You can just barely see the house on the right. This is taken with my much-longed for new Olloclip iPhone fisheye lens. I just love the sky here and this is another swell way to say so.
Stanley Kunitz is back tonight from his book The Wild Braid; a poet reflects on a century in the garden. This book is illustrated with lovely color photos of Mr. Kunitz in his garden and is a true delight. Copies are still available; I would recommend this a a great book gift for writers or gardeners or just for anyone who loves the natural world.
This is the first part of the section called, The Wilderness:
"One of the great delights of poetry is that when you're really functioning, you're tapping the unconscious in a way that is distinct from the ordinary, the customary use of the mind in daily life. You're somehow cracking the shell separating you from the unknown.
There's no formula for accessing the unconscious. The more you enter into the unconscious life, the more you believe in its existence and know it walks with you, the more available it becomes and the doors open faster and longer. It learns you are a friendly host. It manifests itself instead of hiding from your tyrannical presence, intruding on your daily routines, accomodations, domestications.
The unconscious is very much akin to what, in other frameworks,, I call wilderness. And it's very much like the wilderness in that its beasts are not within our control. It resists the forms, the limits, the restraints, that civilization itself imposes. I've always felt, even as a a child, that there was the decorum of the social structure, and so forth, and then there was the wild permissiveness of the inner life. I learned I could go anywhere in my inner life."
(page 87)
It was hard to stop typing, and I will probably share more of this passage this week.
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