Consider Christ our Saviour: an Eventual Pastoral

Divine in nature, nurtured in a crèche
Born to woman, subject to the flesh

In parts and passions ever one of us
Slow to anger, angered nonetheless

Meek and mighty, normal to behold
Man of sorrows, joy of fallen worlds

Bread of life, made hungry by the lack
Twice-crossed Lamb, and bridger of doom’s crack

He is both paradox and its solution
The bringer of the barren to fruition

A beast of burden, lowly in His field
Who, by His bearing, harvests what He healed

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J. Kirk Richards‘ “Cristo XV” used with permission. For more from Jonathon Penny, see here.

Nature-based flash fiction or short stories running between 100 and 1300 words are also welcome.  Excerpts from longer stories or novels up to 1300 words are encouraged–though pieces may run longer if they can be broken into multiple parts.

Please read WIZ’s submissions guide before sending your work.  Then electronically submit your work either to wilderness@motleyvision.org or to pk.wizadmin@gmail.com.

Coming soon to a mailbox (or computer) near you: Dialogue’s environmental issue.  Several Wilderness Interface Zone contributors are included therein–congratulations, friends! Frequent WIZ contributor Steven Peck guest edited this issue.

Table of contents:

Page     Author     Title
Mary Toscano     Front Cover
Inside Cover, Title Page
v     Edwin Firmage, Jr.     Letters
1     Steven L. Peck     Why Nature Matters: A Special Issue of Dialogue on Mormonism and the Environment
6     George B. Handley     Faith and the Ethics of Climate Change
36     Craig D. Galli     Enoch’s Vision and Gaia: An LDS Perspective on Environmental Stewardship
57     Bryan V. Wallis     Flexibility in the Ecology of Ideas: Revelatory Religion and the Environment
67     Jason M. Brown     Whither Environmental Theology
87     Bart H. Welling     ”The Blood of Every Beast”: Mormonism and the Question of the Animal
118     Mary Toscano     A Perch, A Foothold, A Float
119     Patricia Gunter Karamesines     Why Joseph Went to the Woods: Rootstock for LDS Literary Nature Writers
134     Adam S. Miller     Recompense
143     Ron Madson     Grandpa’s Hat
148     Sarah Dunster     Gaius
150     Harlow Soderborg Clark     Easter Sermons
152     Jon Ogden     Seasonal Ritual
153     Jonathon Penny     Winterscape: Prairie
154     Karen Kelsay     Mother Willow
155     Sandra Skouson     Girl Without a Mother to Her Big Brother
156     Mary Toscano     The Tightrope Walker
157     Hugo Olaiz     The Birth of Tragedy
161     David G. Pace     American Trinity
177     Benjamin E. Park     Image and Reality in the Utah Zion
180     Polly Aird     Not Just Buchanan’s Blunder
190     Rob Fergus     Scry Me a River
196     Mary Toscano     Wherever He May Go
197     Peter L. McMurray     This Little Light of Ours: Ecologies of Revelation

Can’t wait to get my copy.   I’m very happy to see so many WIZards’ work appearing in the issue, including poems from WIZ’s 2010 Spring Poetry Runoff.

Only complaint: The cover girl or boy polar bear is cute, but I would have put hummingbirds up front.

Just sayin’.

Wilderness Interface Zone would like to thank participants who made our Love of Nature, Nature of Love Month such a pretty thing this time around.  The list includes:

Karen Kelsay
Jonathon Penny
Tyler Chadwick
Lou Davies James
Judith Curtis
Michael Lee Johnson

You all helped WIZ celebrate love and nature with heart and high style.  Thanks so much.

Also, thanks go to our readers and commenters, too.  There’s still plenty of room open on our giveaways of The Charge at Feather River and South of Pago Pago.  Please take advantage of one or the other of these offers so that we may extend small tokens of our appreciation for your following WIZ.

Also, as an aside, WIZ’s 3rd Annual Spring Poetry Runoff Contest and Celebration will open on the vernal equinox, March 19.  Please make a note of its pending arrival and watch for announcements detailing this year’s activities and prizes.

Again, hugs of gratitude to you, contributors to and followers of WIZ, for your happy presence here.

It’s funny how things look
From however many thousand feet
One has to be to sail on clouds and see no birds.
And when the clouds burn off, I find a charm in streets—
Their random pass, the patchwork of man’s world,
The green and brown space, the plaid or checkered shirt,
The crawl of hills as if topography encroached on man
And not the other way around.

I like a well-graphed neighborhood,
The cluster of a town from time to time.
Even cars look innocent from the air, like brilliant gems.
Cities, on the other hand, are better from the street.

Lake Michigan still dwarfs (thank God)
Chicago’s “skyline,” if not its awful sprawl.
(By heaven! an awful phrase, that:
Shades of Babel, as if the sky were touched at all.)
It is a sea, white-dotted, of blue cloud
That feels eternal from the air—an immeasurable body, undulant,
That seems from here untouched by our small passing.
It’s different in the ooze, or so I’m told.

So distance and largesse inveigle perception:
Earth bears our abuse, sky our infection,
I know. But still, it’s stunning from up here.
The earth looks mighty good for being old:
Sinews of clear water, veins of human gold.
It’s funny how things look from God’s eye view—
Like something out of Hopkins: clean, bright, and new.

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For Jonathon’s bio and more of his poetry go here, here, and here.

Remember wild, ungardened greens?
Dark mulchy woods of unkempt trees?
That broad, telestial paradise
Of birds and bugs and field mice?

Remember snows of varied hues?
High drifts? spring thaws? fat summer dews?
And fragrant, flatland buzzing air?
Paint-palette, musty harvest fare?

We’ve none of those in this dry place
Where seasons are a figment of degrees
And landmarks fickle as a ninja bride:
Trembling within, inscrutable outside.

But still, this scorpion desert stretch,
This single-seasoned wasteland planet’s kvetch,
This Godful bare and burning arm,
This empty quarter has its vagrant charm:

For one, it’s always warm.

_______________________________________________________________

Jonathon Penny took his MA in Renaissance literature at BYU and his PhD in 20th Century British literature from the University of Ottawa. He has taught at universities in the U.S. and Canada, and now lives with his family in Al Ain, United Arab Emirates where he is Assistant Professor of English at UAE University. He has published on Wyndham Lewis and apocalyptic literature, and is currently at work on several books of poetry for precocious pipsqueaks under the penname “Professor Percival P. Pennywhistle.” Bits and pieces may be found here. In addition to those he has published on WIZ, he has grown-up poems forthcoming in Dialogue and with Peculiar Pages Press.

For more of Jonathon’s poems on WIZ go here, here, and here.

For the second year, we’re making February “Love of Nature, Nature of Love” month on Wilderness Interface Zone.  To celebrate Valentine’s Day, all month long we’ll publish poetry, essays, blocks of fiction, art, music (mp3s), video or other media that address the subject of love while making references to nature.  Or it could go the other way around: We’ll publish work about nature that also happens to give a nod to love.  That presents a wide field of possibilities.  We’re seeking submissions of original work or you can also send favorite works by others that have entered public domain.  So if you have a sonnet you’ve written to someone dear to your heart–even and perhaps especially your dog–please consider sending it to WIZ.  See the submissions page in the navigation bar above.

Also, February 24th is WIZ’s birthday.  We’ll be two years old—a toddler now.  To celebrate, a couple of posts will offer presents to our readers.  Because without you, dear readers, where would we be?

There’s more than a slight hint of thaw in earth and air.  The light is growing longer.  The first waves  of the Canadian geese migration are rolling through the southern Utah county where I live.  Hen-and-chicks and stork’s bill are beginning to preen.  The coyotes are pairing off.  February is a good month to warm things up.  Got love?  Celebrate it here on WIZ.

Fallow soil, windblown, is a rigid latticework
Pressed hard against patchwork fields etched with snow.

A river, drawn amblingly, God’s Hancock doodle,
Flows its cursive way across the whole.

Jealous of its motion, frozen lakes and ponds
Lie low and sullen in their teardrop bowls.

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More from Jonathon here and here.

But here at WIZ, our nearly six-week flow of sparkling verse has finished.  The last poems have posted, and voting to decide which one wins the Spring Poetry Runoff contest will begin Monday, May 3rd,  and run through Friday, May 7th.  Poets, please come back and vote, and let your friends and family members know about the voting, too.

I’d like the thank–happily, exuberantly–all the poets who contributed to the Spring Poetry Runoff not only for participating beautifully but also for exceeding my expectations for the number of poems submitted.    There really was a spectacular turnout, and I’m in awe of the quality of the poems.  Very well done, folks.

The poll to determine the winner of the Spring Poetry Runoff Popular Poem Award will close Friday. May 7, but winners of both the popular vote and the Admin Award will be announced Monday, May 10th.   So keep an eye on WIZ to see how matters settle out.  Also, clean off your reading glasses.  Twenty-one poems qualified for the voting, any one of which can cause you to linger.   Another matter to consider: Each voter will be able to vote for his or her three favorite poems!

Again, good work, participants.  Stay tuned.

Once-melting drifts of speckled snow
grew stiff against the freezing ground.
The humid gusts abandoned hope
and left the air without a sound.

What once was flowing now was tamed;
the rivulets, muddy and curled
lost strength and stream, as puddles became
glass windows to the underworld.

As April’s harbinger, the hawk
should sense the shifting of the sun.
A general in retreat would know
what day the winter war be won.

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Alan Mitchell has served on the AML board, and is the author of an award-winning novel, Angel of the Danube. He has recently started an LDS publishing company, Greenjacket Books (greenjacketbooks.com), and has a new book that expounds the global economic crisis in view of latter-day prophecy. He has served in numerous ward callings and currently as ward music leader. He ranches in the west desert of Utah, where he and his wife have been named 2008 Ranchers of the Year by the Society for Range Management.

*Contest entry*