Hi, I'm Maggie Smith, new host of The Slowdown.

As we get ready to launch the new season on August 18th, we're revisiting some gems from the archive.

Today's episode comes from Tracy K. Smith, who helped build this beautiful space for poetry and reflection.

Music space for poetry and reflection. I'm Tracy K. Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

I'm Tracy for my health and my home,

for the love and friendship in my life.

I'm grateful for free time and for beauty, all the goodness I can see and claim.

But there's far more than goodness and pleasure in my life and in every life.

There's struggle. There's hard work. But I'm grateful for that too. I'm grateful for the failures I've endured and what

they've taught me. I'm grateful to have lost the things that have led me to the life that's now

mine. But could I follow that perspective a step further? Am I grateful for this world filled with war, with rage,

with waste and greed? It would be a lie to say that I'm not, despite all of that, as it would be a

lie to believe myself innocent of wrong. Sunday night will drag boxes out to the curb for recycling. Evidence of all we

consume and the long and costly roots these inessential goods travel before landing for a time in our

life. I fly. I drive. How can I look out at the trees and birds? How can I look at my

own children knowing that the everyday habits of lives like mine are unsustainable, that they've wrought

irreversible havoc upon a not-distant future.

I can accept my own culpability, but it's hard to bring that acknowledgement into the vocabulary

of thanks. It takes a wise and gifted poet to marry those two disparate perspectives,

to create a panoramic portrait of life that allows guilt and anger and shame

to occupy the very same space as gratitude.

I believe the late W.S. Merwin was such a poet.

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