Mark Turin
Sunflower, facing each day anew. Photo: Hans/Pixaby
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The morning glory,
lifts its head, unfurling,
to meet the low rays of an early sun.
On cloudy days,
the crocus simply
shrugs its shoulders.
The tulip bows its spine,
through wet spring nights,
closing in on itself.
I have learned:
Now every morning,
uncoiling, I salute the day,
and greet your heart.
At dusk,
I fold inward
in deference.
Each day anew,
I turn and face you,
a sunflower.
Twin Flame.
One Heart.
This Life.
The Big Love.
Poet’s Statement
As my colleague, Sienna Craig, has said about her own practice, I consider myself an anthropologist who is a writer and a writer who happens to be an anthropologist. Now in the middle passage of my life, I am reconsidering the intention behind the work in which I am engaged. For me, this means devoting time to creative expression in addition to my scholarship.
For my entire adult life, I have applied myself to thinking and doing. This was my training, both intellectual and social. I am now just as interested in feeling and being. This realignment is a pivot from role (focused on the outside world) to soul (the inner landscape of interconnectedness) and a move from an individualistic state to one that is inherently more collective and relational. In this, nature — in its abundant dignity and glory — has been my constant guide and greatest inspiration.
Morning glory, unfurling, full of hope. Photo: KIMDAEJEUNG/Pixaby
Universities can be isolating places to work in. Scholars in the humanities often think of themselves as their own instruments: what we do and how we do it are central to our identity. Our imagined value becomes deeply entangled with our work. Professional successes feel like personal victories, while professional rejections are experienced as personal flaws. This unhealthy conflation can lead to a disassociation from the deeper questions that brought us into the path of intellectual inquiry in the first place and result in a disconnect from the wonders of nature and the gift of this one precious life. I am ever more interested in exploring the threads that tie the timeless biological processes of our planet to the structures that shape our sociocultural worlds.
My poem is an offering of devotion and gratitude, rejecting a narrative of scarcity while embracing an attentiveness to the plenty inherent in every moment.
Thinkers like David Abram, whose pithy “more-than-human world” opens up new ways of seeing, and Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, who have devoted their careers to the respectful integration of religion and ecology through their Journey of the Universe and a Living Earth Community, offer models for what it is to return to a place of enchantment and wonder. Poetry has become my chosen medium. I am moved to a silent reverence by the places where the tenacious beauty of nature and the expressive power of human culture meet. This audacious abundance — a simple “enoughness” — in light and scent, color and song, has helped me touch what a friend calls “the Big Love.”
What long felt like two solitudes traveling side by side — nature and culture, processes that are so often pitted against each other through the projects of extractive colonialism and destructive capitalism — is slowly reintegrating into my consciousness and heart. This tiny poem happened when I slowed down long enough, figuratively and literally, to smell the roses and marvel at how love and life are interconnected, in tiny and grand ways. My poem is an offering of devotion and gratitude, rejecting a narrative of scarcity while embracing an attentiveness to the plenty inherent in every moment and expression of nature’s wonder. The greatest challenge that many of us face — myself included — is getting out of our own way for long enough to notice the richness around us. As a friend’s mother likes to say, “When the student is ready, the teacher appears.” For me, the lesson is biocultural abundance.
Crocus explosion, the audacity of new life. Photo: Mark Turin
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Mark Turin is an anthropologist, linguist, occasional radio presenter, and associate professor at the University of British Columbia. He teaches and writes about collaborative, community-led projects — both in the Himalayan region and with First Nations communities in what is now Canada — working to reclaim Indigenous languages and revitalize endangered cultural traditions. Read more from Mark Turin:
