Hello Earth: A Month of Daily Reflections

By Rosemary Nissen-Wade

These "Earth Hellos" were written June 2020. They are a series of brief 'mindful writings' but they very soon expanded into longer prose poems: meditations of a sort.They deepen our connection to the self and the earth in profound, unexpected ways. During the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, when in Australia there were lockdowns and quarantining, the author went into self-isolation for some months (being high-risk on several counts). It was a strange period - confronting the unknown, dealing with fear, finding of necessity different ways to live and communicate. The author's month of daily 'earthellos' was crucial in maintaining her wellbeing. And may very well add to the wellbeing of the reader.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rosemary Nissen-Wade
• Release date: Feb 6, 2021
• ISBN: 9781942005667

Rosemary Nissen-Wade

Rosemary Nissen-Wade is an Australian poet, witch, Reiki Master and professional psychic medium. She grew up on the island of Tasmania where, throughout her childhood, the moon rose outside her uncurtained bedroom window; so she thinks she was bound to be poetic and magical (and both started from an early age). She spent much of her adult life in the city of Melbourne, and now lives in a small town in the sub-tropical Northern Rivers region of NSW. Author of three volumes of poetry, several e-chapbooks and some collaborations with other poets, she has been a librarian, editor and book reviewer, and has taught writing in both tertiary institutions and community settings. She has outlived three husbands and has a number of grown-up children, foster-children and step-children as well as several step-grandchildren.Rosemary was a founder of the Melbourne Poets Union in the late 1970s, started a program of prison poetry workshops, and was part of a poetry theatre group called Word of Mouth. For a decade she was an independent publisher of Australian poetry, as proprietor of Abalone Press and part of the Pariah Press Cooperative. She taught Poetry Writing as part of professional writing courses at Holmesglen and Box Hill Colleges of TAFE in Melbourne, and at Victoria College, Toorak (Melbourne) which is now part of Deakin University.She founded, and for seven years facilitated the very successful WordsFlow writers' group at Pottsville Beach Neighbourhood Centre in far northern NSW, before handing it over to other facilitators who continued it a further three years. In its ten years of operation, a number of members had books published and two began and completed degrees in Professional Writing. Recently she has begun a new writers' group, also at PBNC. This is for women writers, as part of Pottsville Beach Village of Women (VOW). VOW Writers is one way in which VOW seeks to support and empower women survivors of various kinds of trauma, and encourage them to share their talents more widely.Rosemary has now embraced the online poetry world via blogging, twitter, and international poetry groups and communities. She is a staff member and feature writer at Poets United, an international community of blogging poets, and a sometime participant in other online poetic communities. She administers several poetry and micropoetry groups on facebook, and is a member of others. She is too busy nowadays to chase publication, but when invited (which she is glad still happens now and then) she publishes in both online and paper literary journals and anthologies. Her various blogs, both poetry and prose, can be found on her website at www.nissen-wade.com or by googling Rosemary Nissen-Wade. (The hyphenated surname ensures she's the only one!)Some free pdf chapbooks are available at her Google site: https://sites.google.com/site/rosemaryschapbooks/Her first two paperback books of poetry, UNIVERSE CAT and SMALL POEMS OF APRIL, are long out of print, but selections from each are included in her latest monograph, SECRET LEOPARD – of which only a few paperback copies remain, but SECRET LEOPARD is now published as an ebook and is available on Smashwords.Her work has also appeared in the collaboration, SHE TOO (with Helen Patrice, Delaina J. Miller and Leigh D.C. Spencer) in the chapbooks LIFE AFTER DEATH and THE IMAGINED OTHER (the latter in collaboration with Walt Wojtanik, Phillip Barker and Bruce Neidt) and in a wide variety of journals and anthologies. Her website has details of her non-Smashwords publications and how to acquire them. Most are also on her Amazon page (see 'Where to buy in print').THREE CYCLES OF THE MOON, a collaboration with her friends and fellow-poets Helen Patrice and Jennie Fraine, is available at Smashwords.Forthcoming at Smashwords is FOUND ON THE EDGE, a new collaboration with Helen Patrice, Jennie Fraine and Michele Brenton, planned for early 2020. Watch this space!

Book preview

1

Hello Earth,

Here I am, in the spare room, keeping a safe distance out of the cleaner’s way. Neither I nor she wishes to catch the Virus.

Earth, you have been regenerating, I’m told, from the excess of people, now that most of us are staying indoors. 

Leaning in, I remember the love you have always given me. I always felt it, and feel it even now. The walls are not so thick as to shut it out.

Listing gratitudes, I recall lying on grass in my childhood, gazing at sky — ground that supported me, sky that seemed to look back at me kindly.

Offering myself the joy of these memories, I offer on your behalf my prayers: for people who will treat you as kindly as you treated me then, who will support you.

2

Hello Earth,

Here I am, sleepy, putting off going to bed.

Earth, you are quiet tonight. The dark is deep.

Leaning in, I start to hear the deeper silence.

Listing gratitude — the speed of sound, the roof over my head, a comfortable place to sit.

Offering my eyelids closing, caring for myself by going to bed now.

3

Hello Earth,

Here I am, contemplating the clarity of winter sunshine.

Earth, you continue to surprise me, even with the same old.

Leaning in, I want you to hold me like a mother.

Listing gratitudes, some are selfish (I don't have dark skin).

Offering white guilt is not useful. What of awareness, prayer, solidarity, lifted voice?

A bit of a segue? I don't think anything is a segue at the moment. All thoughts lead, naturally and inevitably, back to George Floyd and the protests. There is simply nowhere else they could possibly go.

4

Hello Earth,

Here I am, listening to the rustling of the breeze outside, and seeing through the window the sun striking the uppermost leaves of the trumpet vine along my back fence.

Earth, this portion of you I inhabit is blessed with greenery, vast clear skies, blue mountains, a flat, lazy river.

Leaning in, I notice my neighbour's gardenias still blooming as we head into winter; I see that the young magpies have

Listing my gratitudes is easy here;