Deep Truth | Sandy Weisman
It’s hard to know what’s true. What news to believe. Whom to trust. What positions to take. I cannot ignore the news, yet solace is what I need.
I am looking to geology and Deep Time – the 4.6 billion years of our planet. In this worldview, oceans and rocks are everything. Maine’s rocks date back to the Precambrian era, a billion or more years ago. Maine’s mountains, faults, and erratics nurture my need for rock-solid (forgive the pun) truth. To hold a rock 450 million years old makes me pause, slow down.
As a poet, I find freewriting offers another way to slow down. I write for an hour, take a break, and then look at what my mind and body and heart have put on the page. With luck, I will find a line or two (or, possibly, three!). The beginning of a new poem? A bit of hope?
So, is that it? Am I looking for hope? As a writer, I thought I was looking for truth, not a capital “T” Truth, but something honest and personal. The poet’s presence. Insight into the human condition. Isn’t that also truth?
One poet who is speaking to me right now is Marie Howe. In her poem “The Singularity,” she asks us to wake up:
…to what we were
—when we were ocean and before that
to when sky was earth, and animal was energy, and rock was
liquid and stars were space and space was not
at all—nothing
before we came to believe humans were so important
before this awful loneliness.
These words help me find my own peace in the history of the planet. In “What the World Seemed to Say,” Howe asks if we’re willing:
….to take your place in the forest again?
To become loam and bark, to be a leaf falling from a great height,
to be the worm who eats the leaf,
and the bird who eats the worm? Look at the sky – are you
willing to be the sky again?
I once took a workshop in which we wrote, verbatim, a poem dictated to us, including line breaks and punctuation. Slowing down enough to write a poem dictated requires the body to be ready—ears open and attentive, paper ready and pen poised. With this concentration one’s hand and ears are doing most of the work.
It’s that feeling of being fully engaged I’m after, an encounter of body, heart, and brain. I find that in Carolyn Locke’s poem, “Blossoming,” a three-way encounter between daffodils, the poet, and her granddaughter:
Every day we go to the daffodils. See
how their stiff blades poke inch by inch
through frozen ground. Watch the slow
swelling of buds, their thick green skin
thinning to pale yellow. One morning
we find three petals bright as goldfinches
escaped from their casings. By afternoon
you can’t wait to visit them again. Look!
you say. They popped out all by theirselves
and they didn’t need any help! Days later
you tell me you can hear more of them
popping out. What sound do they make?
I ask. La! La! La! you say, and throw
your head back, laughing with delight.
My own poem, “Seeking Solace,” explores my encounter with Deep Time:
Geologists teach me
mountains rising/eroding
earth warming/cooling.
We are only a tiny subset
of earth’s billion-year history.
I breathe in deep time,
patient as a rock
watching orange lichen bloom
over its face, calm
as a dry river bed, and hopeful
as a tectonic plate
gently bumping into its sister
to push up another splendid mountain.
Deep time is soothing, it brings hope, it provides a truth that resides in my body, mind, and heart. The kind that matters: Deep Truth.
Note: Marie Howe’s poem “The Singularity” is from New and Selected Poems (W.W. Norton & Co., 2024); her poem “What the World Seemed to Say” is from New and Selected Poems (W.W. Norton & Co., 2024). Carolyn Locke’s poem is cited, in full, with the author’s permission.
Sandy Weisman is an artist and poet, living in South Thomaston, ME. She is the owner of 26 Split Rock Cove, a small artist community of studios and one residency apartment for artists and writers.
