Holly Wren Spaulding

Holly Wren Spaulding is a worldwide activist, filmmaker and award-winning poet, writer, researcher, and artist. She grew up in the woods in northern Michigan, off the grid in a “pretty 19th century style of life,” she said.

For a New Year

Let plain things please you again

and every ordinary Monday.

Bean soup in a white bowl,

firewood in your arms.

The weight of longing.

That you have survived is evidence

that nothing is assured

but you are lucky.

Looking up from this page

let all of it surprise you —

piled mail, other people, the air.

— Holly Wren Spaulding