My instructions were clear: I was told to keep this overflowing, small cardboard box in a safe place until my six-year-old daughter turns twenty and has children of her own. At that point, she would retrieve the box and give its contents to her children.
Somewhere along the way in her voracious reading, my daughter had stumbled upon the concept of a time capsule. I put the box on top of a bookshelf and then, curiosity got the better of me. What did a six-year-old think was worth preserving for posterity? I opened the box and peeked inside: a photo of her and her father at her first Daddy Daughter dance, a pine cone that she had painted in class, some Barbie stickers that the pediatrician had given her, some cupcake erasers from a friend, a little piece of ribbon left over from the Fourth of July parade this past year. Lots of artwork.
In some ways the items stared at me like a visual examination of conscience. These were the things that were important to her; they contrasted sharply with the worries and concerns that I had had over the past year, the to-do lists and errands and comparisons. This was age six, I thought, with a pang of loss and grief as I realized that she would be turning seven in the next few weeks.
I thought of this scene once again when I encountered this beautiful poem by Denise Levertov, entitled “Living” in Czeslaw Milosz’s A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry.
The fire in leaf and grass
so green it seems
each summer the last summer.
The wind blowing, the leaves
shivering in the sun,
each day the last day.
A red salamander
so cold and so
easy to catch, dreamily
moves his delicate feet
and long tail. I hold
my hand open for him to go.
Each minute the last minute.
Because I grew up catching salamanders in our backyard creek, the image of the salamander in the poet’s hand instantly connected with me. I can confirm that salamanders are “easy to catch” as she says. The way the poet goes from the general: “each summer the last summer” to the specific – “each day the last day” – and then so specific as to be the almost insignificant moment that she catches a salamander and lets him go – “each minute the last minute” is nothing short of breathtaking, capturing how our lives are made up of these small, almost insignificant moments of beholding beauty and letting it go and how our final, last act will also be an act of beholding beauty and finally letting go.
In her work on poetry, “Some Notes on Organic Form” Levertov discusses the influence of Gerard Manley Hopkins on how she interprets form. I think we see Hopkins’ influence in the image of the salamander itself, an image that brings to mind Hopkins’ “Pied Beauty,” in which he invokes “All things counter, original, spare, strange” to praise God.
Our family has been learning about Charlotte Mason’s approach to home education this past year. One of the things that she states is: “We all need to be trained to see, and to have our eyes opened before we can take in the joy that is meant for us in this beautiful life.” A poem like Levertov’s truly teaches us to see and to take in the joy of this “dappled thing,” the salamander, and to see in it the necessity of living utterly in the present moment.
I look back at my daughter’s time capsule, full of the “original, spare, strange,” and I see the summer fading before my eyes as it fades in Levertov’s poem: the orange fire, the red salamander, the leaves shivering – autumn is there in the poem even as it beholds summer. Levertov somehow has perfectly encapsulated what I am aspiring to teach my daughter through Charlotte Mason’s approach to nature study: to train our next generation to truly see and experience joy in nature, even as it is passing and fleeting before our eyes. At the same time, this approach to nature study has allowed me to experience and enjoy my daughter in the same way: to behold her and to take joy in her.
Barbara Gonzalez 2026
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