Читать книгу The Wild in You - Lorna Crozier - Страница 8

friend Ian. She thought we’d like each other, she said, and he’d agreed to take some pictures while I was there. Knowing the brilliance of his photographs and his international reputation, I didn’t expect to meet such a modest and laconic man.

A chewed-up wool toque pulled low on his forehead, his face reddened from the ocean and the wind, he hopped out of his boat onto the dock, held out his hand, and—Kim was right—I liked him instantly. She’d also said, with naïve optimism, that maybe Ian and I could do a book together. We both circled that suggestion like strange wolves and promised each other nothing. Yet by the time I left, we’d agreed he would send me some photographs and I’d see if they triggered a response. He doesn’t need poems to enhance his images—they don’t require any explanation. My challenge was to make a new thing that could stand beside each picture and speak to it in an unpredictable, hopefully surprising, way.

It wasn’t only the days I spent in the rainforest and Ian’s photographs, brilliant as they are, that turned me to poetry. It was also learning about the vulnerability of this place and its inhabitants. I share Ian’s passion for the natural world, and though it may sound crazy, I believe that if we honor living things other than ourselves—orcas, ravens, wolves, cedars—our attention will remind us that they are holy. To see them clearly is the deepest kind of praise, the deepest kind of love. To wound them and their habitats is to wound ourselves.

As I move toward seven decades of living on this earth, I find myself growing lonelier. It’s not the deaths of friends and members of my family that make me feel forlorn, though those losses bring a grief that numbs.