I went to a reading of Ada Limón at Trinity Church in Menlo Park with my cousin yesterday. The church itself is a beautiful space, a reminder of how the earth can feel like a welcoming home. By the time we arrived it was already full, but just then the ushers opened the first two rows, and somehow I found myself in the front row—close enough to take a picture of Ada Limón with Reverend Jude Harmon.
Ada’s reading was intimate and luminous, her voice grounding the packed room in quiet attention. I was also struck by Reverend Jude Harmon, who gave me a glimpse of what Jesus’ love might look like. Even in his brief role, simply through attentive questions and gentle comments, he showed what it means to listen with care. The congregation, too, was warm and inviting, the whole evening carrying a spirit of welcome. At one point, the folks sitting in the row behind us leaned forward and said that because I was a poet, I deserved the front row seat. And I believed them—for a moment words made me feel worthy, which is magical in itself. Later that evening, I even had the chance to speak with her and have a couple of my books signed, including Startlement, released that very day.
I have not studied Ada Limón’s poetry in depth. I’ve written a little about Instructions on Not Giving Up, which carries a Krishna-like message from the title onward and has become one of her most beloved poems. I’ve also reflected on Dream of the Raven and connected it to Guru Nanak’s teaching that suffering itself can be a medicine. But I’ve never truly sat with her work—certainly not from the front row of a church filled with readers. After this luminous evening, and now with two of her books in my hands, I know I want to spend more time with her poems.
So why wait? This morning, wanting to linger a little longer in her voice, I opened her new book at random and landed on this beautiful poem:
On Earth As It Is On Earth
by Ada Limón (from Startlement)
Green and green and green, I speak
to the tree line, a booming body, trying
not to boom. I see myself as I once
was, hiding inside a manzanita outside
the ceramic studio, the mirrored rain-
drops hanging on urn-shaped blooms
and soon, too, my strands of hair. There was
always a line where the rain fell and where
it didn’t. It was the line between abandonment
and freedom, loneliness and imagination.
How I waited in there, composing in my mind
a life without rules, without money, cruelty,
clocks, or clothes, how still I am the same,
in the green, in the green, waiting out the rain.
At first glance, the poem is simple: green and green, a body under rain, a manzanita tree to hide in, mirrored drops. Then a hinge appears: the line where the rain fell and where it didn’t. Weather becomes philosophy. That skinny border is suddenly the place between abandonment and freedom, loneliness and imagination. The border between hard work and grace which Guru Nanak talks about in Japji. Limón plants us on that threshold and, crucially, leaves us there. She doesn’t tell us whether to step out and get soaked or stay tucked inside the leaves. She trusts the reader to choose.
That’s part of why the poem feels therapeutic. If you’re shy, you can read it as a permission slip to dance—go ahead, cross the line, let the water have your hair and your caution. If you tend to act too fast, the poem hands you a stool: sit here, watch the rain break the world into two clean halves, practice not rushing. Either way, you’re welcome. The poem does not close the door behind you; it keeps it open.
It’s also a sonnet—the kind that rhymes in thought. Fourteen lines, a turn at the weather-line, and a last chord that keeps ringing: “in the green, in the green,” while the rain hauntingly rhymes with same. And then there’s the title, which is a small stroke of mischief and devotion. “On Earth As It Is On Earth.” It echoes the Lord’s Prayer:
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. For yours is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever. Amen
While it echoes this prayer that Jesus gave to his disciples, she tilts it -- as if the rain was slanted by wind. Not “as it is in heaven,” but here, now. The poem wagers that heaven is not elsewhere. It is this place, when we agree to notice it.
After I read it, I stayed put for a while, thinking about thresholds. Most of life happens there—on doorsteps, at trailheads, beside riverbanks, in hospital hallways, between emails we send and the replies that may or may not come. Limón’s line of rain gave me a field guide for those places. Stand on the seam. Look both ways. Decide, or don’t, but be alive to the choice.
And then a harder thought arrived. We aren’t just on the threshold of rain and not-rain. We are on the threshold of green and not green. Forests are thinning. Rivers stall. Summers burn longer. The line where the green once held is receding in too many places. Which makes the poem’s refrain feel less like description and more like a vow: “in the green, in the green.” Can we keep that line from slipping back? Can we be the kind of people who notice the change soon enough to help?
There’s a line from Gurbani I carry with me: Wherever my Guru sits, that place becomes green. I hear it as both faith and assignment. The teacher—however you understand that word: divine presence, wise friend, conscience, Shabad—brings greenness with them: attention, tenderness, repair. If that’s true, then greenness is not only a fact of rainfall; it’s a practice. We make places green by how we stand in them: by planting, by protecting, by speaking up, by stepping over the threshold when action is needed, and by waiting wisely when patience will do more good than noise.
Limón’s poem doesn’t tell us which move to make. It offers the stance: alert at the edge, bright to the world, capable of both restraint and courage. In personal life, that might mean letting a hard conversation ripen one more day—or finally walking into it. In civic life, it might mean learning the watershed you live in, calling a representative, planting a tree, or deciding that your backyard will be a little sanctuary of pollinators and shade. Small acts, yes, but that is how lines hold: one rooted choice at a time.
So I finish the poem and look out the window. I am just going to start the purpose of life class, where they think I am teaching them, but in fact they are teaching me. On the sidewalk there’s a thin wet stripe where the irrigation overshot the lawn and found the concrete. A miniature version of Limón’s border. I stand there for a minute, just looking—earth as it is on earth. Then I think about the larger stripe we’re all standing on together, the one between green and not green, and I wonder what today’s faithful act might be.
And here, now, I pass the ball to you. Stand on the line a moment. Think away. Then decide which side your next step will defend. In the green, in the green. Hopefully, with Ada, Reverend Jude and me in these lines:
Wherever my Guru sits, that place becomes green.
Whoever sees my guru, that person becomes green.
Singing oneness!
3 Comments
Gorgeous Shivji. Totally resonated-Prerna
ReplyDeleteThank you so much for reading. Always so kind!!!
DeleteBeautifully sensitive and touching analysis in the light of our world’s present situation.
ReplyDeleteMay the spiritual dimension of nature gather more and more people into green advocacy, were it only by pickin up a piece of rubbish on public grounds and gently putting it in a waste bin with a smile.
A child seeing that will be inspired to do the same, thereby spreading the spirit in his turn. It works. 🙏🏻