Derek Sheffield

I suppose I wasn't too surprised at the turn "What It Feels Like" makes toward the end. That's where I am now in my life, struggling to give the gift of letting go to my daughters. Mary Oliver said, "Attention is the beginning of devotion," and that's exactly what happened to me. Paradoxically, that devotion now means moving out of the range of attention. Or perhaps a different kind of attention. Of course, that's the lesson the garden was offering all along. These plant beings my daughters and I cared for together through the warm days of spring and summer would grow and change. 

Behind this poem is another "ripping away" that took place eleven years ago when circumstances forced me to move from my first home as an adult. A little house between a creek and a forest. The garden I had there grew what my friend Dwight assured me were the best strawberries on the planet. And there was a rhubarb that was one of the hardiest beings I've ever encountered. The more we forgot about it the more it thrived. Aside from a patch of lodgepole pines, the front acre of the place had been denuded, especially along the creek. I set to work immediately planting all my favorite native beings. There was a long row of Ponderosa Pine. They were so cute! Maybe ten inches tall, like baby porcupines with their green needles pointing every which way. In between them, bristly Nootka Rose bushes blooming pink in May. And there were so many others. Doug-fir, Red Alder, Golden Currant, Kinnikinnick, Columbine (I'm stepping around the place in memory as I make this list), Serviceberry, Scouler Willow, Western White Pine, Black Cottonwood, Mock Orange (the most intoxicating scent), Blue Elderberry, Lupine, Arrowleaf Balsamroot, and Tamarack. 

I did not know what I was doing until we moved away and I felt the same kind of tearing I feel now as my daughters stride on into their adult lives. Simone Weil said, "Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer." All that time planting, watering, fertilizing, mulching, re-mulching. The winters I worried about them under the snow load. All those hours I spent in the company of those plant beings was a kind of prayer in which my sense of self mingled with theirs. I still mourn the loss of that place, those beings. It is still difficult for me to go back, even as I have been doing the same thing here at the new place, even as I'm sure I'll do it again. Such is the way of love, no?