For the past 10 years, Creative Learning in a Unique Environment (CLUE) teacher Dwight Robert Wade has been compiling poignant poems and illustrative images into a book called “The Lost Love Songs of Thomas Winter.”

While traversing through America’s national parks, Wade composed his experiences into poems. He views writing the poems as a way of uncovering what was already there. 

“I remember the very first thing I started working on, I was camping out in New Mexico and I got up in the middle of the night, and saw the stars, and went back to lay down in my camper and started thinking about something and I wrote it down,” Wade said. “I kept working on it and kept working on it and kept working on it.”

In his book, Wade discusses the acquisition of inspiration when connections are made. To him, looking beyond this life and accepting that there is more than one life to lead requires the sacrifice of the pursuit of worldly attributes like materialism, approval seeking, popularity and pleasure to find true connection.

“There’s something there that’s often facilitated by relationships, a sense of connectedness,” Wade said. “And it’s the longing for connectedness that we seek. We spend our lives trying to figure out how to achieve that. Essentially, the secret is turning our thoughts to other people, becoming more concerned with others, then we truly feel connected, and we experience inspiration.”

Wade wrote most of his poems while visiting the national parks with his dog, Ziggy. Inspired by the stars and sights of the American west, Wade crafted his works through his experience. Many of his poems were inspired by the setting of the natural environments he visited.

“I was out traveling through the national parks,” Wade said. “I did it six summers in a row and I’d go out [from] the second school got out, to the second school got started. I would camp, and I had my dog with me. And we would just drift — and I saw all the national parks, many of them several times — and just have experiences along the way. Mostly, that’s where [the poems] are composed.”

In the process of repeatedly revising his poems, selecting and editing his photos, and meticulously sifting through and placing his works, Wade put the book together. Wade worked on the cover of his book with Isis Calma (10), which is a depiction of the loss of innocence and childhood from the 1941 film, Citizen Kane. Furthermore, Wade navigated the technically difficult process of publishing his book in a way that complemented his intentions without looking too professional.

“I was just taking tons and tons and tons of pictures, and when you take tons and tons of pictures, occasionally, you get a good picture, and I started collecting them,” Wade said. “Then I realized that they made a nice complement to the story, and I really hope that some people would be drawn to the pictures, and then accidentally read the poems … and they might say ‘Wait a second, this is really good.’” 

To Wade, the process of assembling his book was a mixture of difficulty and ease. When the time came to finalize each individual poem and the book as a whole, the collection came together in a moment of realization. 

“There came a moment with everything that I knew it was done,” Wade said. “I think if you were sculpting, you could tell by looking at a sculpture that the sculpture was complete. And every poem was like that.”

Each individual poem contributes to themes of loss and redemption, awakening and self-abandonment. As a whole, Wade realizes and challenges what he considers the nightmare of normal experience.

“There’s kind of a nightmare that is the normal experience of unsatisfied demand, of self-pity, of fear and anger, and that’s the normal, common experience of people searching for something and never finding it,” Wade said. “And then there’s a very different state of mind when we sacrifice and surrender all that. It’s almost a kind of self-abandonment. You just start to turn your thoughts to others. Not out of a kind of virtue, but out of a genuine act of energy transference.” 

Writing about the outdoors while being in the outdoors himself, Wade believes his audience is anyone attracted to the outdoors. He hopes that his readers enjoy it, or identify with his book in a form of connectedness — the essential essence of the book.

“[My audience is] people who are attracted to the outdoors,” Wade said. “People who are jazzed by spirit. There’s a feeling of the sublime that’s experienced in nature, and the people who are drawn to that. It’s worth noting that the sublime is that feeling we get when our mind tries to put form on something that’s resistant to having form, like fire or water, we experience this disharmony of the mind … People who are drawn to that are the people who I think would enjoy reading [my book].”

To Wade, the book is more about gift-giving than anything else. It is meant to be a gift to give, mirroring its essential theme of selflessness, connection and generosity.

“The idea that there might be something, a virtue, there is sort of like panning for gold, they just think it’s so unlikely that they really look,” Wade said. “I think there’s really something [in my book]. You have to reread it, probably at least once or twice, again to see it.”