in my ongoing attempt to resist mechanical time and our alienation from the earth, my latest in the benedictine magazine spirit & life invites us into the traditional discipline of ember and rogation days with a renewed view and intent.

was happy to get this out, and am mulling subconsciously on another similar essay on telling time by the moon, and maybe the sun. we’ll see. third quarter moon tonight!

pax inter spinas.

fern dell is a 1/4 mile gorge made in upper cambrian sandstone by dell creek. lots of ferns, yes, amid a red and white pine wood all leading to a precipitous drop over mirror lake. which is in its own gorge.

after a day spent out madison-way for family business, we called in some reinforcements and headed to mirror lake state park. i’ve been going to the baraboo hills area my entire life, but never made it here for some reason or other. we’ll certainly be back. we hiked the upper unit where the creek is hardly visible this time of year and down to the lower portion where it opens out quite a bit from all the springs and seeps.

highlight was all the tiny fruiting teaberry along cliff’s edge. (first id.)

some “living found” lunes for you:

a.

& there’s the rippling

of sandstone

up above dell creek

b.

all of berried life

in an inch:

two-leaved teaberry

c.

cellulose scrollwork

embracing

the vanished heartwood

I’ve been at work making early modern Benedictine nun Dame Gertrude More’s writings and spirituality more available since I taught a summer seminar on women mystics and visionaries at Marquette University back in 2017. I’d reached out to her community to see if I could edit and publish her shorter works, and her Poems and Counsels on Prayer and Contemplation came out around the time the pandemic started. Then a couple years later, I wrote a chapter on her for A Benedictine Reader 1530-1930. I’m also at work with a colleague editing her more sustained work, a spiritual diary known as her Confessions.

And so it was with great joy that I visited the community at Stanbrook Abbey for their fourth-centenary celebration this year by offering a couple talks on Dame Gertrude’s teaching on mortification and contemplation last weekend for their community study day. All the sisters made me very welcome, and it was a pleasure getting to walk the Yorkshire gills and hear the offices chanted while getting to know them, some of their oblates, and a variety of visitors. The sandstone outcroppings in the gills were gorgeous. My heartfelt thanks to the whole community at Stanbrook!

Can’t wait to get her bigger work out; will be working on it this winter break. Stay tuned!

i grew up visiting durward’s glen outside baraboo, wisconsin. it was/is a stupendous place: a secluded sandstone and conglomerate gorge flanking prentice creek on a small wooded lot outside the precambrian baraboo hills.

later on in life, when i moved to milwaukee, i found out that the glen was named after bernard durward, a scottish immigrant to milwaukee in the 1840s and a transplant to the baraboo area in the 1860s. i also found out that i currently live on the same street he lived on way back then.

all this (and that he became the first professor of english at the catholic seminary here near milwaukee and was an artist and poet) led me to start getting together a new edition of his poems, which i’m hoping to publish within the next couple years.

but in the meantime, i’m just itching to get his work out there sooner than that, so: i’ve recently come into a copy of durward’s poems from 1882. i’m going to start posting here regularly an audio file of one milwaukeean (me) reading another milwaukeean’s (durward) poems. we’ll see if i can make it happen daily, but every few days anyway.

two further bits: 1) the illustrations will be images from bernard’s son’s book wildflowers of the glen (1875), used by permission of the milwaukee public library, which holds the volume now, and 2) this is 19th-century american verse, so sometimes there will be some settler-colonial sentiments present—this is a sad but real aspect of midwestern history. i won’t post poems that are particularly problematic if i come across any. but to be clear: the durwards and my own ancestors and lots of yankees and european immigrants directly benefited from the land-grabs of the american federal and wisconsin state governments, and this was a terrible terrible series of events for the indigenous peoples of “the old northwest” and for the colonizers and the descendants of all of the too. as junot díaz says, “we’ve all been in the sh*t ever since.”

history being what it is, i still think generally that folks’ art is worth engaging and wrestling with even in their limitations, as we all have our limitations as well.

with that, poem #1, “the dells“:

the little menomonee river nature preserve in ozaukee county is a 20-acre parcel of wooded land thru which runs the little menomonee. the river is small and seems to be close to its source here, and it has been vigorously channelized. further downstream the county is starting rejuvenation efforts and de-channelizing. (the word used is “remeandering,” which is fantastic.) hopefully, the city of mequon, which acquired the parcel in 1992, will continue those efforts or encourage and permit the county to do so.

it was a gorgeous fall day, and we meandered thru the woods of maple and oak, finding some fungus and the kids forded the river. a quiet, out of the way site, whose trail i wished had led thru more of the wood.

a.

lanced green spiraling

into thorn

silk in waning sun

b.

the menomonee

channelized,

sculpted to a dash