“We cannot unpeach the peach"

Susan

Rejecting all geometry

Abandoning arrogance to stand in awe

Wild is God, the gardener

Overcoming the absurdity of wilderness

Bowing often to creation

In discernment and humility

The Lord God walking in the cool of the evening

A five-year-old in love with chooks

A woman watching the wings of a moth enflamed in a candle

A child clad in shorts and a t-shirt and high topped sneakers

A man learning the licorice smell of pine stump

The place where we learn this love,

If we learn it at all,

Shimmers behind every new place we inhabit

Looking through a new lens

To take time, sit on the porch

To walk, fish, and catch lightning bugs

A chance to count the chickens before they hatch

Insouciance

We cannot unpeach the peach

My wonder in the face of it is bottomless

This is a found poem that I produced via sayings of Susan and readings that embodied our week with her. Some of the authors that this found poem is produced out of are Barbara Kingsolver, Robert Clark, Annie Dillard, Michael Pollan, Wendell Berry, Wallace Kaufmann, Louis Owens, Scott Russell Sanders, Andrew Hudgins, Denise Levertov, and Mary Oliver. This poem encompasses many of the passions that Susan stirred in me as well as several others during class.

We learned during our week with Susan, about the concept of evil in the face and presence of God. We read a poem about God being the gardener, carefully choosing and plucking plants from the garden for the greater wellbeing of its growth, just as He does with us. He overcomes the absurdity of this earth in its present state.  The fourth stanza embraces the topic lines of various essays and poems that we read. Additionally, I learned the importance of taking away the calibrated meter on the camera lens glued to my face, and seeing things by merely being in their presence. Susan repeatedly mentioned the apprehension we were feeling towards Spring Break the following week, challenging us to live insouciantly (care-free) and to acknowledge several ways of experiencing.

“We cannot unpeach the peach” is a quote by Dillard, simply meaning that we cannot forget what we’ve learned in certain instances, and Susan is a chief representation of that quote. We all thoroughly enjoyed her approach to teaching, reception of her students, and joyful individuality. 

-Post written by Joy Hartman, Hope College

Photos from our night of "Inhabiting the Text". Students each chose a passage from
their readings to bring to life.