Vox Populi
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James Crews: Mud-Puddling
I don’t want to read another book
or listen to another podcast promising
a better life, the road to happiness.
I just want to love my life as it is—
the cobwebbed corners and rumpled bed,
my sweaty yoga mat still unrolled
across the floor, the color rubbed off
where I rest my head each morning.
Let me love the orderly and the messy—
my unwashed and salt-stained car,
the cracked planter left out in the cold,
this regret that still fills me years after
my mother’s passing because I wasn’t
there at her bedside when she died, because
I didn’t do more to save her. Let me be
like the butterflies, sipping from wet soil,
dung, and carrion, drawing nutrients
from actual blood, sweat, and tears—
what we call mud-puddling. Let me stay
in love with my sorrow today, with anger,
fatigue, and every fruit fly rising up
from the sweet and rotting compost
I forgot to take out.
~~~~
Copyright 2026 James Crews
James Crews is the editor of several bestselling anthologies, including The Path to Kindness: Poems of Connection and Joy and How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope, which has over 100,000 copies in print. He has been featured in The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, The Christian Science Monitor, and on NPR’s Morning Edition. James is the author of four prize-winning books of poetry—The Book of What Stays, Telling My Father, Bluebird, and Every Waking Moment—and a book of short essays, Kindness Will Save the World: Stories of Compassion and Connection. James also speaks and leads workshops on kindness, mindfulness, and writing for self-compassion. He lives with his husband on forty rocky acres in the woods of Southern Vermont.
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“like the butterflies, sipping from wet soil,
dung, and carrion, drawing nutrients
from actual blood, sweat, and tears—
what we call mud-puddling. ”
I read this over and over, knowing that a delightful epiphany was forming in my old brain, and then there it was: aren’t our poems like those butterflies? Don’t they sip what feeds them from life’s, nature’s, and our histories’ blood, sweat and tears? But as in this poem, how love & compassion, gratitude & care often emerge!
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I have a friend who often says, “Get over it!” I like the way you said it better. Thanks, James. I’m going to print a few copies of your poem to use for hand outs!
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“Let me love the orderly and the messy…” Such a wonderful poem, full of what we all live with. Perhaps, as your poem says, we need to be more tender with everyone and everything.
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Yes, James consistently argues in his poem for kindness, love and generosity.
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Your poems always inspire and instruct me in the art of being a better human and writer, James. Thank you, once again!
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I read this poem after meditating in the ADU behind my son’s house. I am beginning to spend more time here as I learn to let go of my house full of memories. At one point when I opened my eyes, I could see my son outside my window rescuing the bag of birdseed mama squirrel opened when he left it on my porch. I must remember to leave something out for her as it is obvious she is feeding a family. The little peach tree we planted still has some pink flowers but also the beginnings of fruit and leaves. There is beauty in the beginnings of final stages and beginnings of beginnings and I am beginning to let go and see it in what is.
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Thank you James. I love when a poem opens me to thought and words. Memories of the butterfly forests in Mexico and the Monarchs mud-puddling.
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Lovely, Barb. Thank you.
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Wonderful poem by a wonderful poet and human being. Love love love.
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yes, me too. I love James’s gentle vision.
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“Let me stay in love with…” I love this poem. There is no answer to trouble, just opening towards it. Some of the agreements I work on with my clients as a counselor are the facts of impermanence, and that a time will not come when we will be struggle free. So the work is to learn how to love our struggle and make beauty out of it.
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Beautifully said, Moudi. Thank you. James inspires wisdom in us, doesn’t he?
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Great poem to begin the morning with. It is something we need to be endelessly reminded of. It recalls Zagajewski’s “Try to Praise the Mutilated World.” These two could easily be laminated and put up together as reminders on how to start each day: learning to love life as it is, trying to praise the mutilated world. Thank you James and Michael.
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Thank YOU, Michael.
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I am trying just this every day.
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Brava!
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This one goes up on the outside of the cupboard, where I keep the chipped companions of morning.
I once offered an apple to a friend from a grocery bag of windfall apples. When she opened it a cloud of fruitflies emerged. Perhaps our laughter amused them as much as us? She did refuse the apples, but in a kind sort of way.
James Crews often focuses on kindness both to self and others in his poems and prose. The sort of wayfarer I hope to meet on life’s way.
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Thanks, Jim. You’ve made a lovely poem of praise here.
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Ah James, to love my life as it is, the sweet and rotting compost. This is the challenge, but thinking of it as mud-puddling softens the hardness of it, making it playful. Thanks for this fresh perspective.
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A lovely poem to begin my day. Hear, hear, James Crews — I lift my old / favorite / chipped coffee mug to you!
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