This morning, I started out my reading time with a little poetry from Billy Collins. The title of this article is a line from his poem Canada, from the book, “Sailing Alone Around the Room.”

What Collins does best is turn an apparently simple phrase into a numinous moment. –The New Yorker

That started off innocently. I just wanted to share the quote on the cover jacket. Then I had to go look up the word numinous. It means “1 : Supernatural, mysterious 2 : filled with a sense of the presence of divinity : Holy 3 : appealing to the higher emotions or to the aesthetic sense : spiritual.”

And that makes all the sense in the world.

Reading poetry in the morning is like reading words spoken directly to my inner core, my poetic self, my joy in a glorious turn of a phrase. Handsome are those words that whisper subtle meanings to me. Haunting and numinous are they. What a ring that has to it.

And we are Oh So Much Closer to Spring! This weekend, we turn the clocks forward and get just that much more light in the morning. Evenings will become longer. Our view of the back field will be an all summer long mural of wide skies and long views, with “endless visibility that hands you the horizon on a platter.” Oh!

It is true. I may use too many exclamation points when I write. I have been trying to work on that, but it is no use. I am excited over everything. If I were unable to use excitement in my writing, I would have to bounce, and which is worse, I ask you? Truly, if you know me in real life, I do both. Which is why, perhaps, I so often turn to the soothing words of poetry to ground me, and sway me spiritual or earthy and wise for a moment, before I run amok and go skipping and twirling through a back field like Maria in the Sound of Music, all caught up in the beauty all around me, and singing at the top of my lungs.

My poor boys. Their mother is such a delirious whack job.

photo of our back field from my phone.