Resuscitation
in the peace of wild things
Thank you for waiting for me, as I wriggle and wrestle to get the work out. Sometimes I wish it was easier. Sometimes I’m glad it’s not. When your labour rewards you - not in the hustle but in the steadfast determination - with something that you were able to work out of your body into the world, it is no small thing. I used to relentlessly worry that it had to be good (whatever good means anyway). Some days I still do fret about its worthiness, but less often because the working it out has become the whole thing. Its ‘goodness’ is irrelevant. Subjective. Perhaps, inherent.
In September I came across a call for work in The Way Back to Ourselves Literary Journal. The fall theme: The Peace of Wild Things, inspired by the poem of the same name by Wendell Berry. I exhaled. Then inhaled the invitation that seeped into the only space I had available, meeting me in the smallness and tenderness of things. A lifeline. It gave me enough room to gather the pieces I had tucked away and put them together. Whether or not my work was selected mattered not. It gave me a safe place to land, when I desperately needed it.
Resuscitation
in the shambles of striving
crushed from the pressing
an emergency
I could not find my own pulse
in the fading light
love rushed me
to the place
my heart was known
to beat
under a hazy pink sky
towering lodgepole pines
at the foot of rocky peaks
a gently meandering stream
an invitation whispered
from the wind housed
between my brittle bones
to the water’s edge
I stepped into its flow
the glacial current
a defibrillator—a jolt back
to the land of the living
amid the question
if the place I’ve been dwelling
is merely a wasteland
worthy of return
tender soles pressed
into jagged edges
toes gulped up hope
as if they could drink
on my behalf
moved step by step
within this wild intravenous
could I just stay here
forever connected
like another tree—evergreen
or the moss on the bank
our roots plunged deep
and interconnected
beneath the river
that saves a life.
Erin Stinson 2024
Published in the Fall Edition of The Way Back to Ourselves Literary Journal
Stunning 🤍