James Lenfestey

My formal love for Mother Earth began with her image floating in the cold blackness of space on the cover of Whole Earth Catalog in 1968, so fragile and vulnerable. I have been an activist and journalist and poet and essayist for her health ever since. I began with water, lakes and rivers, then birds, then the plants breathing all around me. In my poetry I respond to sound and silent vibrations I feel in my fingertips. Mostly in the early morning with the family still asleep, I feel the world breathing, from insect hum to fluttering leaf.  In those moments of quietude the voices of plants erupt around me – the bifurcated birch, the arms-wide oak, the majestic white pine, some planted with my grandfather when I was three, now 50 foot tall climax denizens of my local forest.  Meanwhile, Northern White Cedar are abundant at my island home, like blades of grass, so it took some time to hear them – their lack of speech, the gift they offer of almost pure silence. My latest thunderbolt of plant appreciation comes from Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s new testament, BRAIDING SWEETGRASS: Indigenous wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants. In a review of that book, I remarked that I know no one who has not been changed by reading it. In my case at my urban house In Minneapolis, I have had a durable predawn practice of gathering up the morning newspaper and paying homage to the moon and remnant stars. Reading Kimmerer taught me what I was missing right in front of me: “the Standing People,” the trees. Now every morning I gather the newspaper and offer gratitude to the trees for breathing for me.