Max Garland
I love Emily Dickinson’s famous poem on hope, but this morning, it’s her contemporary, Walt Whitman, who comes to mind. I bequeath myself to the dirt, he said. Look for me under your bootsoles, he said. I’m holding Walt to his words. Keep encouraged, he said. Missing me one place, search another.
This morning I’m searching another, and another after that. A cold gray sky hovers over this late March day, and our portion of the planet here in the Chippewa Valley is snow covered again. Snow raggedly outlines the otherwise bare trees, grants the evergreens a frosted look, a sort of senior moment, you might say.
I’m remembering what composes a snowflake. I mean, what’s at the crux of the crystal hexagon? Before it can form, briefly float, inevitably fall to outline and lightly weigh upon the branches? Before it can clot the treads of tires, whitecap the neighborhood houses?
It’s just dirt, of course, that forms the nucleus, the cold heart of snow. A fleck of dust, speck of grit, maybe a discarded and upswept pollen grain. It takes nearly nothing, in fact, but nearly nothing is vastly different from nothing. It’s that cast-off floating particle of grit in the upper air that allows molecules of ice to be true to their hexagonal blueprint, branch and elaborate into the various shapes of snowflakes-- lattice, lace, diamond dust, aggregate, column, needle, or my personal favorite—the stellar dendrite.
In this season of viral distancing, quarantine, and genuine suffering, here, this morning, the 4th week of March (I’m going out on a limb here) comes the small gift of spring snow. I think of how something so tiny, nearly nothing, dust or pollen, is seized by the frigid upper air, then branches into performance mode, a kind of beatification of grit, that falls and now covers what I can see of my town from the window of my own isolation.
My hope on this crisis-ridden morning is the audacity of grit, those castaway particles of nearly nothing that allow the crystalline pattern of ice to launch into beauty, cold beauty, sure, but the point is that the smallest thing--dirt, dust, grit—seeds the miraculous, both outside of us, and inside.
I admire the acts of obvious heroism (doctors, nurses, emergency workers), but this snowy morning, it’s also the grit of the girl stocking grocery shelves, the trucker, baker, convenience store clerk, ordinary neighbors keeping the human grid alive-- repairing furnaces, feeding and dressing our quarantined elders who once did the same for us—that’s hope for me. That’s the human manifestation of the unspectacular grit at the heart of the snowflake.
I depart as air, Walt Whitman said. I shake my white locks at the runaway sun, he said. Keep encouraged, he said. I’m trying, Walt, remembering that it’s also words --empathetic, heartfelt, trivial, humorous, distracting; it’s the irrepressible grit of humanity at the core of our impulse to speak, write, sing, listen, to bridge the distance with words—that constitutes hope for me, and keeps me encouraged.
Max Garland is the former Poet Laureate of Wisconsin.