I’ve been keeping a list for some time of my favorite blogs. There are so many to choose from that discovering one capable of sparking genuine enthusiasm often feels like chance—like gazing nightly at the starry heavens and marveling at what lies beyond human reach. When such a blog does appear, it draws me back again and again, not out of habit but wonder.
Relying on that list, I came upon a short paragraph-poem this morning by Dr. Drew Lanham, the award-winning African American professor of environmental studies at Clemson University. Lanham confesses to being “a man in love with nature—a wanderer finding foundation in wild places.” What follows is both intimate and expansive:
Handle my life in your hands as if it were your own. Feel the heart beating—small as it may be—and imagine it in your own chest. Beating in syncopated time to become shared meter. That pulse, the breathing, is your rhythm. Your in’s and out’s, its in’s and out’s. Look close under
whatever warty skin or soft fur or gaudy feathers and see self. Its being is your being. Be in that same skin for what moments it will allow. Then, when the convergence between you is sealed, release that wild soul to free roaming as you would desire of your own.
What strikes me is the poem’s quiet tone: a persona grounded in kinship with the natural world, alive with empathy for the vulnerable. Applied beyond nature—to our fellow humans—it gestures toward something transcendent: a way of bridging difference, whether of creed, ethnicity, or race.
Such bridging begins only when we recognize our linkage, when we are willing, even briefly, to see ourselves in others—“Be in that same skin for what moments it will allow.”
Lanham wrote this poem after rescuing a frog from his cat’s pursuit.
Brimmings: up from the well 