OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAI was doing a bit of dusting on Sunday as we were having friends over for afternoon tea. That was one motivation. The other, and probably the most important motivation, is to feel grounded. After a busy time of getting a new website ready and editing poetry with my poetry editor Ursula Vaira, I needed to just be. Moodling while dusting is a fine way to offer some space. Also, it’s a way to appreciate our surroundings. In head-down mode, I’m not looking out the window as much or seeing what’s right in front of me. Just last night a belted kingfisher landed on a wire with a goldfish in his mouth – from our pond!

Dusting really means paying attention to things and those things glow because they’ve been honoured. I’m thinking of Jane Hirschfield’s poem that mentions “a simple, passionate thusness.” That’s actually the theme of the poetry circle I’m offering on Saturday, March 22nd at Bethlehem Retreat Centre in Nanaimo. (You can read about it, here.)

The poem is “Only When I Am Quiet and Do Not Speak.” It begins:

Only when I am quiet for a long time
and do not speak
do the objects of my life draw near.

Shy, the scissors and spoons, the blue mug.
Hesitant even the towels,
for all their intimate knowledge and scent of fresh bleach.

How steady their regard as they ponder,
dreaming and waking,
the entrancement of my daily wanderings and tasks.
Drunk on the honey of feelings, the honey of purpose,
they seem to be thinking,
a quiet judgment that glistens between the glass doorknobs.

 The poet goes on to say she can hear “the sigh of happiness / each object gives off.”  Hirschfield names a “circle of simple, passionate thusness” as if the poet herself could join those objects in their happiness.