“You can never have enough of this world.”
That’s a line by poet Teddy Macker, whose book This World I spent a fair bit of time with in September. This autumn, I’m doing more with writing prompts than I have in a good long while thanks to Writing the Wild, and using that line as the start of a poem was one that was offered last month.
“What is enough?” is a question that has underlaid a lot of my work, thanks to the wise Wendell Berry calling it the most urgent question of our time. That, and a season of contributing to a collective blog1 that explored all the nuances of what “enough” meant to each person who was involved in the project. What’s enough energy to put toward this or that? What’s enough when it comes to physical possessions, or work, or self love, or living space, or garden beds, or friends, or…..the list of what we pondered was long. Ellie and I continued mulling those ideas as that blog eventually evolved into the book 12 Tiny Things.
In our desire to be actualized and reflective people, we loved how agile and expansive the question [what is enough?] felt. Clothes, self-esteem, technology, exercise, time—we applied the question to all the nooks and crannies of our lives. As humans living in a world full of stuff, in a world that links clutter to depression—how much is enough?2
We found the question, as all powerful questions do, had no one right answer, and what is enough can shift. What’s enough in your world might be too much, or not enough, in mine. Something might be enough for awhile, and then it might vanish.
The sun gold cherry tomatoes were abundant this year. I wised up and put them inside the garden fence so they were good and protected from deer nibbles and thieving raccoons. I’ve never eaten so many—This past growing season, we’ve had them in pasta, soup, salad, as snacks off the vine, and now there are at least five bags of the little orange orbs in the freezer (though the frozen ones aren’t quite the same as fresh…). When it comes to cherry tomatoes, I can confidently say that this summer, we had enough.
Sun Gold
There are too many
of you to pick
all at once—
after all, we’re just one small family—
though I try to keep up with your abundance
your sweetness dropping
into my hands, onto the soil, bursting between my teeth,
a taste of summer
that I never used to like but do now.
Now I crave you when you aren’t here
and that makes me glad your season is short—
abundance is sweetest when bookended by desire.
For several months, anyway, they have been enough.
Then again, once the freeze comes, they’ll be gone. They never last, but I can praise them while they’re here.
I won’t claim to have any answers around what is enough, or offer a how to on praising things that cannot last—all of these questions are in the ‘unanswerable’ category when it comes to things that have a right answer. All any of us can do is continually sit with the questions and pay attention to what happens when we are okay with not knowing. The world is too much, too vast, too everything, to really have it.
Collisions of enough and never quite having it3
You can never have enough
of this world,
and that’s the trick, isn’t it?
Instead, all we can do
is see the red flowers
as they drop their petals
each one a crimson offering
a delicate gift given just once,
each one, and then they’re gone.
Instead, all we can do
is feel how sun and wind and rain
all have their own language of touch
each one a burst of tactile energy
an elemental shift given
day after day, season after season
always repeating, never the same.
Instead, all we can do
is notice the nuance
pervading all of life
each detail another thread weaving
a continual stitching (mending where necessary)
of earth’s collective tapestry.
Instead, all we can do
is wonder at how praising
things that cannot last
holds the world for us, somehow
allowing what we do have
of this world to be enough.
This blog that was called “Living Enough” was the foundation of what eventually became the book 12 Tiny Things.
This quote is from the introduction of 12 Tiny Things.
This title isn’t quite right, but it’s what I’ve got for now. Maybe how I want to really say it will emerge later.
Your poetry always touches me deeply. And we seem to be “in sync” on this topic, based on what I recently wrote about. Thank you for helping me think about it differently. 🙏🏻