| The Tooth Fairy
by Dorianne Laux Text of poem unavailable “The Tooth Fairy” by Dorianne Laux from Only as the Day is Long: New and Selected Poems. W. W. Norton & Company, 2019. (buy now)
It's the birthday of writer and explorer Alexandra David-Néel, (books by this author) born in Saint-Mandé, France, in 1868. She had an unhappy childhood, the only child of bitter parents who fought all the time. She tried running away over and over, starting when she was two years old. As a teenager, she traveled by herself through European countries, including a bike trip across Spain. When she was 21, she inherited money from her parents, and she used it all to go to Sri Lanka. She worked as an opera singer for a while to finance her travels. She was especially interested in Buddhism. She disguised herself as a Tibetan woman and managed to get into the city of Lhasa, which at that time was off-limits to foreigners. She became fluent in Tibetan, met the Dalai Lama, practiced meditation and yoga, and trekked through the Himalayas, where she survived by eating the leather off her boots and once saved herself in a snowstorm with a meditation that increases body temperature. The locals thought she might be the incarnation of Thunderbolt Sow, a female Buddhist deity. She became a Tantric lama in Tibet when she was 52 years old. And she wrote about it all. Her most famous book is Magic and Mystery in Tibet (1929), in which she wrote: "Then it was springtime in the cloudy Himalayas. Nine hundred feet below my cave rhododendrons blossomed. I climbed barren mountain-tops. Long tramps led me to desolate valleys studded with translucent lakes ... Solitude, solitude! ... Mind and senses develop their sensibility in this contemplative life made up of continual observations and reflections. Does one become a visionary or, rather, is it not that one has been blind until then?" She died in 1969, at the age of 101, a few months after renewing her passport. She was a big influence on the Beat writers, especially Allen Ginsberg, who converted to Buddhism after reading some of her teachings.
It's the birthday of the poet Denise Levertov, (books by this author) born in Ilford, England (1923). She worked as a civilian nurse during World War II in London, and in 1946 published her first book, The Double Image. Then she moved to America and became very involved in American political causes as well as American schools of poetry. She wrote, "In certain ways writing is a form of prayer." She published more than 30 books, mostly poetry, but also essays and translations. And she remained prolific until the end of her life — in 1997, the year she died, she published two books of poetry: The Life Around Us, a collection of nature poems written over the course of her career; and The Stream and The Sapphire, a selection of poems with religious themes.
It's the birthday of the writer Sarah Josepha Hale, (books by this author) born in Newport, New Hampshire (1788). Sarah Josepha Hale was a vocal supporter of Thanksgiving, and along with a litany of other social causes and campaigns, the campaign to make Thanksgiving a national holiday was her dearest cause. She wrote letters to one president after another — Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, and finally Abraham Lincoln, who did, in fact, listen to her. He proclaimed Thanksgiving a national holiday, celebrated that year on the last Thursday of November. So we have Sarah Josepha Hale to thank for Thanksgiving, as well as for writing the nursery rhyme "Mary Had A Little Lamb." Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® | 
