Christine Gelineau

I have been privileged to live for multiple decades now amidst the wisdom of plants--both the trees, flowers, vegetables, and fruits we have planted and nurtured here, and the acres of trees and meadow plants that have flourished with a minimum of interference from us (just the benefit of us husbanding them by keeping up the mortgage and the taxes so that they can be left alone). We have been tutored, enriched, and nourished by them all.

Of course, all of us are necessarily living simultaneously within a human culture of consumption and acceleration but also within the remnants still left to us of the millennia-old culture of renewal and continuance, fecundity and acceptance, that is the natural world. How long, and ignorantly, the constructed world of the Anthropocene has treated that natural world as if it were mere "resource" available for depletion without thought to replenishment. Living where I do, as I do, in such proximity to that essential world beyond the human capacity to construct, for me it kindles a kind of responsibility to what the botanical world (and the world of other-than-human animals--those two most often seem one to me) teach us about peace, meaning, fulfillment, and responsibility. While the poems that come out of my gardening and my walking in the botanical world necessarily often do address the specific time and place of what the century-plus of the Anthropocene has done/is doing to our planet, I feel as committed to providing evidence of another way of being alive, a way larger, older, and wiser than ourselves.