Alison Hawthorne Deming > Quotes

“I don’t mean to say that when a forest is gone you can replace it with a poem. When a forest is gone, you cannot replace it. But with written words you can bear witness, you can hold a memory of the forest for others to experience and celebrate, you can grieve over the loss and rage against the forces that have leveled the forest- and through grief you can fall in love with forests again, and through that falling, you can believe again in the human capacity for love and in the faith that we might learn to protect what we love.”
― Alison Hawthorne Deming, Writing the Sacred into the Real

“The peace of the land, the last islands of this peace, made me feel small. I welcomed the feeling. It was a pleasure to feel insignificant, to let my desires quiet, to feel, in the moment, the human body as an instrument attuned to peace.”
― Alison Hawthorne Deming

“The rain is falling in silver needles into the forest green outside my window. The wind slathers it against the glass and it smears into little lenses of distorting clarity. Some raindrops gather on the window casing, bead up fat and round, then fall. The rain’s forms are all beautiful. The human eye does more than see; it stitches the seen and unseen together, the temporal and the eternal. It wakes me again and again to the astonishment of finding myself in a body moving through a world of beauty and dying and mystery. It is as if the world were a series of questions, and astonishment were the answer.”
― Alison Hawthorne Deming, Writing the Sacred into the Real

“Writing was a forbidden game, Bei Dao (the Chinese dissident poet) said, that could cost one’s life. The poetry they published amounted to a new language, since “for thirty years the Chinese language there had no personal voice at all.” The official line on Bei Dao’s poetry was that it was politically subversive because it expressed intimate thoughts, asserting the rights of the individual by his or her own private experience. And the more obscure Bei Dao’s poems became, the more subversive the authorities considered him. He said, 'on the one hand, poetry is useless. It can’t change the world materially. On the other hand it is a basic part of human existence. It came into the world when humans did. It’s what make human beings human.”
― Alison Hawthorne Deming, Writing the Sacred into the Real

“I fell in love with the West’s magnificence, a scale and intensity of beauty that humbled me before its power. None of the sheltering blue hillsides, tidy seacoast villages, or fresh mown velvet pastures I was accustomed to swooning over in the Northeast. Here the mountains scraped up past the treeline to make their jagged statements to the sky. And the desert spanned into the shimmering edge of nowhere, its creatures adapted to harsh aridity wish such inventive survival strategies that life seemed indomitable. …the expansiveness invites a freedom of mind…the geologic nakedness of arid land gives a vivid sense that human power is mall beneath that of the larger planetary forces.”
― Alison Hawthorne Deming, Writing the Sacred into the Real

“For me, the natural world in all its evolutionary splendor is a revelation of the divine- the inviolable matrix of cause and effect that reveals itself to us in what we cannot control or manipulate no matter how pervasive our meddling.”
― Alison Hawthorne Deming, Writing the Sacred into the Real

“Some destruction is required to live. We cannot eat rocks and air. Yet why should one organism eat so greedily that all others are imperiled? When we’re finished grazing in the garden, I want there to be some garden left. This is more than aesthetic desire- though surely it is the beautiful complexity of nature that woos me. It is moral desire. To use nature beyond its capacity to restore itself is to destroy the force and process that have given us our lives. We have not fallen from nature, we have risen from it; all human accomplishment, feeling, and belief along with flesh and blood are rooted in that generative power. Even our strange human inwardness that imagines such guiding abstractions as faith, justice, love, and compassion is a gift of nature. The theory of evolution, our long genetic entanglement with all the other living things, is not at odds with theories of the sacred. It locates the sacred in living things. I believe we owe nature the deep sense of gratitude that people once expressed to their gods. The earth’s life is finite, as is my own, and these are the realities I accept with sorrow, the place and the passage made sacred by their limits.”
― Alison Hawthorne Deming, Writing the Sacred into the Real

“To have a life devoted to art, to spiritual practice, to service to one’s community and ecosystem, restores faith in our collective human enterprise. Work on the culture is work on the self. Art can serve activism by teaching an attentiveness to existence and by enriching the culture in which our roots are set down. Culture is both the crop we grow and the soil in which we grow it. And human culture is the most powerful evolutionary force on Earth these days…art is necessary because it gives us a new way of thinking and speaking, shows us what we are and what have been blind to, and gives us a new language and forms in which to see ourselves”
― Alison Hawthorne Deming, Writing the Sacred into the Real

“…I set out for water so I can get closer to the essence of the place, how its life is encompassed by what goes on offshore. When the swells begin to rise in the deep channel, the water feels like a living body, our vessel a mote adrift in its cytoplasm. The rhythmic sway of tides measures the pull of planet and moon. I can’t feel these forces in my body, though they must be there, made as I am from so much cellbound water. The human body is a poor instrument for sensing patterns of movement that guide the migration of whales, terns, butterflies, and geese. I cannot read with my body the earth’s magnetic forces, the tracks of sun, stars, and ocean currents. What pushes or pulls the arctic tern forward when it migrates from its summer home in Iceland to its winter home in the Antarctic Ocean? Ways of knowing that a human body will never know. But the human body is a good instrument for making language, and that tool is the best means we’ve got for finding our way.”
― Alison Hawthorne Deming, Writing the Sacred into the Real

“The tide slackens and the swells lay down flat. In the barely perceptible distance, a chaos of whale blows hatches the horizon, dozens of towering white fountains. So much energy is being expended that from a distance the disruption looks vaguely industrial. Then, trying to fix the image in my mind, I write ‘looks like a scene from a war movie.’ The simile seems so right and yet it’s alarming how easily it comes to me, how estranged of the sea’s daily business I am that an image of war seems easier to visualize than burst of cetacean breath erupting randomly and rapturously into the air as the great mammals feast their way through the bay.”
― Alison Hawthorne Deming, Writing the Sacred into the Real

“If the spirit of a place has anything to do with what a poet makes, then it must be the intensity of light (two f-stops brighter than New York) and the extreme geography that so infuse the mind in Provincetown and make one more reflective. With all that jazzed-up light, the excitement of photons bounding off water and sand, even the ordinary air says, Notice me. … the function of art is to wake us up to the very life we are living.”
― Alison Hawthorne Deming, Writing the Sacred into the Real

“We’re nature. Our minds are nature. Our desire to make poetry is nature.”
― Alison Hawthorne Deming

“Why didn’t everyone feel as I did that natural beauty raises the spiritual energy of the world?”
― Alison Hawthorne Deming, Writing the Sacred into the Real

“No one’s prepared for the slow growl that rises off the water, the sound I feel enter my body by trembling straight through my chest rather than slipping into my ears. There’s a finback lying surfaced beside us. Then a second finback emerges, letting out the same cavernous rumble. In seventeen years of fieldwork, the guide has rarely heard such vocalizations…the finback voice is among the loudest and deepest in the ocean, creating such long frequency waves that the animals easily can communicate forty miles across the bay., even one hundred miles across the Gulf of Maine. It’s possible that located in the right spot, they can talk underwater across ocean basins all the way from New England to Europe. But rarely do they hear finbacks vocalizing out in the air.”
― Alison Hawthorne Deming, Writing the Sacred into the Real

“T.S. Eliot wrote: ‘and so each venture/is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate/with shabby equipment always deteriorating/in the general mess of imprecision of feeling.’ We clap our hands to our hearts in gratitude that unsayable has simply been said. Why? Some deep chord in us is struck when form is realized- a chord in which nature must always be one of the notes because to make art is to practice the form-making compulsion of nature, exercising “wild mind.” Wild is a name for the way that phenomena continually actualize themselves- here a saguaro, there a cypress, here a raven’s prrruk, there a warbler’s cheedle cheedle che che che che, here a sonnet, there a free forming cloud of a poem. 'music heard so deeply/that it is not heard at all, but you are the/music.”
― Alison Hawthorne Deming, Writing the Sacred into the Real

“I’ve argued with another poet-friend about beauty. He swears we no longer experience it, and that our poetry is an answer to that bleakness. But when he lived in Berkeley he’d regularly escape to Point Reyes…He would not write about natural beauty, though he sought it for comfort, because he was convinced our language had been so tainted by history, politics, and advertising that a poem could no longer pretend to represent anything but itself. I argued that it was that very abrasion between the experience of beauty and what the culture sells is that makes us need to write, makes us fierce to enact our passion for the truth, makes us wild to reclaim the language from its abusers and polluters so that it conveys the wholeness of life’s contradictions, celebrating beauty and lamenting its diminishment and loss.”
― Alison Hawthorne Deming, Writing the Sacred into the Real

“If you have this deep feeling of empathy for the natural world, you feel it so profoundly. It’s almost a religious experience. I feel that I could never really say the depth of feeling or connection I feel to the natural world, which has made me.”
― Alison Hawthorne Deming