Open Link Monday

Welcome to the Imaginary Garden ...

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Greetings Toads! Today we are entering a unique garden, as I share a few thoughts from a book I recently completed. It is a work of non-fiction by author, Paul Rosolie, called Mother of God, documenting Paul's journeys to the Madre de Dios, the steaming tropical jungle at the head of the Amazon River.

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"As I stared at the stars hung at random in billions upon billions of miles of outer space, it suddenly meant something altogether different to be in the jungle. The Amazon, with its vast matrix of interconnected, interdependent organisms as seen from one of those points of light, a star billions of miles from earth, is something unfathomably unique. The Amazon, viewed from space, has been described as the Tree of Rivers: the trunk rising from the Atlantic Ocean and reaching across the continent in ever-diverging branches of tributaries. It is the tree of life, the single greatest example of life to exist, perhaps, in the universe - the miraculous antithesis to the trillions of miles of barren, frigid space."
Read more about Paul Rosolie HERE on Ecology.com

These words made me consider the world we live in from the perspective of everything else in the known universe: what a unique miracle of life we own. As poets we seem to be on a quest to uncover the secrets of human existence, in all its glory and degradation. We try to figure exactly how we fit into a pattern of existence we have barely grasped over the mere 5.5 thousand years of so-called civilization, since we entered the Bronze Age. A reading of Walt Whitman's poem, Miracles, gives some voice to the perspective of which I speak:

Why, who makes much of a miracle? 

As to me I know of nothing else but miracles...

If you have a poem to share today, consider that the very act of writing, recording, creating art through the use of small marks upon a page may be a singularly unique enterprise, unknown in any other part of the Universe. We see, we believe, we preserve, we communicate.