Checkpoints

We know places of power from video games. A totem, a healing fountain, a bonfire or wherever your heart fills with determination. Places that hold a special aura, where some sort of magic is possible. In video game magic, it replenishes your HP, provides you the safety of second chances and too gives you a breather. Much like in the Japanese concept of ma, we are taught by fiction that places of power are also places of pause.Stephen King calls his version of them "receiving place", the spot where the chair is comfortable, the light is perfect and the vibe is strong. There is a story about how Emily Dickinson once told her niece that locking her bedroom, the place where she wrote most of her poems in, was "freedom".Up until not long ago, we all had favorite places that could easily refill our life bars. On my list was my home. For whoever has the privilege to have even a nook to call their own, with sweat and care it can become one of those places to heal and inspire. Then a lot changed overnight, as we know. Our homes turned into the only places, whether we loved or loathed them, where everything happens. Work, leisure, time to self, all comprised into those same few squared meters, every nook and cranny.During these strange times, I moved. To a new home, with new nooks, and a different hemisphere, with new places to look for pause. But what is pause in a time that itself feels like pause? I have been wondering. There is a poem I like a lot by American poet Wendell Berry. It speaks of places of power and of finding grace, whatever you choose the word to mean. Poetry recently made its way into my places of power - not a physical place, but close enough.The Peace of Wild ThingsWendel BerryWhen despair for the world grows in meand I wake in the night at the least soundin fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,I go and lie down where the wood drakerests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.I come into the peace of wild thingswho do not tax their lives with forethoughtof grief. I come into the presence of still water.And I feel above me the day-blind starswaiting with their light. For a timeI rest in the grace of the world, and am free.(Not by any coincidence, Berry is also a farmer.)-Maíra