are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we

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