What We Were Born For

In this marvelous, compact, first volume of poems by Emilie Lygren, a California outdoor educator who has developed outdoor science curricula for youth (the BEETLES project at the Lawrence Hall of Science) and worked as a life coach and mentor for teens, a kitchen manager, and a barista, readers find a world shimmering in beauty and possibility. Whether contemplating the daily news or rivers or mothers or circles of students really discovering the outdoors for the first time, Lygren’s poems shimmer with revelation. There is a simplicity of being in every act and day that abides and sustains all people. Soil, a fly, shadows, the ways of planting seeds—Lygren writes about her father’s tools in a poem that has made me cry so many times since first hearing it years ago in a Tassajara wilderness workshop and then seeing it years later on a page. What tools do people really need? How do people keep constructing lives they might live honorably, together? How do people keep being born to new wonder the longer they live? Lygren is a meditative poet with immense social energy: her lines inspire people to become better. They also encourage thinking of poems that may have been missed. Everyone is richer than they think they are. Give this book to people you love as well as yourself.