(From an interview with poet and author Marilyn Nelson)
I have one book that a lot of people respond to: It’s a spiritual biography of George Washington Carver. It’s called Carver: A Life in Poems. I wrote it because I wanted to write about a saint. I had thought about writing about Hildegard of Bingen – a 12th-century German saint – and I changed course and wrote about Carver. But it’s really a saint’s life.
This is a man who devoted his life to serving the Creator. He got up at 4 o’clock every morning of his life and went out into the woods to commune with the Creator. He believed that the Creator was giving things to him. He was a very, very great inventor and he never took money for his inventions because he said, “the Creator gives them to me free; why should I make a profit on them? They’re gifts.”
He was a great inventor and a great saint.
This message is excerpted from “Holding history” by Sarah Carson from the November 2019 Gather magazine. Today we commemorate John Donne, poet, 1631.
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