Jane Hirshfield on Time, Mystery, and Kinship

Emergence Magazine is an online publication with annual print edition exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality. As we experience the desecration of our lands and waters, the extinguishing of species, and a loss of sacred connection to the Earth, we look to emerging stories. Our podcast features exclusive interviews, narrated essays, stories and more.

In this conversation, poet Jane Hirshfield locates time as part of the great mystery of the cosmos, embracing its largeness and unknowableness from a place of humility. Reciting several of her poems, she shares how an inner spaciousness can draw us towards being in service to the Earth.

From the Episode:

Jane Hirshfield: I am a thread in an endless fabric. I am not a cut-off isolated phenomenon. And I just feel better when that sense of the full fabric of existence, going backwards in time and forwards in time and outward in every direction, accompanies this small boat that I am rowing through this world.

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Listen to the rest of this story on Emergence Magazine’s website or by subscribing to the podcast.

Jane Hirshfield is a poet, essayist, and translator whose poetry collections include Given Sugar, Given Salt, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; After, which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and named “best book of 2006” by The Washington Post and others; The Beauty, Ledger, and most recently, The Asking. Recognitions include Columbia University’s Translation Center Award, the Poetry Center Book Award, the California Book Award, and the Hall-Kenyon Prize in American Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets. In 2004, Jane was awarded the 70th Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement by The Academy of American Poets. And in 2019, she was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Photo by Curt Richter