A Poetic Ode to My Chosen Place

Tucson, Arizona 🌵 📚 And how does reading root you?

This month’s letter comes to you from my 73-degree and partly sunny writing perch at the University of Arizona campus for the annual Tucson Festival of Books.

As I write, I’m sitting on a bench. Then I’m listening to journalists, biologists, conservationists, poets and anthropologists. Then I’m watching kids roll down a particular hill while I lay in the grass — one parent announcing that he’s been doing it every year since he was little. I’m hearing a child play her kazoo and smiling at the way another eats a hive of cotton candy bigger than his head. There’s the distant discordant sound of drumbeats and french horns played at the music tent mixed in among the indistinguishable murmur of a walkie-talkie as the sunshine warms my face.

I am here, and it is now, and all around are stories of other heres and nows.

Beyond the churros and circus performers, there are rows and rows of writers selling their years of hard work, and tents and tents full of stacks and stacks of books. At one point, I overhear someone mention that only one in five attendees of this free Festival go to a panel or talk. But it warms my heart to realize why: when you look around and realize how young most of the festival-goers are. What seven-year-old would sit still for a 50 minute panel? Instead, most people come to mill around and simply delight in their mutual love of one of humanity’s greatest pleasures, reading — and one of our greatest inventions, books.

When I was younger, I regularly stayed up way past my bedtime with a book in bed. I don’t recall specifically getting in trouble for staying up late, as long as I was reading. Some of my favorites were Nancy Drew, The Babysitters Club, or The Boxcar Children, but I also especially loved books by Roald Dahl. The fascinating thing about reading a book is that although you are being transported to another time and place, I have found that it can strangely cement you in your real-life time and place. There must be some kind of synaptic plasticity carving out the memory groove. As you paint that internal landscape of your imagination through words, your body also perceives your physical surroundings that much more acutely. It’s striking to me how much reading can root you, and I feel the same way about writing, as well.

A fun one to reminisce on today: Where were you when you read some of your most favorite books?

Last year during the festival, I didn’t go to any panels. Instead, I hung out on the grass on the campus lawn for a few hours while soaking in the hum of the festival, and for the first time in my life in one sitting, I read all 1,300 lines of Walt Whitman’s epic Song of Myself. It was transcendent!

There are not many leaves of grass in Tucson naturally. But at the U of A campus…

This year, other than moments spent writing this letter to you, I went to five sessions featuring authors on topics that intrigued me. During the first, Leslie Patten, who wrote a book about mountain lions, asked us to raise our hand if we’d ever seen one of the animals in the wild. In a crowd of about 100 people, nearly half raised their hands. That’s Tucson for you. She reminded us how rare that was, and she reinforced that humans shouldn’t be afraid of the animals. She said that to mountain lions, humans are just another saguaro cactus that happens to be moving.

That line inspired a bit of the poem at the end of today’s letter — a poetic ode to my chosen place.

On that note! I invite you to head over to Kelton Wright’s

Shangrilogs

for a delightful new series that she is hosting called, Chosen Places. Along the way, you will be transported to far-flung locales, from the mountainous trails of Norway to a small town in England to a farm homestead in New York and today — to my chosen place for over five years now: Tucson, Arizona.

Chosen Places: Tucson, Arizona

Enjoy! ☀️

Cactus Arms
is what I used to call them,
teaching yoga to workaholics
in the nation's capital,

shoulder blades retracted,
with limbs outstretched, making goal posts,
an empowering posture.

Here in the land of cacti, though,
my cues become much more precise:
make saguaro arms.

These giants are our neighbors
with their own distinct personalities 
or at least as we assign them:

this one looks like it's dancing, 
this one looks like it's reaching out for a hug,
this one looks like it's seen things.

You learn to do things in the Sonoran,
like how to stay hydrated, wear close-toed shoes,
and give the prickly plants their space.

You learn to watch your step for rattlesnakes,
and the benefits of hats and long-sleeved shirts,
and the difference a bit of shade makes.

You learn to adjust to the dry air,
and how to go outside during monsoons
to stand with limbs outstretched —

an empowering posture.