The vital spontaneity of life brought William Wordsworth’s “Ode on Intimations of Immortality” to my heart-mind on Saturday, as my family and I visited the Cementerio General in San José, to honor and remember my father R.C.M., my grandmother D.M.A., my grandfather E.C.J., and other ancestors, up to my great-great grandmother or tatarabuela, who rest there.
As we stood silently in the campo santo, listening to leaves rustling in the wind under a gentle morning sky, I recalled these verses from memory:
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.
These are the most well-known and often quoted verses from the ode. Later that day, in the quiet of evening at home, I read the entire poem.
I then listened online to an engaging lecture on Wordsworth’s “Ode” by Professor James K. Chandler, at the University of Chicago, who even related it to Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It and to the film by Robert Redford based on the novel. I did not know Wordsworth was Maclean’s favorite poet.
At the heart of all these moments lay my own memory of and love for my father. They reaffirmed my quiet practice, in the early days of this new year, of trying to be present and attentive to the daily beauty that thrives in my garden in San José, the garden which he cultivated when I was absent.
A new joy has been eating the ripe passion fruit from the Passiflora alata. A bumblebee has been polinizing the flowers and we have been gathering the fruit when it ripens. It is delicious, sweet and tart at once.
The garden’s beauty and its sensual delights are living expressions of Natura naturans as it pulsates through the world around me.
These photographs are but imperfect icons of that beauty, which in turn is symbol of Universal Spirit or Nature in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s philosophy. Nonetheless, these pictures may convey some of that simple beauty which I want to share.
Daniel G. Campos 