Hello dearest reader,
Happy Monday, and welcome to a new week and to another edition of Red Campion Post. I hope you are feeling well, and can look forward to some pockets of joy in these final days of March.
Perhaps the rains have found you today, as they have indeed found me. After a weekend of March sunshine, everything is once again subsumed in vaporous mists sifted down from a thick grey sky, and beyond the window of the room where I sit and write to you, passersby hurry through the enveloping rain toward destinations unknown to me. I watch them with faces bowed towards the ground, puddles splashing underfoot, and I wonder where they are going, and I wonder about their heart, and whether it feels light or heavy. So many faces that we cannot put a name to, so many stories that we do not know, and yet we all live together in this place, making and remaking the world that we share.
After a spell of writing this morning, I did brave the rain to take myself out into the garden, my hands craving some purposeful work. As is most often the case when I step out into cold, rain, and wind, I was quickly reminded of how easily we tend to impress our own troubled emotions upon inclement weather; shutting ourselves away indoors whenever conditions fall out of our favour, gazing in disdain at the falling rain from behind our windowpanes, believing that bad weather has nothing good to offer us.
Once we step outdoors and brave the weather, however, we may erase the separateness that we create between ourselves and the landscape. Indeed, once we are out in it, and we feel its coolness upon our skin, we may find that there is nothing sad about the rain, and that conversely, it can actually be quite invigorating, leaving us feeling markedly more alive than we felt when we were huddled away inside. Just a little something to ponder next time you find yourself lamenting rain clouds, as we are all wont to do from time to time.
Rain aside, today's small piece of post brings you the second instalment in our series on hope. This four-part run of correspondence seeks to entwine reflections on the dawn of springtime with thoughts on the nature of hope’s essential force, considering its interaction with experiences of change, renewal, and transience. I hope you enjoy today’s small offerings, and that they may lighten your step a little as you embark upon your week.
With love ‘til next time,
Anna Margarita
x
Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems by heart.
— Rainer Maria Rilke
a poem | WORM MOON by Mary Oliver
from Twelve Moons, 1979.
Below you will find Mary Oliver’s poem “Worm Moon”, published in 1979. It seemed fitting to offer this poem today with the advent of the very moon that the poem takes its title from. The full moon of March, known as the Worm Moon, can be seen this evening in the night sky, heralding the coming of Springtime like a great orb of phosphorescent hopefulness. Remember to look up this evening and draw your eye across the cloak of night in search of its splendour.
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WORM MOON I. In March the earth remembers its own name. Everywhere the plates of snow are cracking. The rivers begin to sing. In the sky the winter stars are sliding away; new stars appear as, later, small blades of grain will shine in the dark fields. And the name of every place is joyful. II. The season of curiosity is everlasting and the hour for adventure never ends, but tonight even the men who walked upon the moon are lying content by open windows where the winds are sweeping over the fields, over water, over the naked earth, into villages, and lonely country houses, and the vast cities III. because it is spring; because once more the moon and the earth are eloping - a love match that will bring forth fantastic children who will learn to stand, walk, and finally run over the surface of earth; who will believe, for years, that everything is possible. IV. Born of clay, how shall a man be holy; born of water, how shall a man visit the stars; born of the seasons, how shall a man live forever? V. Soon the child of the red-spotted newt, the eft, will enter his life from the tiny egg. On his delicate legs he will run through the valleys of moss down to the leaf mold by the streams, where lately white snow lay upon the earth like a deep and lustrous blanket of moon-fire, VI. and probably everything is possible.
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Nobody can mine the phenomena of the natural world for shards of hope quite like Mary Oliver could, and this poem is testament to that.
Trying to define ‘hope’ is slippery business, but I believe that we can understand this force as a place that we may access within ourselves; a certain dimension of our soul. When Mary Oliver wrote, I believe that she understood the gravity of the natural world in enabling us to access this place of hopefulness within ourselves — how a passing cloud, a green blade of grass, a swollen moon, or the hatching of an egg to bring forth a tiny new life can all bring us into the hopeful embrace of Life’s continual cycles of renewal, reminding us that yes, “probably everything is possible”.
Beautiful 🌼