2024 CAN BE A YEAR OF DELIGHT, PROMISES A TIMES COLUMNIST

by Devon Balwit

Quilter Delight Painting by Karla Gerard

The basic premise of a delight practice (which I learned about in the essay collection “The Book of Delights” by Ross Gay) is simple: You make a point to notice things in your everyday life that delight you… Then whenever you notice something that delights you, you lift your arm, raise your index finger in the air and say, out loud and with enthusiasm, “Delight!” (Yes, even if you’re alone.) —Catherine Price, The New York Times, December 31, 2023

I hold up a finger and say Delight!—two shelf mushrooms

in a hollow tree, a squirrel hanging by its feet. I zoom

in on the electric green of moss, a red leaf peeking

from wood chips. Always the teacher’s pet, if seeking

wonder is the task, I’ll find it, if only for the gold

star next to my name on the chart. Behold

the shining face of a baby at the bar, the daffy

hound, a Beethoven riff that makes me laugh! 

 

Expressing simple gratitude does get old—

the litany of health, family, shelter—but marvels

are singular. Even the same street shifts

with the light. I read the essay to the end sold,

ready to dash out and see what’s revealed

as the world sheathes its terrors and bares its gifts.

Devon Balwit walks in all weather and has rediscovered her love of cartooning. Her most recent collection, Spirit Spout [Nixes Mate Books, 2023], storms through Melville’s Moby Dick.

THE NEXT DAY

by James Grabill



So it’s the next day and we’re still alive on the planet where we’ve thrived beyond overflow capacity and immersed ourselves in collective interdependence propped up by long-evolved mineral sense and other species.

With all the fasting and ascension, retooling of Arctic winds for the hog-blinking duration, through certain rains we’ve inherited, amounts of arrogance from before science occur in the underbelly of thought.

And yet this is the chance we were given, to live while the clock hands wheel and numbers vanish along with the sky eventually darkening, where heads of the sunflowers eventually bend heavily toward the ground, as if sizing up where their seeds will fall.

Unfinished presence extends, where mushrooms stake out reclamations.

Stitches Grandma made to dresses on her seamstress bodices I’m sure still exist where they were drawn with attention taut, right for the baby in arms of her mother, in the room behind the door that stays closed.

James Grabill’s recent work is online at the Caliban, Green Mountains Review, Kentucky Review, Elohi Gadugi, Buddhist Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Terrain, Mobius, Calliope, The Oxonian Review, The Toronto Quarterly, Mad Hatter’s Review, Plumwood Mountain, and others. His books include Poem Rising Out of the Earth (1994) and An Indigo Scent after the Rain (2003), both from Lynx House Press. Wordcraft of Oregon has published his new project of environmental prose poems, Sea-Level Nerve: Book One and Book Two. A long-time Oregon resident, he teaches 'systems thinking' and global issues relative to sustainability.