Ten years ago my 21-year-old son died on the Sunday following Easter. The coupling of the tragedy with the celebration of Christ’s resurrection makes my questioning of the religious observance all the more acute. Do I really believe that Jesus rose from the dead? Is there life after the death of our bodies? Or if […]
Tag Archives: Nature
Stepping over Every Dark Thing
If life seems hard at the moment, I have a poem that may lift you up: Mary Oliver’s “Egrets.” Oliver is, if not the most popular poet writing in America today, at least among the top five. Her poems often function as prayers to a divine spirit running through nature. In this way, she comes […]
The Restorative Power of Daffodils
Daffodils have been breaking out all over. St. Mary’s City has a little ravine that we refer to as “Daffodil Gulch,” and the flowers this year have been spectacular. Daffodil Gulch borders St. Mary’s River, and if one visits it on a sunny day and then looks beyond to the sparkling waters, one cannot help […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud", Depression, Tintern Abbey, Williams Wordsworth Comments closed
Environmental Revenge Fantasy
Film Friday Henceforth I will devote my Friday posts to something I like almost as much as literature–which is to say, movies. Film is, after all, a narrative art form, and I teach film history and theory as well as literature at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Although I may, at times, look at intersections between […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Avatar, Environmentalism, James Cameron, James Fenimore Cooper, Jungle Books, Last of the Mohicans, Rudyard Kipling Comments closed
Seeking a Spiritual Connection with Nature
from Songs of Innocence and Experience My Introduction to Literature class (focus on Nature) has just moved from Robinson Crusoe to William Blake, and we are seeing in the 18th century a conflict similar to one we are witnessing today over the environment. Defoe’s protagonist is an advocate of the “drill, baby, drill” approach to nature although, […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Mock on, "The Garden of Love", Auguries of Innocence, Capitalism, Fundamentalism, Religion, Rousseau, Voltaire, William Blake Comments closed
Snow Days Open Up Cracks in Time
An unusually heavy snowstorm has locked us into our homes these past few days, cancelling my Monday classes and locking down the county. Years ago, in an essay I’d love to find again, an author wrote about the “found time” of a snow day. She noted that, because we normally believe we must make every […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Stopping by Woods on a Winter Evening", Robert Frost, Time Comments closed
The Birds of War-Torn Afghanistan
I share today a poem by my father Scott Bates, who is an ardent birdwatcher as well as poet. The poem reminds us of an ongoing war that too often we want to push out of our minds. Through contrasting the natural world with the disasters created by humans, my father expresses his longing for […]
Mess with Dionysus and You’ll Pay
Euripides’ The Bacchae was written 2500 years ago. Given the shape our environment is in, the play is more urgent than ever. The story involves the nature god Dionysus, who visits Thebes followed by a troupe of dancing women, the Maenads or Bacchae. Dionysus is the product of a union between Zeus and Semele, a […]
