Day #15: EcoTheo Review

Celebrating National Poetry Month by highlighting 30 days of literary publishers who produce poetry you can listen to, watch, or read, in 5 minutes or less.

Today’s journal recommendation is for my gal pals, my soul sisters, my neighbors. We share lives, lemons, lavender, and ideas while living and walking on Acjacheman land. There are no fences; we share space with wild things. Rattlesnakes. Great Western Owls. Bats. We water each other’s gardens, know almost every trail out our back doors. And we talk constantly about how to coexist.

“Who has rights to the pomegranates I water? Me or squirrel?”

“What do you think about turning off my fountain because the coyotes come to drink at night?”

“If all is predator and prey, why shouldn’t I exterminate the gophers?”

If you love to consider, and reconsider, what it means to live in harmony with all creation, then EcoTheo Review might be a nice poetry match for you too.

From the “About” page:

EcoTheo Collective envisions a world in which care for the places we inhabit, the people we encounter, and the lives we lead makes for lasting beauty in art, nature, and community. 

In the work we publish online and quarterly print editions of EcoTheo Review, we cultivate conversation and connection with artists and writers to bring original work to a wide audience invested in the relationships between ecology and theology, earth justice and social justice. ETR was founded in 2013 at Princeton Theological Seminary as a literary journal dedicated to “enlivening conversations and commitments around ecology, spirituality, and art.”

EcoTheo Review, the literary journal, is just one of many offerings from the EcoTheo Collective. You can join a virtual Book Club on April 24 to discuss chapters of Our Biggest Experiment: An Epic History of the Climate Crisis by Alice Bell with journal editors, or participate in an online poetry event on May 3 featuring Victoria Chang and Elisa Gabbert.

What should you read today? There are so many favorites I could share from the recent EcoTheo Review. But I’ll give you “Burrowing Habitat” by Jacob J. Billingsley because it stayed with me long after I finished reading.

It begins like this:

My neighbor says he hopes to kill
the woodchucks, thinking they are moles.

How old do you have to be
to want to kill something

so harmless. I tell him
they are good 

for the soil—keep 
it breathing.

burrowing habitat by jacob j. billingsley

Do follow the link and read the rest of this poem, and many more if you’ve got some time.

I hope you keep breathing.

And reading poetry.

And living close to those you live close to.

Keep questions and conversation open and always keep talking to your neighbors who may, if you listen well and share generously, become friends you cherish.