I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight.
For the ends of being and ideal grace.

– Elizabeth Barrett Browning

As with Leaves of Grass, the loving lilt of Songs from the Portuguese touches the unity of life in time, the exalting expression of spirit as breath, heartbeat, and movement. In this series, I will meld talk of science and spirit as integrated by Teilhard de Chardin and Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington. The idea is to ponder state-of-the-art restoration methods with state-of-the-art spiritual support. This is easier to do in the mind than to share. I take encouragement from Neil Pierce, an archaeologist who manages to enliven the silent speech of buried artifacts with the resonance of ancient prose and poetry. I also take encouragement from Jewish thinkers who view all of creation as Torah, which is scripture as poetry. I will also try to write nature poetry in the way of Gary Snyder or Mary Oliver or Walt Whitman or EE Cummings, but will not inflict that on you here 🙂 —I will simply seek to practice inclusivity of all anthropogenic processes for loving life on earth.

In other words, this series views restoration of life in time as poetry in action, and thus as a distilled paean to a living future sung by those who have already chosen not to go extinct. The purpose is to inspire myself to hope that our struggling species will finally choose life as directed in the Psalms, and to share that with you. I will also share the musings of scientists who are working through how best to love the ravaged body of life. The ultimate aim of all three series—probably not to be explicitly stated again—is to look through a glass darkly at how doctors of life might seek to care for and cure all species made vulnerable by sapiens, including ourselves.