Poets, Nuns, and Climate Change
What's Going on Around WestVirginiaVille.com | march16.2021
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1 | PASSAGES: Sister Mary Pellicane passes on at 99
My dear, sweet, and feisty friend, Sister Mary Pellicane — a friend to many in West Virginia and beyond — died this week at age 99, at the retreat center she co-founded in West Virginia’s capital city. This month marked her 75th year as a nun in the order of the Religious of the Retreat in the Cenacle. As a child of Sicilian immigrants who settled in Brooklyn and then Queens, she grew up an inquisitive young woman who loved to dance, from ballet to the Lindy Hop (named after famed aviator Charles Lindbergh, whom she saw in a ticker-tape parade as a kid). At the link, read how she came to enter a semi-cloistered order of nuns — against her parents’ wishes — in pursuit of a life of silence and introspection. Her life turned out maybe less quiet than she expected, not the least reason being “I can’t shut up,” she says. I’ll leave Sister Pellicane the final word, in describing what may be learned in silence:
“We’re all very spiritual people, whether we’re so-called ‘religious’ people or not. Anybody who thinks or who loves — knowing and loving is the basis of our lives. If you’re looking to find happiness, those are two things you are looking for. So, to go away and stop the noise and wait — if you wait, it comes. Sometimes in two weeks, two months, two years. But sometime.”
READ ON: PASSAGES: Sister Mary Pellicane Moves On at 99
2| SPOTLIGHT: Of Black Hair & Confederal History
Legislation is moving quickly in the West Virginia Capitol to allow Confederate monuments to remain on the WestVirginia Capitol grounds while the Crown Act to ban Black hair discrimination stalls. “There is a whole coalition in support of the Crown Act,” says Del. Danielle Walker. You wouldn’t know that by tracking the movement of both bills, as Erin Beck does in our reprint of a recent Mountain State Spotlight article. “Right now, I think if I had to make a decision, I probably would not stay in state,” says Walker’s intern, West Virginia University student Myya Helm (above) of watching the Legislature’s priorities up close. “A lot of these things seem like they’re constantly working against me and my literal existence,”
READ ON: SPOTLIGHT: Of Black Hair & Confederate History in the WV Legislature
3| POETICS: It’s a Poet Laureate thing
The next year, 2022, will mark a solid decade Marc Harshman has served as West Virginia’s poet laureate. What does a poet laureate do and how’d he get the job? Last Thanksgiving, the New York Times solicited poets laureate in all 50 states to muse on what people in their states might be thankful for in a year of pandemic and political upheaval. We reprint the poem as well as others by the poet and ask him “5 Questions” on the vocation of poetry. His answers include a shout-out to young poets:
At the end of the day I believe the best counsel I might offer — certainly to a younger poet — is to love what you do from the deepest place in your soul. Understand that this will bring you hurt and pain, frustration, anger, loneliness, despair. But with luck you will know it can also galvanize in you a sense of purpose, make you giddy, shine a light in the dark, and just possibly might keep your head above water when you feel that all is going down.
READ ON: POETICS: The Art of Being West Virginia’s Poet Laureate
4| CLIMATE: Counting down to (net) zero
While the world remains consumed with COVID-19, the climate crisis remains a blazing, four-alarm fire that’ll worsen quickly without coordinated global action. Achieving ‘net-zero’ carbon emissions is a key to halting — then, beginning to reverse — the warming effect of the megatons of greenhouse gases we inject into Earth’s atmosphere and waters daily. Attaining net-zero carbon emissions is a "heavy but necessary lift" in West Virginia and America, says Perry Bryant, one of the founders of the West Virginia Climate Alliance. At our request, he dives into a significant recent climate report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. In West Virginia, Bryant writes, a move to clean energy and a de-carbonized economy "will stop mountaintop removal, end Black Lung, greatly reduce the need for fracking and vastly improve air quality.” That sounds like a good deal.
READ ON: CLIMATE CRISIS: Getting to ‘net-zero’ carbon emissions a ‘heavy, but necessary lift’
5| NATUREGRAM: Nothing but pines
We can't share with you the sweet aroma of a stand of pine trees in Putnam County, West Virginia. But we can share with you the experience of standing among them. A new WestVirginiaVille shelter-in-nature short video.
SEE MORE NATUREGRAMS: Two minutes of nothing but pines, plus some calming music
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