Guest post by Simone Madsen

Although I never had Simone in school I remembered her and
recently reconnected with her through her work as executive director of
the Southeast Tennessee Resource Conservation & Development Council.

Think about the first memory you have of enjoying being outside. Stretch as far back as you can recall. It may be something small – a temperature, the shade of a tree, the smell of rain on wet pavement. Hold it in your mind and keep it there.

My earliest memory of enjoying being outside was really uneventful. I was maybe 4. The seasons were swinging from the chill of winter to the thaw of spring. It wasn’t warm enough to go without a coat, but it was warm enough to stick my hands in the storm water fed ditch in front of my house. Numb and nimble, searching through leaf litter and pebbles for signs of life – bugs and crawfish – that would be the first tell-tale wriggle that life was coming back to a sleepy land. Knees wet and muddy, wind whipping any exposed skin, I gathered my catch into clear glass jelly jars to watch them flit backwards and hide on whatever side my refracted face was not. I wouldn’t keep them – my house was not like their house. And any time I must have tried before, it seemed to only make them slower and less happy. So after a few minutes, back into the cold ditch they went – flapping tails and legs scratching desperately to hide in the ditch bed. I knew every inch of this poor excuse for a creek. Because I couldn’t stay out of it. This is the earliest joy I remember from the great outdoors.

I grew up with a foot in both worlds – living at the heart of a small city nestled in the country, I mean smack dab middle of commerce and communion. Surrounded by the foothills of the Appalachia’s, Highway 127, and the now abandoned woods – sometime, before I was born, we began retreating to yards and parks and paths. I don’t know when it happened, but it was something that was understood by the time I toddled into the wider world. Many places hadn’t seen people in decades. I could tell by the stuff they left behind. Rusted bike parts, abandoned clothes, toys I had never seen people play with.

In both worlds, I liked to talk – a lot – and make art, but I loved learning about the world of living things and their habitat. I loved the questioning nature of science. The first real biology I encountered was in second grade. Ms. Melissa was a new teacher, carrying with her, I like to imagine, the passion of youth and a heart dedicated to making a change. She introduced us to science in a way I had never really encountered before – I was born a naturalist, but the whet stone of education sharpened me into a scientist. We were asked to name, one day, all the animals we knew. If I recall correctly, I could name more than any other person – I knew 133 different animals. I skipped all my work that day to work on it. I didn’t cheat. But I had to think about it – and think about all the books, to that point, I had ever opened that even had a picture of an animal in it. I was grateful for my mother’s investment in encyclopedias then. I don’t think I ended up winning the prize (because, historically, I am not a direction follower) but an ability was recognized and encouraged after that. That little extra attention sparked a fire.

I failed a lot of assignments because I didn’t like homework. I would excel on tests. I wouldn’t find out till much later that I actually have a learning disorder – ADHD- primarily inattentive. But my love of the natural world and fascination with science made it easy to balance out a mediocre grade. And inbetween, I self-medicated with the outdoors. Connecting with the habitat that I missed while I was locked in concrete buildings 8 hours a day. In college, getting my hands and boots into a murky wetland was the only thing that kept me from dropping out. It was the only way to de-stress.

And with everything I learned in my time running the marathon of education – here are the things I carry with me.

1. The number one cause of species decline and extinction is habitat loss and alteration.

2. All living things require a habitat to survive.

3. I was a living thing.

My love of living things, including myself and everyone I knew, and the things I learned, forced me to feel new things brighter. Anger, passion, hope. I sharpened my intellect yet again, and put it to work. I learned to become an environmental scientist – a conservationist – a person that seeks to find a balance between humans, their habitat, and their ecosystem cohorts. That’s what I do today.

Earlier, I had asked you to picture your first memory of enjoying nature – whatever it is, I want you to think of it again. But also consider the words of Baba Dioum, a Sengalese Forester and Conservationist –

"In the end we will conserve only what we love; we will love only what we understand; and we will understand only what we are taught." 

This is the beginning of your environmental ethic. What ties you to your habitat.

You will only conserve what you love – My fondest memories are elbow deep in the creeks and streams of Tennessee.

You will Only Love what you understand – Because I loved them, I watched them. I never took my eyes off of the water. If there was a puddle to play in, you’d find me there. I knew every rock in my little ditch.

You will understand only what you’re taught – every thing I learned built a case for self-preservation – that we are living things, and we cannot reasonably separate ourselves, or as in the case of my crawfish friends – any mud bug from its environment. To do so is suffering. To do so is loss.

The edge that education gave to my wit is the blade by which I defend myself. And it began with the first stepping stone of building environmental ethic.

Hold on to that memory I asked you about before. It’s more important than you realize. My life depended on mine, and indeed, shaped mine. It gave me a purpose and a vision, even if my four-year-old self couldn’t see it at the time.

When you go from here – I wonder, where will your mind wander? And if you go there, will you find it changed?

Simone with my friend, Mariah Phillips, who is running
for Congress in our district.

Guest Post by Kathryn Kiper

Kathryn welcomed everyone and then shared some poetry
during Poetry, Prose and Pie.

Welcome to Poetry, Prose, and Pie! We are so pleased you took the time to join us tonight and we hope you’ll enjoy.

Most of you are here from a connection to my parents. I could, of course, say so much about what they have given me as their child, but I believe, perhaps more than anything else, they gave me an appreciation for beauty - in nature, in art, in music, and most of all in words.

Living where we do, there is beauty aplenty, but in way of culture, art, and performance it can feel a bit scarce. Dunlap, after all, boasts no theatres, or art museums, or even a coffee shop with an open mic.

But my parents have spent years connecting with the storytellers, musicians, artisans, and poets in this little corner of the world, and my mom in her usual fashion, made it her mission to host this event to share the bounty of this community.

So if you have joined us here tonight, feeling a bit thin in spirit, I hope you leave full of heart, with a bit of substance to get you through.

And If you are in a season of plenty in your life, I hope you will share the gifts of this evening in the (cold) days and weeks to come.

And with that, I want to share a selection of poems.

When we find some rhythm with nature and the cycles of season and Solstice, there is space and time, quiet and reflection, memory, and then renewal.

First is a piece about Time, which is actually the prologue to a novel by Diana Gabaldon.

“Time is a lot of the things people say that God is. There’s the always preexisting, and having no end. There’s the notion of being all powerful--because nothing can stand against time, can it? Not mountains, not armies.

And time is, of course, all healing. Give anything enough time, and everything is taken care of; all pain encompassed, all hardship erased, all loss subsumed.

Ashes to Ashes, dust to dust. Remember, man, that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return.”

Next is one of my own pieces titled “Woven Baskets” which I wrote after a walk at dusk.

Woven basket holds pink,

red, orange

basket of grey, brown

branches holding the sky

and my one-star dusk; one

star in blue, fading and sliding,

sneaking into darker blue

Woven basket of one-star sky

and moon

waning crescent rising in the

east as I run into the woven basket of

one-star sky moon

and you...

I’d like to invite my friend Zavier Phillips to come up. He’s a student a University Chicago currently studying and also performing with the Comedy Troupe.                                           .

The poem he will read is titled: “To the Garbage Collectors in Bloomington, Indiana on the First Pickup of the New Year” by Philip Appleman

(the way bed is in winter, like an aproned lap,

     like furry mittens,

     like childhood crouching under tables)

The Ninth Day of Xmas, in the morning black

outside our window: clattering cans, the whir

of a hopper, shouts, a whistle, move on ...

I see them in my warm imagination

the way I’ll see them later in the cold,

heaving the huge cans and running

(running!) to the next house on the street.

My vestiges of muscle stir

uneasily in their percale cocoon:

what moves those men out there, what

drives them running to the next house and the next?

Halfway back to dream, I speculate:

The Social Weal? “Let’s make good old

     Bloomington a cleaner place

     to live in—right, men? Hup, tha!”

Healthy Competition? “Come on, boys,

     let’s burn up that route today and beat those dudes

     on truck thirteen!”

Enlightened Self-Interest? “Another can,

     another dollar—don’t slow down, Mac, I’m puttin’

     three kids through Princeton?”

Or something else?

Terror?

A half hour later, dawn comes edging over

Clark Street: layers of color, laid out like

a flattened rainbow—red, then yellow, green,

and over that the black-and-blue of night

still hanging on. Clark Street maples wave

their silhouettes against the red, and through

the twiggy trees, I see a solid chunk

of garbage truck, and stick-figures of men,

like windup toys, tossing little cans—

and running.

All day they’ll go like that, till dark again,

and all day, people fussing at their desks,

at hot stoves, at machines, will jettison

tin cans, bare evergreens, damp Kleenex, all

things that are Caesar’s.

O garbage men,

the New Year greets you like the Old;

after this first run you too may rest

in beds like great warm aproned laps

and know that people everywhere have faith:

putting from them all things of this world,

they confidently bide your second coming.

To end the poetry portion of the evening, a reflection on the New Year titled: “To the New Year” by W.S. Merwin.

With what stillness at last

you appear in the valley

your first sunlight reaching down

to touch the tips of a few

high leaves that do not stir

as though they had not noticed

and did not know you at all

then the voice of a dove calls

from far away in itself

to the hush of the morning

so this is the sound of you

here and now whether or not

anyone hears it this is

where we have come with our age

our knowledge such as it is

and our hopes such as they are

invisible before us

untouched and still possible

Bookends of 2017

2017 was a stellar year for me in many ways.  I began the year by championing a Feed My Starving Children mobile pack.  It came to fruition in April when the mobile pack was fully funded and took place at the National Guard building in Dunlap.  It was fantastic to see our community come together for such a meaningful event.

On December 29th another event took place that was very meaningful to me.  It was called Poetry, Prose and Pie, and it was inspired by my trip to Hutchmoot which I wrote about here.  This was an experimental event to see if an evening of beautiful words and music would interest people.  It was also an attempt to showcase local people who were skilled at sharing their thoughts and talents.

I was completely satisfied with how the evening turned out.  Even though it happened during the busy holiday season, a great crowd turned out.  I am extremely grateful to my friends who so readily agreed to speak or write pieces for this event.  I will be sharing some of the selections that were read here in the coming days.  I hope you will enjoy it.

I invited many friends, but space was limited.  I intend to have other events like this in the future, and if you would like to come see what it's all about be sure to let me know.  I'd love to share this with you.

One of the many pies we had to choose from

John Cofield and his daughter Autumn provided beautiful
music for our enjoyment.

So many friends turned out

I had great help in the kitchen from my dear friend Mary,
my sister Penny and my sister-in-law Pattie.

Lots of good conversation at the tables

Home from Hutchmoot

I've been at a thing called Hutchmoot over the weekend.

What is Hutchmoot?

This is a hard question to answer.

Thursday night Andrew Peterson described it as church summer camp without all the bad parts.  Another time someone called it "feasting as an act of war."  To me it was swimming in an ocean of words, beautiful words.

Hutchmoot is a community above all else.  It is community for people who love words in all the various ways they come to us-- in books, in poems, in songs, and in art.  This community gathered together from all regions of the United States.  Many of the participants were actual artists, but many were there, like me, because they love words.

We began on Thursday evening with a delicious meal and great conversations with strangers who would become known. The chef came out to share with us a piece he wrote that explained the origin of the menu (he did this every evening).  It was every bit as tasty and satisfying as the actual food.  The program afterwards consisted of performances of music and readings that drew us together with a sense of wonder at the beauty and craftsmanship we were seeing and hearing from each artist.

On Friday and Saturday there were sessions on a variety of topics, and they were held in classrooms named for the favorite authors of the organizers: Lewis and Tolkien, Berry and Buechner, Sayers and O'Connor, among others.  I attended "How to Be a Poem" led by John Pattison (whose books I am definitely going to put on my reading list).  It was based on a poem by Wendall Berry called "How to be a Poet," which you can read here.  As Berry explains his craft here, Pattison led us to think about how this poem might relate to the way God is shaping us into a work of art, a poem, to be put on display for others, and how we might participate in this process.

I also attended a session called "The Consolation of Doubt" which was all about the writings of Frederick Buechner (whom you should check out if you haven't read anything by him starting with Telling the Truth).  This class was led by Andrew Peterson who spoke eloquently about the influence of Buechner on his life.  It was also led by Russell Moore who is the President of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention.  I see many of his blog posts on FB, and it was great to get to hear him in person.

One of the highlights of the weekend was an open-mic event for poetry reading.  About sixty people showed up to either share a poem they had written or one they loved.  I wasn't sure I would like this and thought I might end up wishing I could tunnel out of the room, but it was very enjoyable.  There was an equal number of men and women who shared their poems, which surprised me a little.  There were poems on a wide variety of topics, some profoundly sad, others hilariously funny, and everything in between.  Hearing them made all the difference; poetry is made to be read aloud.

And so here's what I came away with...

One of the speakers referenced the story of Jesus feeding the five thousand.  He brought up an idea of the scarcity that the disciples saw in the situation and the abundance that Jesus brought to the scene.  I guess I had always thought of this scarcity/abundance in financial terms.  But this weekend I came to terms with my own view of the place where I live as a place of scarcity.  I spent four days in a place of abundance and left thinking, "What if I can change?  What if I can stop looking at my town as a place of scarcity and begin to see that there is abundance here too?  What if I can make a place for it and foster it, this abundance of thought and words and art?"

What if...