the intricate exacting particulars

In midwifery school we talk a lot about self care. We talk about the things we do to take care of ourselves, when our selves are always so busy caring for others. We talk about the importance of good nutrition, regular exercise, a good night's sleep. There's more to it than that though, there are things we do for our souls. Some people take long hot baths or dance in their kitchen to Abba. Some people make things, in kitchens and workshops. Some people sit down to play piano or climb to the tops of mountains, eyes and soul open in wonder.

I read poetry. I read it aloud to myself, or to Cub if he stops to listen. I sit in the bath with A Book of Luminous Things and turn over the words of "Wild Geese" for the thousandth time. That Mary Oliver knows how to write a poem. Reading poetry is the singular thing I do that brings me back to myself. Before you ask, no, I don't write poems. I don't write much. And novels are too daunting for the few precious spare minutes I find myself with. Short stories I can get behind, have you read Olive Kitteridge lately?

But poems have my heart. Lately I've been stuck on this one. I came across it by chance a couple of years ago, while I was pregnant with Cub, and it visits me all the time. It casually opens the door in that small part of my brain (or is it my heart?) where it lives to say hello, and stops me in my tracks every time.

In the spirit of self care, here it is.

The Spirit is Too Blunt an Instrument

The spirit is too blunt an instrument
to have made this baby.
Nothing so unskilful as human passions
could have managed the intricate
exacting particulars: the tiny
blind bones with their manipulating tendons,
the knee and the knucklebones, the resilient
fine meshings of ganglia and vertebrae,
the chain of the difficult spine.

Observe the distinct eyelashes and sharp crescent
fingernails, the shell-like complexity
of the ear, with its firm involutions
concentric in miniature to minute
ossicles. Imagine the
infinitesimal capillaries, the flawless connections
of the lungs, the invisible neural filaments
through which the completed body
already answers to the brain.

Then name any passion or sentiment
possessed of the simplest accuracy.
No, no desire or affection could have done
with practice what habit
has done perfectly, indifferently,
through the body's ignorant precision.
It is left to the vagaries of the mind to invent
love and despair and anxiety
and their pain.

Anne Stevenson, from Poems 1955-2005