Introduction to Every Atom by project curator Brian Clements
Dazzling and tremendous, how quick the sun-rise would kill me,
If I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me.
When I teach yoga, as my students are coming into savasana, I talk about the flow of prana—spirit, breath, healing energy—into and throughout the body, and then upon the exhalation, flowing out of the body and back into the universe, so that each of us in some sense shares existence with all things. In this way, too, the first principle of ecology—that everything is interconnected—is no illusion.
But what does it mean, to send sunrise out of oneself? Surely not to get rid of it. Instead, I think it means to share it, to express it, in whatever form one finds to do so.
What I love about Whitman’s lines is their reciprocity—metaphorically, the inhale/exhale of beauty and bliss. I walked into the kitchen this morning, glanced out the window, and beheld our maple tree light-drenched, dazzling, most of its leaves still on the branches, quivering like flames in the early morning.
Ann Fisher-Wirth’s sixth book is The Bones of Winter Birds; (2019) her fifth is Mississippi, a poetry/photography collaboration with Maude Schuyler Clay (2018). With Laura-Gray Street, Ann is co-editor of The Ecopoetry Anthology. A senior fellow of the Black Earth Institute, 2017 Anne Spencer Poet in Residence at Randolph College, she teaches and directs the environmental studies minor at the University of Mississippi, and teaches yoga in Oxford, MS.
Photo by Simon Rae on Unsplash