Annotations for Personal Life: Nature

They are born in the sense of what they are born with the capacity for becoming poets. But what fortune deals to them in their early days, their early years, is I think an important factor. Maybe more important than your genes. I think the sense of the natural world, for example, the delight in being alive, and the knowledge of one's mortality, are all involved in the making of the poet.

I believe above all, I suppose, in the web of creation. The sense that everything alive is interconnected and that the so-called natural world is ours. Now we belong to nature just as much as the bears and the locusts and the elephants and the horses. One doesn't learn that by being taught it. It's part of the, maybe the accident of fortune.

I still have my garden up to me. Uh-huh. And to me it's a part of my creative life just as much as language is.

Part of your alliance with the natural world.