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JOHN PADDOCK: A phantasm, nothing else existed in the beginning.

The father touched an illusion.

He grasped something mysterious. Nothing existed.

Through the agency of a dream, our Father Naimuena kept the mirage to his body.

And he pondered long and thought deeply.

Nothing existed, not even a stick to support the vision.

Our father attached the illusion to the thread of a dream and kept it by the aid of his breath.

He sounded to reach the bottom of the appearance, but there was nothing.

Nothing existed. Then the father again investigated the bottom of the mystery.

He tied the empty illusion to the dream thread and pressed the magical substance upon it.

Then, by the aid of his dream, he held it like a wisp of raw cotton.

Then he seized the mirage bottom and stamped upon it repeatedly, sitting down at last on his dreamed Earth.

The Earth phantasm was his now, and he spat out saliva repeatedly so that the forests might grow.

Then he lay down on his Earth and covered it with the roof of heaven.

As he was the owner of the Earth, he placed above it the blue and the white sky.

Thereupon, Rafuema, the man who has the narratives, sitting at the base of the sky pondered.

And he created this story so that we might listen to it here upon Earth.

SPEAKER: A creation myth, which comes from the Witoto Indians of Colombia. All cultures have myths to explain the beginnings of mankind. Myths rich in metaphor, expressing it is suspected some fundamental truths welling up from our collective subconscious.

When Nancy Paddock set out to write a creation myth of her own, she too found herself caught up in a story which seemed to spring from hidden depths.

NANCY PADDOCK: The strange thing about it is that it came by itself. It starts out in a free-verse poem and evolved into rhyme and meter, which I never use. So I don't feel like this is my poem. It's called "Creation."

JOHN PADDOCK: One of the things that's interesting about it is that her God is female. It's a goddess, not a God.

SPEAKER: I was thinking of that because most of the myths begin with the father. That one did. And God, the father, created heaven and Earth, and so forth.

NANCY PADDOCK: Well, most of the later myths begin with the Father. But I understand that superimposed on the earlier ones.

[LAUGHTER]

And in the timeless time, the spaceless space, the Godhead rested,

And in her hunger, moving,

Time and space began,

And where she stopped, the universe assembled,

Stars and planets, suns and moons and men,

And as she moved, she stirred the world with light,

And as she moved, she lit the world with life,

And as she moved, she lost herself in pieces,

Lost her hunger into things which hunger,

Hunger to remember and be one again,

And so she sleeps in every wakened beast,

And so she sleeps in words,

The planets turning, fires burning, wars returning,

All our dreams that fly as birds,

So lost and so forgotten,

These pieces do not see the chain,

We starve for loss of one another,

We kill and cry and die like rain,

And wide awake and hungry always,

While the sleeping Godhead rests,

We die of life and live in pieces,

For the time when hunger ceases,

She will not be our salvation,

Waking sight will burn her blind,

The dizzy spinning of creation end,

In union in her mind."

SPEAKER 3: You suppose that's the final truth?

[CHUCKLING]

NANCY PADDOCK: I'm sure it isn't. [CHUCKLES]

SPEAKER 2: You know, it is curious to me. Why shouldn't the creation myths begin with woman? It makes sense.

NANCY PADDOCK: Well, some of them do. When you read lots of the original myths, they even talk about a time when the men took over and banished the women, in fact, actually murdered a lot of them and took power and then deposed the goddesses and set up the gods. And so it's an interesting theory anyway.

SPEAKER 3: An awful lot of them approach creation the way we approach human birth, though, too. And it required both a god and a goddess to create the world. Robinson Jeffers wrote a creation myth poem, which is tied up to a scientific approach. It's kind of interesting, too. He talks about the pulsation.

[OTHERWORLDLY MUSIC]

Again, it's just a metaphor, I think. I think that science, too, approaches the world metaphorically and then tries to, through the metaphors, relate it to real and observed happenings. And Jeffers talked about an expansion and contraction, which he feels goes on in the universe or which he has read about in scientific treatises. And Jeffers calls it the great explosion.

He says, "The universe expands and contracts like a great heart. It is expanding. The farthest nebulae rush with the speed of light into empty space. It will contract. The immense navies of stars and galaxies, dust clouds and nebulae are recalled home.

They crush against each other in one harbor. They stick in one lump and then explode. Nothing can hold them down. There is no way to express that explosion. All that exists roars into flame. The tortured fragments rush away from each other into all the sky. New universes, jewel of Black rust at night. And far off, the outer nebulae, like charging spearman again invade emptiness.

[JARRING MUSIC]

[CAT STEVENS, "MORNING HAS BROKEN]

(SINGING) Morning has broken. like the first morning

Blackbird has spoken like the first bird

Praise for the singing

Praise for the morning

Praise for them springing fresh from the world.

NANCY PADDOCK: Her fate seizes her and brings her down. She's heavy with it. It rings her. The great weight is heaved out of her. It eases. She moves into what she has become. Sure in her fate now, as a fish free in the current, she turns to the calf who has broken out of the womb's water and its veil.

He breathes. She licks his wet hair. He gathers his legs under him and rises. He stands, and his legs wobble. After the months of his pursuit of her, now they meet face-to-face. From the beginnings of the world, his arrival and her welcome have been prepared. They have always known each other.

(SINGING) Eden saw play.

SPEAKER 2: A poem by Wendell Berry, her first calf.

(SINGING) Praise every morning

God's recreation of the new day

JOHN PADDOCK: A birth is an astonishing beginning of an animal or a human being or anything at all. I speak from experience. I've seen my own son born this past year. It almost defies any words to describe it.

John Rezmerski, a Saint Peter poet, told me that after the birth of his first child, in that following month, he wrote over 200 poems. The creativity that's inherent apparently, or released in the experience of witnessing a birth, especially your own child, must be just an amazing thing. We haven't experienced that, but apparently it's really quite something.

I was interested in how he brought that back into the-- we talked about the original creation myth. But he says, "from the beginning of the universe," I believe, was the line there. So he brought creation back in this pattern over and over and over again.

NANCY PADDOCK: That always strikes me of how the birds and the animals just around the house are always the same. And even though you know that each year many of them are different particular animals, they're always the same. And these patterns persist over time.

And where he says, they have always known each other. And in a sense, that makes it such a timeless and eternal thing of mother and child, which is the same thing, whether it's a human being or a reptile. Anytime there's any dawning of the instinct to care for that mother and child thing is the same.

SPEAKER: It makes the whole concept of beginnings almost a little bit artificial in a way, because we don't experience many real beginnings. We experience re-beginnings or renewal of the cycle.

NANCY PADDOCK: Especially in the natural world. I think in the human world where you can invent a new machine or something like that, then perhaps there are real new things.

JOHN PADDOCK: But maybe that's even an expression of natural forces in a way through us. The Hindu myths have tended always to talk about there being no beginnings. It's another approach that has gone on forever. One thing passing, it's more circular, and it's endless and has always been and will always be.

NANCY PADDOCK: Or in the Yi Jing, where-- the Book of Changes-- each ending and a new beginning is a constant theme that works through the whole thing.

SPEAKER: It's almost a universal even in the Christian world, the phrase recurs over and over in the liturgy, as it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be, world without end.

NANCY PADDOCK: And you must become as a little child to enter the Kingdom of heaven.

JOHN PADDOCK: Which is a new beginning in an adult's life.

NANCY PADDOCK: And except that a seed fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone-- that whole idea of the change-- well, even having the Christmas be the big celebration where you celebrate the child more than you celebrate the adult Christ. It's the child that warms everyone's heart and that is the symbol of the newness that's possible in us.

JOHN PADDOCK: The seed image that you used from the Bible there also goes on to say, but if you do fall into the ground and die, well, then you will bring forth much fruit. And again, this is one of those witness things.

I hope we're talking about this in the right way. I don't think you should talk about these things without a sense of awe in your voice. There's something very strange going on here. And I think our culture has pushed it back. I'm wondering, where do we come from? Every once in a while I think about that. And I'm just awestruck by it.

NANCY PADDOCK: That anything should exist at all?

JOHN PADDOCK: Why are we here? And if you don't have a very patterned conventional religious acceptance of how we're here, you tend to forget the fact entirely. Every once in a while, I'm struck again, what am I doing and what should I be doing? And all of this is, I think, important in reawakening your own sense of self in the universe.

We were talking about birth, though. And Nancy and I, of course, been involved in the Olivia project, working as poets in the community. And I interviewed a woman who was 90 years old now. And she described a birth she witnessed back around the turn of the century before she was married.

And at that time, birth was apparently a little less easy than it is these days. And it might give us an idea of what birth, in fact, was before we had some of the medical helps that we have now. And it's interesting to get the sense of this old woman talking about what it meant to her and her life.

She said it is a breach when the feet come first. That is not so good either. And they come doubled sometimes. But that can be turned to. I think some women, they lost their life. I don't know. Well, I know my niece, the first girl that was born. And we got a midwife. They said that she was so good.

And the midwife got her, and my goodness sake, chilled her. She made her walk on the floor. It was on Saturday. I was there working there already-- made her made her walk on that wet floor. That was on Saturday. That's the way it should be. She was sick. And after that night, she laid there just like dead.

They got Dr. Pretzinger, the doctor. He couldn't do anything. And he said the midwife, she chilled her, so she would never have those labor pains. And my goodness sake, I never in my life seen anything like that. And I was only a girl of 16 then. I thought to myself, I will never get married. That's for sure-- laughs. I had to be kind of a hand in everything, too, then in my land's sake.

On Sunday, then the doctor said, we've got to do something because we can't leave her lay like this. She'll die. No pains or nothing. She was just laying there like this, like nothing happened. So they had to force it now. And old man, alive people, I never saw anything like it. I thought, oh, heavens. They'd pull that baby all to pieces.

The doctor, he'd braced his feet against that bed and pull-- oh, oh. And then one would hold the chloroform on the face. My brother Herman and Will was there to hold something, the arm or legs. Oh, I tell you, that Sunday morning. And it was just on account of this midwife that she did it. And then they had such a pinchers.

And I don't see how them doctors can do that, hold that so. She had a little mark on her forehead and in the back of her neck. But that went away. How they can hold them pitchers, pitchers so steady, that they don't hurt. How they did pull on that little child.

I thought they'd pull the head off, but they didn't. She was a big girl, and she grew up and was OK. Yes, but, oh, something like that is terrible. All of that I went through, but still, I got married.

SPEAKER: She was how old?

JOHN PADDOCK: She was 16 at that time.

SPEAKER: No, I mean, at the time--

JOHN PADDOCK: She's 90 now. Yeah, I guess she was 89 when I interviewed her. I don't know if I mentioned that we put these interviews together in a book, which is an oral history of the Olivia area called, the things we know best.

SPEAKER: Well, so that would have been, what, 74 years or so ago?

JOHN PADDOCK: Yeah, about the turn of the century.

SPEAKER: Yeah.

JOHN PADDOCK: Yeah.

SPEAKER: Which really was a time of beginnings out here, new people in a new land. Incredible experiences they must have had.

JOHN PADDOCK: Yeah. Well, we actually recorded some discussions of how it was when people first arrived out here in the southwestern Minnesota prairies.

NANCY PADDOCK: The early memories of a man named [? Imo Kurnick ?] are of the early prairies before they were ever broken. And he has some bohemian accent, which, of course, I won't be able to transmit. But if--

JOHN PADDOCK: It's very charming, though. It's fun to talk.

NANCY PADDOCK: Oh, yeah, when the folks come here, it was all prairie land. It was just a few farmers around here. And Bird Island, that was the only thing that had trees. When the prairie fires used to come, they used to burn out everything.

And this here, Bird Island, there was water standing, a slew around the whole island. And that didn't let the fires in there. And that's why the trees got to grow in there. Nowadays, there ain't nothing there by god. It's all worked into good field. But then, when the folks first come over here, it was all prairie land.

There used to be a lot of prairie chickens. Yes. You got up in the morning. You could hear them bubbling in every direction from the place, howling just like a pigeon. You could hear them howl like that mostly in the spring of the year. That's when they'd be on the hills, on the prairie. By god, you could hear them bubbling.

Ducks, it was just like blackbirds in those slews just clouds and clouds of ducks, and geese and everything. Sometimes in those slews where the big geese had their nests, we'd take their eggs, and mother would put them under hens, hatch them under hens.

And we had wild geese right to home. You tamed them. But they was flyers. They liked to fly away. And if they got away into those slews with them wild geese, they was gone. And we didn't see them no more.

Mother used to clip their wings. And then they'd grow up big enough. And then mother used to butcher them, didn't bother saving any at all because if we wanted any more, all we had to do was go hunt around the slew and pick up eggs and hatch our own.

Ducks, they used to be more of them than geese. Some slews, when they all flew up, it was just like a big flock of blackbirds, clouds of ducks. It makes me almost sad to read that, the sense of abundance that didn't have to be saved and the fact that there are no more slews around Bird Island. It is all good plowed field.

JOHN PADDOCK: Yeah. Some of the old timers-- and you get this sense of sadness in their voices, too, when they think about how it was in a way and how it is now. But one of the things that I learned was that Renville County, which Olivia is a county seat of, had 1,600 lakes of 500 acres or more in it, back a little before the turn of the century. Now, I think there are 23.

NANCY PADDOCK: It is 97% under the plow.

JOHN PADDOCK: But the other thing that happens though, I think when you talk with them, you'll get this sense of sadness, this loss of the virgin beginnings or of youth almost in a way. And then you'll ask them, would you like to go back to that time? And they say, no because it was hard. It was lonely. And there was this immense, beautiful nature which in a way, they've eliminated.

But on the other hand, I think it's a little bit like leaving your own childhood. That was a beginning. But now, as you know, it's that thing that in a way you want to move into mature phases, too, and maybe in a way some sort of harmonious relationship with the land in which we use it and care for it, would be the ideal thing.

And I think that's what they feel, though most of them do feel that it's been over-drained and over-eroded, to some extent. And they do miss the fact that there aren't wild animals left.

NANCY PADDOCK: To hunt?

JOHN PADDOCK: Yeah. Well, that's getting back into the new-- into the youthful--

NANCY PADDOCK: Oh, certainly.

JOHN PADDOCK: --energies and all that again, too.

SPEAKER: I think any talk about beginnings carries that kind of mixed emotional reaction to it because there's something exciting and new and sometimes a bit terrifying about it, a beginning. And yet at the same time, a beginning so quickly becomes a memory and a thing past.

NANCY PADDOCK: Well, change itself is often terrifying. Just because you're unsure and the kind of tentativeness and clumsiness that so often goes along with a beginning, people, maybe, don't like to get into those awkward positions.

SPEAKER: Those early people on the prairies, though, they must have had a sense of beginnings and newness unlike anything that most of us ever experience.

NANCY PADDOCK: Imagine coming out to a place where no one had ever farmed before, where the sod that you're breaking has been there for forever, and you're the first one to make a farm there. That must have been a strange thing.

SPEAKER: The only modern equivalent I can really think of is the astronauts, the people who go off into space. And I've heard them talk in similar terms, not about specifically people breaking the prairie or exploring this part of the land, but about the explorers who crossed the ocean. But it's a similar kind of a thing, a real frontier, and there aren't many of those left anymore.

NANCY PADDOCK: There are the deep reaches of the mind, which we've only begun to explore.

JOHN PADDOCK: We talk about the beginnings of the prairies, but we haven't mentioned the beginnings of the towns. This is the human place. As long as we've been tending to switch back and forth with Nancy reading the men's parts and me reading the women, I think I'll do that once more.

And I can read a little section from our book by a woman by the name of Mary [? Kubisch, ?] who, I would guess, is in her early '80s and talks about how the town of Olivia was when she was a little girl.

She says, I've been thinking of how Olivia was when I was a small child. Well, there were wooden sidewalks with wild roses growing along their edges. And we had a lovely creek running through the town, diagonally from the southeast through to the northwest.

There were many interesting bridges, painted red. You remember the kind? And those were grand places for teenagers to stand and lean on and talk over all their affairs. And then, they put tile in that creek and covered it.

One of the things I especially remember was the excitement of the noon train, which at that time stopped here. We would rush out to see what people were getting off the train to be fed in Olivia. Everybody got off the train at that time because there were no diners carried. And so we would watch to see which place they were going to.

And one man had the advantage because he would come out with a very large bell and ring it vigorously and yell at the top of his voice what the menu was for that day. Watching this for the kids was a daily occupation.

Then, we had hitching post that I still remember. And of course, the kids soon learned that they weren't just for horses because they were wonderful to twirl around. And there was a watering fountain for the horses and down below a place for all the dogs and cats. That was before we had any rulings and dogs weren't chained. All the animals ran free.

Friday night was the night that practically every kid in town got a dime to go on and see The Perils of Pauline. That ran for years at the movies as a serial. At the end of the night, she was always left tied to the railroad track with the train approaching. And then you had to wait until next Friday to free her. And so Friday night was always a big night. That was all between 1900 and 1910.

Well, Mary goes on in this vein for quite a while reminiscing about Olivia. But again, we're in a nostalgic phase, I guess, these days and this sort of wonderful. I was struck by the symbol and that then there's a sudden change in her pace.

And she says, and then they covered our creek over with-- they tiled it and covered it over. And it's almost symbolic of something that happened, that something was cut off her life or beginnings were lost or her child was lost. It was a good symbol of it for me.

NANCY PADDOCK: It's sort of an underground river, very neatly channeled in concrete.

JOHN PADDOCK: The things we repressed to become adults, too, our underground rivers. The potentiality, again, we'll be working toward renewals and re-beginnings in our lives. And I think the potentiality of opening those channels again in one's life are always there. You have to find the right channels. But I think they're there for people.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

(SINGING) I'm a-coming home, baby

Hold whatcha got, and I don't mean maybe

Been a-thinking about and, I'm on my way

Don't sell the house, and don't wreck the car

Stay there, honey, right where you are

Hold whatcha got, I'm coming home to stay

Well, in my mind, I can see

That's a pretty good sign that I need you

That's why I can't wait to get back home

So squeeze yourself real good and tight, I'll be there before daylight.

If you hold whatcha got, I'm coming home to stay

Hold whatcha got, I'm coming home, baby

Hold whatcha got, and I don't mean maybe, been a-thinking about you

And I'm on my way

Don't sell the house and don't wreck the care

Stay there, honey, right where you are

Hold whatcha got, I'm a-coming home to stay

JOHN PADDOCK: Reading that piece by Mary [? Kubisch ?] about growing up in Olivia back around the turn of the century, of course, doing that sort of interview, I began to be more and more tuned into something that a lot of poets and artists and people in general are becoming involved, and that is looking back into their own roots where they came from.

And I came from a small town in rural Minnesota, about 50 miles northeast of Olivia, Litchfield. And I found myself more and more interested in what went on there as I was growing up, and just what were the traditions, way the local myths that I grew up with.

And this circling back is something that's kind of interested me lately, watching a lot of other poets doing the same thing. And I just recently wrote a small poem on that very process, what's the meaning of it. I called it Circling Back.

That circle back to our beginnings, we pitched horseshoes and fished, lived so close that loneliness lived only in unfeeling jokes about old women. Our beginnings, we now know, are as good as anything else and better because they are the bed in which we slept. They are the face we bore before ever we saw a mirror.

In that limbo of beginnings to get away, I used to say, there's no place to go. There's nothing to be done, but didn't believe that the bone till I got just got awful tired of day times insomnia. Oh, smashed the mirror with the aging face, sleep in the bed with the smiling dreams.

And so I guess that I find myself writing a lot of poems about that particular period in my life. And Nancy, too, has looked into the past and, I guess, the impressions that some of the people have made on you that reminds you of a traditional past that you may or may not have participated very much in.

NANCY PADDOCK: Well, I think there's a certain continuity of generations that people pass on father-to-son, mother-to-daughter. And it seemed to me that some of the rituals that accompany different stages in your life-- you certainly have an initiation into adulthood and the rituals that are associated with that, like the confirmations and the churches or bar mitzvah or whatever.

But also with marriage, the ritual of the shower, which I suddenly found myself in the midst of about a year and a half ago. And it was a very moving experience. And so this poem comes out of that. I call it "The Mothers."

They are old now with quiet eyes,

Hands still, soft arms, and breasts falling empty to their laps.

In loose flowered dresses, they lean toward each other, almost whispering.

This is my wedding shower. I am a girl to them.

And I almost forget my more than 30 years.

We are stranger to each other than we know.

And yet, they gather a circle of gifts and blessings

To welcome me because I am a wife, a daughter.

The old mothers wishing children into my belly,

Wishing me safe journey on the ancient path worn deep by slow feet.

They do what everybody does.

They bear their husbands' names, first and last, and children caught in photographs.

The son's jutting chin and narrow eyes,

The daughter pale lips smiling from her frame.

Mrs. Howard. Howie Peterson, Mrs. Calvin T. Johnson,

They smile and take my hand and I feel their lives flow into mine.

One plays the organ carefully, finding her own harmony.

Bless this house, they pray for me.

And I could weep.

The mothers, their lives are a never-ending chain of love of children

And their children's children springing out of their arms.

JOHN PADDOCK: I'm struck by the fact that there are two levels to the beginnings that we've been talking about. One are our original beginnings, which we look back to. And of course, there are the new beginnings which we've been talking about too.

But I've tended myself to look back at that experience and write about it occasionally, especially since I've been working in oral history projects. And one of the town myths that I remember growing up in Litchfield was one about a blind lawyer. And he actually used to drive a car.

And for that reason, there's was sort of a nostalgic longing for a time like that where someone could be handling the controls of the car and someone next to them could be steering because he didn't have sight. I don't think it could happen now. And in a way, why I hearken back to that in a poem. And I just call it "The Blind Lawyer."

Back then, in that town where hanging upside down in a man's hand, I was whacked. And I shrieked. There was a blind lawyer who got by with a wife for his eyes. Now, we look back through a recent past of freeways which shrieked through our flesh. Oh, it was easier then.

Childhood was a dance, which was all grace and no form through each day into a sleep-like death. That blind lawyer handled the controls of his car well enough and his wife tight beside him, eyes stretched wide enough for two, steered easily over roads, then styled the worst in the USA.

The police of that time, too, were blind or busy whittling when the lawyer and his wife passed by until, of course, the traffic was just too great to bear, a dance with no form. I suppose that's the problem, the traffic more and matter everywhere in a world upside down and shrieking.

I guess that we could probably go on and on with poems about our beginnings But they seem to be really quite important in nourishing ourselves now for new beginnings in a way, I think.

NANCY PADDOCK: I don't know whether it's a sign of middle age or what, but it seems to me that the sense of being at home has been very important to me, and that maybe the contact with the origins with your childhood and with your background, whether it's ethnic or whatever, helps you to find that feeling of being at home. And maybe once, then, you're there, then you can go on, and maybe that's a renewal with a new beginning.

JOHN PADDOCK: I was reading an article the other-- or last night, I was scanning something that-- an interview with Robert Bly. And he talked about what he called grounding-- and it was an oriental concept, I gather-- that is being right with the vibrations of an area within which you live. And you can't be creative when you aren't grounded from his point of view, or very creative.

And he thought that people went and established themselves in universities, little by little, lost their grounding and became more shallow and less creative and--

NANCY PADDOCK: Like trees.

JOHN PADDOCK: I suspect there's something that there is something to that, that when you get too far cut off from your own roots, you aren't nourished in quite the same way anymore. And I think you can be intellectual. I don't know if you can be deeply creative. I think there are two different things.

SPEAKER: It's back to the red clay of Georgia for me.

NANCY PADDOCK: You better stay here.

JOHN PADDOCK: Pretty good land around here.

SPEAKER: Yeah, well, we've really been talking about beginnings in the most beginning sense, I guess. We've been talking about creation myths and birth and people going back to their very earliest things.

But there are more immediate kinds of beginnings, too. We could talk about the renewals and the re-beginnings or new projects, if you will. You don't have to go back to the beginning of your life to get in contact with beginnings and new things.

JOHN PADDOCK: Well, in a way, I think that this is the biggest area of contemporary poetry. I think most of the poems that are being written now are healing poems in one way or another, and healing toward a new health or a new beginning.

And I think most of us, most modern men, most modern artists feel alienated in a way. And so many poems are attempts either at describing the sense of alienation or attempts at finding one's way back into a period of health.

I find frequently when I write this kind of poem, I tie it up with the seasons, too. And in this sense, a poem of mine, which I call "Waiting for Spring," is really waiting for a new rebirth in myself. And I guess I could read that in.

Waiting for spring, out talking geese,

But making less sense, we migrate constantly to winter.

That springtime of nights, goose gabble, moonlight blend over prairie,

The flocks riding thousands of miles of wind as ice drifts north,

Walking alone on moonlit prairie,

Goose stock falling through the night like spring snow.

Ankle deep in goose joy, I'm filled with love but can't fly.

Ah, the geese at home in the wind, the marshes, the seasons.

Who am I? Who are we? What are we to do?

NANCY PADDOCK: The eternal question.

SPEAKER: Right.

JOHN PADDOCK: Well, in a way, though, I think the answer is implied, too, though. The geese have this instinctual certainty about their lives. And I think we do when we're children, too, in a way. We don't have the doubts and the questions.

And then little by little, we work ourselves out of that instinctual certainty. And then after a time, we're a little confused, the line being we migrate toward winter instead of toward summer. And I think that sort of poses the problem more. And that's a healing process, too, of diagnosing what's wrong.

And I think, again and again, you'll find poems of people who feel somehow or another, they're cut off from their deep energies or their relatedness to nature and the world around them. And I think that's an important area in contemporary poetry.

But I think also, too, more and more to it. I think, in the evolution of the art, it shows a step forward in the actual process of healing. More and more people are beginning to write poems about times when it clicks for them, when they are, in fact, do feel instinctually attuned to their environment and their lives around them and the people around them and stuff like that.

NANCY PADDOCK: One of my favorite poets, James Wright, has a lovely book called The Branch Will Not Break. And the poem that that line comes from is one called "Two Hangovers." And I won't read the first one. I'll read the second one, which is called, "I try to waken and greet the world once again."

In a pine tree a few yards away from my window sill,

A brilliant blue jay is springing up and down, up and down on a branch.

I laugh as I see him abandon himself to entire delight,

For he knows as well as I do that the branch will not break.

I think their right is seeing the eternity in nature, the possibility of becoming in tune with it again if he could just trust the world the way the bird does. And perhaps that's what he's learning in this poem.

JOHN PADDOCK: Yeah, and give himself up to the world in his own inner self in a way that whether there's that sort of impossible to fall and hurt oneself. I have a poem here that kind of follows directly on the one I read about "Waiting for Spring." And I call it "The Song Within."

And in fact, it seems to me to be-- the song itself seems to be almost exactly this thing I've been describing of instinctual certainty, that is, a recognition of having something within myself that is the same that these animals, which I write about here, have within them.

Low grassy hills with stony ravines where foxes curl and sunshine,

Head lift, ears pushed forward, keen eyes scan distances,

Then sinking back into doze, where lives a song like my own.

Dusty two-track roads lead down to the marshes where muskrat piles stand dark in the water.

And the great hulk of beaver lodges richness of the marsh power in its roots,

A song like my own.

White-tailed deer follow thin trails through grass to fields of clover and corn,

And having fattened their haunches, go bounding through meadows for sheer joy,

A song like my own.

And in spring and fall, long undulant lines of geese,

Their steady calling through miles of bright sky, such wildness,

A song like my own.

So that came out of a period when, in fact, I felt that I had that same quality that the animals had. And I think it's important to repeat it over and over again in a way, that when you-- in time, I think you can create yourself anew by repeating your healthy moments in that sense.

And I think that's what art, in fact, is doing in all its various disciplines quite a lot of the time over and over, great dance, for instance, or visual art, I think is bringing us back into that center, which is deep and instinctual.

NANCY PADDOCK: Which is perhaps the same function that ritual has in religious ceremonies.

JOHN PADDOCK: Yeah.

NANCY PADDOCK: It's funny about the geese, though. The poem that I was going to read for renewals is geese again. And both of the poems that you read are geese. It's a special thing. I guess that even the shaman is thought of--

JOHN PADDOCK: The goose is the symbol.

NANCY PADDOCK: --a goose too.

JOHN PADDOCK: What is Joseph Campbell's book on, I think, shamanism is called The Flight of the Wild Gander. And the shaman's flight is symbolized by that of the wild gander.

NANCY PADDOCK: Transcendence.

JOHN PADDOCK: This is always an instinctual thing with me. But I find myself always directing my flight toward that of the wild geese. But I guess growing up out here on the prairies where there's almost no better symbol that we have to look at either, then--

NANCY PADDOCK: I want to read the last part of Wendell Berry's poem with geese in it, too, because-- he says, geese appear high over us, pass, and the sky closes. Abandon as in love or sleep, holds them to their way. Clear in the ancient faith, what we need is here. And we pray not for new Earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart and in eye clear. What we need is here.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I watched and listened to Jennifer Langham play the cello not too long ago at Don Abode in Tyler. And she's the affiliate artist for the [? Smock ?] region for this year. And listening to her and seeing how totally into the music she was, I realized what a wonderful thing this must to be able to become the music.

And so the poem that I have written for her is, I call it "Love Song," because it seemed to me that the commitment was so totally that that's all it could be, was love. Her body tautly tuned, in folds the cello, fingers measuring the limits of the strings, weaving webs of melody that hold us over an abyss of silence.

She rocks the cello like a child or a lover,

Sounding the depths of sound and surfacing with harmony in her soul's shape.

The heart's music playing over her face like wind over water.

And she is in the throes of giving life to twin worlds or moons behind her eyelids.

She draws her bow over our bones, quickening marrow,

And the dry wood of the cello sprouts green song that lives again.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

And we're back to rebirth again.

JOHN PADDOCK: Yeah, I think that in our poetry, but maybe in general, in contemporary poetry, there is a sort of a visionary attempt at rebirth. And I think people are thinking about the culture and themselves and their loss of their own beginnings and many such things.

I guess that as I've been listening to these poems we've been reading, it struck me that I have one that's maybe more appropriate for new beginnings than some of the ones I've been reading. I call it "Migration."

And of course, migration is, we could easily see the symbolism of a new beginning of the season for us. But I'm also talking about a change in my personal mood. And coming back to Minnesota, I'd been living in Northern New Mexico for about six months and spent a great deal of time hiking in cross-country, skiing in the mountains.

And that was great. But after a while, I was becoming lonely. I wanted to get back to my family and friends and people, I guess, more than any other thing.

And this particular day, I started out early in the day feeling slightly depressed and little by little, as I worked my way up to the shoulder of the mountain, my mood began to change until I was really toward the end of the climb, really quite exhilarated.

And I had managed, I guess, an inner catharsis and had made a renewal in myself. And also, I think part of that renewal was the awareness that within a couple of days I was leaving to come back home and make something like a spring flight of the birds. So I called it "Migration."

Today, the mountains were full of robins and melting snow. The sunshine was so bright I saw black. On cross-country skis, following old logging roads, I climbed and climbed upward through air gone so thin that each 100 yards I must stop and rekindle my blood, delicious breathing for another rise.

Till on the mountain shoulder drying great lungfuls of distance, I shut my eyes to the dazzle, and tough and glittering black ravens burst fluttering from my center. I counted 11. Then I was light and began my long glide downward to the summer below.

One little thought about beginnings and re-beginnings, in numerology, the number 11 is considered a new beginning. You've gone 1 through 10 and you're starting, in a way, with one again.

I guess that's what I was playing around with when I talked about the 11 fluttering black ravens coming out at me, which really symbolized the heaviness that I felt, and that I lost up on the mountain side.

SPEAKER: I was just thinking an interesting thing about the structure of that poem, too, is that really the beginning is marked by describing, in a sense, the end. You know what I mean?

JOHN PADDOCK: Exactly. There is that cyclical thing in the poem, which, again, is seasonal, I suppose. And you move from one season to another, too, from the mountain top where it was still winter, definitely to the lower elevation where it was quite a lot of summer already, too.

SPEAKER: That's a good thing to be talking about right now.

JOHN PADDOCK: Yeah, it's awfully cold out there.

SPEAKER: Isn't it? It's good to know that really this is not what it seems. It's really the beginning of spring. It's just--

NANCY PADDOCK: The days are getting longer.

JOHN PADDOCK: Yes. That's right.

NANCY PADDOCK: Light is coming back.

[THE BEATLES, "HERE COMES THE SUN"]

(SINGING) Here comes the sun, doo-doo-doo

Here comes the sun, and I say, it's all right

JOHN PADDOCK: In doing our program in Olivia, in the region, going around to the schools, we've had a chance to work with children quite a lot, little children, and read to them and also to have them write poetry.

And I can't think of anything that is offered as much of a renewal to me a long time as having had a chance to work with poetry, with little children who haven't developed the inhibitions that we have, the censorship in our own beings. And that sort of spontaneous enthusiasm for them is great.

And it isn't just me. Nancy feels that way. But we were talking to Fred Manfred the other day down in Vermillion, South Dakota. And he was talking about how he, every once in a while, would go into a Laverne school program he'd do.

And he really enjoyed going in with the children and talking with him about writing. And one of the things he said was that, Hemingway should have done that, said it would have been good for him.

NANCY PADDOCK: He might be alive today.

JOHN PADDOCK: He said-- he might be alive today if he'd done that. And I can understand that. And we've been talking about these beginnings all along. And, of course, children, again, are at their beginning. And almost in a way, it might be a good way for us to end, be for us to read a few of the children's poems that have come out of some of the programming we've done.

NANCY PADDOCK: "The Queen," one time as I was walking in the woods, I met a bad-tempered hippo. He said, follow me. I said, why? Then, he said, don't ask questions. Follow me. I said, but. Follow me, said the hippo. I have to be home before dark. I don't care. But, but, but-- but follow me, said the hippo. So I did.

He led me to a castle. Sit down in that chair, he said. Why? said I. So you can be queen, dummy. So I was queen for five years. When I got home, mom said, right on time, because each world has its own time.

And of course, in the mind of a fourth grader, there's a special world there that does have its own time. And I think maybe that freshness and that lack of being brittle is what makes children so exciting.

Like, when we were seeing your baby, Kim, with a wide open and wide-eyed approach to everything in the world and just really, really willing to embrace everything, that's probably--

JOHN PADDOCK: wanting, anxious.

NANCY PADDOCK: Yeah. Yeah, it's not like, oh, all right. It's, yes!

SPEAKER: No matter what, plates, blankets, chairs, fire hydrants, dragons.

NANCY PADDOCK: Sure. But we need that because we're kind of scared.

JOHN PADDOCK: Yeah, well, so much of our--

NANCY PADDOCK: Cynical.

JOHN PADDOCK: --lives are spent in focusing our energies on specific things which we say are worthwhile. And little by little, we lose the capacity, I think, to appreciate life in general. And then we need a renewal. And I think we have to come back somehow or another.

SPEAKER: And begin again.

JOHN PADDOCK: And begin again. Yeah, and sometimes a piece of art can do it, sometimes a conversation with a friend or a hike up a mountain, or whatever, but these things. And maybe I'm sure that in people's lives are much larger religious-level experience is where you really are reborn into a new spiritual sense of the sacred universe, too.

But just in general, I think that every day we get little renewals, and certainly in a month's time we'll have renewals, too. I've got a poem here, which came out of a group of children. Each of the children in this playground group we were working with supplied a line or two.

And it goes back to a form or a style, which in a way is interesting. It's today's children using a form which in fact, is something that the most primitive of poets have used. And that is they've talked about their identification with other things in the world. We just call the form "I am."

I am a tree making the wind. I am a kitten in a world of dogs. I am a cocoon just opening up. I am a bomb ticking. I'm a tiger that always wants to win. I am a car with a lot of gas. I'm a basketball going through the hoop. I'm a flower just blooming. I'm a girl in a big, round world. I'm a dog running in the wind.

I'm a bird with no wings. I'm a brat for my babysitter. I'm a piece of wood in the fire. I'm a bottle of pop blowing my top. I am nice and windy. That's the way we ended it. I was even moved to write a poem about little children. And not being a father, I suppose that that's more of a feat than otherwise.

But no, just one day it came to me in a little flash to write this little poem in response to what I saw in them. I just call it "The Little Children." Their eyes are the pure and receptive water. When they sing, they become small songs. Their rhythms range from puppy dance with teeth to a sleep, which floats so serenely that the small paper boats of its dreams drift on forever.

[THE BEATLES, "HERE COMES THE SUN"]

(SINGING) Little darlin', I feel that ice is slowly melting

Little darlin', it seems like it's been years since it's been clear

Here comes the sun, here comes the sun, I say it's all right

Here comes the sun, here comes the sun

It's all right, it's all right

SPEAKER: And that concludes our program on beginnings with Joe and Nancy Paddock. In addition to their own poetry, Joe and Nancy read poetry of Robinson Jeffers, Wendell Berry, James Wright, and several children.

They read also from The Things We Know Best-- An Oral History of Olivia, Minnesota, and Its Surrounding Countryside, edited by Joe Paddock. On behalf of the entire staff of KRSW, I want to wish you many happy beginnings in a joyous and prosperous new year.