Finding Your Way Back to Wonder: On the Power of Poetry to Sustain Our Spirits

It can’t be true that every town in the Midwest has a grain silo, but the four-hundred-some miles between Laramie, Wyoming, and Red Cloud, Nebraska, would make you think so: long clear stretches of highway and farmland punctuated by concrete towers and clusters of capped steel bins, ladders and catwalks spidering between them; some small collection of trucks circling, constant but unhurried, in the back. Then, a filling station, a few houses, an improbable post office, like a stray stucco spaceship crash-landed by the side of the road.

When my friend A and I make the seven-hour drive along Route 6 to a conference, a bank of near-purple clouds in the left corner of the horizon follows us most of the way, but otherwise the sky is blue. The silos coming into view become a kind of ritual: something is happening here. Everything shines in the morning sun, and I think of the opening lines of “Magnum Mysterium,” an early Lucie Brock-Broido poem.

Since I’ve lived in many places, it’s odd
That I continue to waken in Nebraska,
Wandering into the sunroom where the wheat
Has come up wide overnight.

Partly, I know the poem is rising from my memory spurred by this landscape—little clapboard houses and high, soft fields moving like water—but I am thinking at least as much about waken and wandering and wide as I am about wheat, all that consonance, the way the words roll into one another like waves, one mystery after another: Why do I find myself here, of all places? How did it happen that when I slept, there was nothing, and now there’s all of this?

We’re of the world, and in it together, even and perhaps especially when it feels fragile, or we do.

Lately, I’ve been struggling to access a sense of wonder. The news is thick with horrors. A pipe in my kitchen clogs, again, and floods the laundry room in stale water. My work email chimes: a legislative mandate to cut funding, a schedule due yesterday, a student I love wondering how to keep going. In the mornings, I open the windows; I walk the dog; I trek up the wide western blocks to the campus of my university. It takes me weeks to realize I’ve stopped really looking at the world around me, occupied instead with the clatter inside my own head: the continual failures of institutions, the mundane emergencies of living, all the things I fear about the country, and my life.

Brock-Broido’s poem goes on: “If I lived in a railroad car, / I could keep an eye on the weather.” Her speaker is convinced that she “could fathom things that way,” sure that if she could make a life of watching the clouds gather and disperse, the seasons change, the landscape churn by, “the quarries / churning great chunks of marble,” she might arrive at meaningful understanding. As we trundle through Nebraska, I watch each little town crop up, sharpen, and then disappear.

And I feel what she means, the way the shifting light hits the eves of a barn and instantly throws into focus all the lives you could be living but aren’t. The luckier ones, and the less lucky, and the lives for which luck isn’t a useful metric at all. I look out the passenger window, and for a second all these other existences feel just as clear, sharp, and urgent as my own. This is the feeling I’ve learned to call grace. If I could just keep looking and looking, I think, I could fathom things, find my way back to wonder.

*

“Magnum Mysterium” translates to “Great Mystery,” and the poem takes its title from a responsorial chant from the Matins of Christmas in the Roman Breviary. It’s about the nativity, a moment when the animals are watching Jesus asleep in the manger, and all these ordinary things—livestock, a new mother, her infant—are weighted with the heft of the miraculous. Matins is the canonical hour of the predawn morning, a hushed, suspended time reserved for contemplation.

At the moment of the nativity, all is quiet and possible. In the hours just before the sun rises, all is quiet and possible. If you make your whole life in a railroad car, your forehead pressed to the window, “the clouds a gallery of passing obsessions,” all is quiet and possible. The problem, of course, is that that hour doesn’t last. The baby wakes and wails; the noise and demands of the day rush in. Things happen: boring and beautiful, hard and horrible. Things that can make mystery feel far away and faith in much of anything feel difficult or even impossible.

There’s another poem, by Cameron Awkward-Rich, that often makes the rounds in my circle in times of extremity, a state that feels constant lately. It’s called “Meditations in an Emergency,” and it begins: “I wake up & it breaks my heart.” A plain, wrenching acknowledgment. In Awkward-Rich’s poem it’s raining, and the speaker ventures out into a world where

…the buildings, men in

Monday suits. The flight of doves, the city of tents
beneath the underpass, the huddled mass, old
women hawking roses, & children all of them,
break my heart.

On first read, this is a poem in which solace is hard to come by. The speaker has to “dream” a reality in which he “love[s] the world,” one where “there are no borders, only wind.” But what strikes me anew each time I read it is the way the poem’s central litany instantiates this dream in the very world we live in. The speaker is willing to be struck, be moved, by people and things it might be easier to look past or look through. As different as it is from Brock-Broido’s, Awkward-Rich’s poem is also a kind of paean to the significance of sustained attention. After all, only when we come to know and love something is there the risk of heartbreak.

*

My friend A grew up in the city, far from any kind of agricultural landscape. On our drive through Nebraska, each time we pass another little town she gestures out the window, offering joking commentary like the world’s least informed judge of America’s Got Silos: This town’s thing is clearly better than the last town’s thing. The tallest ones are best, and it’s nicer when they’re closer to the road, come on! As with everyone I love most, she makes me laugh easily and unselfconsciously, and she is fascinated by the world. She tells me she’s learned that one difference between farmland and prairie is that prairie has an underneath: invisible depths like the ocean. And once we mow it down, it isn’t prairie anymore and never will be again. We’ve altered it irrevocably. This one fact holds so many things inside it: gorgeousness, mystery, violence, ruin.

When I stop writing, almost immediately belief begins to feel like something distant and ludicrous.

My favorite moment in “Magnum Mysterium” is a turn in the penultimate stanza, when the speaker offers a kind of prayer:

If I have some important thing to say
I hope I live here long enough
To say it gracefully.

Every time I read these lines, I’m drawn to their humility: the work that first if is doing, the entreaty of I hope. But I’m moved also by that here. Grammatically, the line doesn’t need it, but there’s something crucial in the speaker’s desire to stay where “the corn beats inside its stalks, waiting for bloom,” where “wheat flowers, falls easily,” in the thick of the material world, temporary and changeable as it is. This is where she wants to make her offering, and it’s also, she knows, the place that will—if she keeps watching—teach her how to do it gracefully. It matters, I think, that the great mystery is in the world: in “the tents beneath the underpass,” the dense ecosystem of the tallgrass prairie, the musty dimness of a barn. Something divine made flesh, made mortal, made one of us.

The conviction of our interconnectedness, of something collective in our existence, is the other thing that links “Meditations in an Emergency” and “Magnum Mysterium.” “Like you I was born,” writes Awkward-Rich, and Brock-Broido writes: “The wind moves / Everything. Nothing is exempt.” There isn’t exactly solace in either of these lines. Being born underneath the vast sky, into all this weather, is vulnerable. We’re buffeted. But both poems know we’re of the world, and in it together, even and perhaps especially when it feels fragile, or we do. Attention is the seed of change. The thing we owe one another.

Really, this is why I’ve always loved and needed poems: they sustain the contemplative hours of the early, unbreeched morning, whenever you come to them. They both demand careful observation and carve the space for it. It’s also why the first thing that happens when I stop really looking around is that I stop writing. And why, when I stop writing, almost immediately belief begins to feel like something distant and ludicrous.

The truth is, I frequently find faith difficult to sustain. So much is brutal. Being alive is loud, laborious, and painful. But the people and poems and prayers I love most teach me again and again that the cure for the estrangement from hope is not to look away from the world but toward it, and that this takes practice and strength. I hope I live here long enough to say something gracefully. I hope I can look long and hard enough to let the mess and the mystery break my heart. For now, we’re still driving through Nebraska. Around us, the grass grows steadily taller. Ahead of us, “the clouds become enormous & have names.”

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“Nebraskan Mystery” by Molly McCully Brown appears in the latest issue of Image Journal.