Dr. Dodge: Passion for Health

Angels Sing in Me is the title of an anthology of the best poems, essays, and stories of James Dillet Freeman. It is a wonderful collection, published in honor of a remarkable man. Jim Freeman was an author, minister, director of education, and executive, but it is for his lyrical poetry that he is best remembered. 

Known as Unity’s poet laureate and called a “modern-day Transcendentalist,” Freeman’s poems have been published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Saturday Review, Scientific Monthly, Reader’s Digest, and many other places. Freeman is the only poet to have had poems put on the moon by two astronauts. His work transcends time and space.  

I was privileged to hear and meet Jim Freeman in 1999 when I attended my first retreat at Unity Village. He was a vigorous octogenarian then, and he was marvelous in reciting one of his most famous poems, I Am There, and telling us how the poem came to him. Too long to reprint here, it is one of his poems that literally went to the moon. 

Jim Freeman passed away in 2003, but his poetry still sings. I bought a copy of his book when I was at my most recent Unity retreat two weeks ago. His writing moves me to tears at times, but always leaves me inspired and refreshed.  Hear what Freeman himself says: 

“Poetry is song. The whole universe moves in rhythm, our pulse dances, keeping time to the music of our central being. Let us give it tunes then to which it may dance in joy.” 

“Poetry is the lightning of God… Poetry is as intense as life... Prose produces light, but poetry strikes fire – and to live, we need fire!” We see his fire in an essay entitled, Be! 

“Life cries to me with ten thousand tongues that it is meaningful. Morning cries it with sunlight and birdsongs and pink rosebud clouds. Noon cries it from a brazen mouth of fire, evening with the still small voice of quietness, night with… the lights of all the stars. Spring shouts it like a hallelujah chorus. The horns of summer blow it across the groves and meadows. Fall’s gold and scarlet fifes repeat it on the burning hills. It rumbles on the drums of winter under the brooding snows. Storms cry out its meaning no less than tranquil seasons…To be is to grow, and to grow is to aim beyond your reach. Growth is aspiration, and aspiration is the impulse to be what you were born to be…God said, “Be!” 

Then this from another poetic essay: “Clouds form and dissolve, birds sing, insects rise, leaves tremble, flowers unfold – all is change, activity, livingness. You may be part of this livingness. The universe is as a web, beautifully woven; its threads spiraling out, linking every living thing, even every atom, so intimately, so perfectly, that no least thread, no least point in the perimeter can be touched, but the whole web vibrates in harmony. You can be one with this oneness of things… You are part of life.”