Gillian Cummings

When I’m very sad, I tend to write poems, maybe as a way of survival. The poems allow me to say what I probably wouldn’t say aloud socially, but the blank page that becomes the poem will accept any emotion, unconditionally. Plants, well, they are different. Plants almost always make me happy. When I go for walks in marshlands, when I look at a meadow or a tree, I almost always feel peace, a deep peace inside that takes me away from my problems. My therapist tells me to feel the earth under my feet. She calls this earthing. But I prefer simply to look, and sometimes to listen. To hear the rustle of leaves, if there is a wind. To see the nodding yellow of goldenrod in September, so bright and thickly gleaming in the waste places. These, and so much more, bring me a state of calm unmatched by my Klonopin. But then, when I am indoors and become sad again, I mistrust what I have just seen. I return to my baseline sadness. Except. Except when I bring the outside indoors in the form of a vase full of sunflowers or a basket full of gourds. These I can look at for hours, and I do, because I draw them. And nothing makes me happier, honestly, than when I connect with a plant by practicing hand-eye, hand-eye movements over and over with pencil and paper. My husband tells me that when he sees me drawing, I look blissed out. Those are his words. It is when I draw a still life from nature that I forget about being sad. And sometimes, but only sometimes, I can also capture the happy feeling in a poem.