Poetry Friday: Marilyn Nelson

Generous Listening

A conversation can be a contest,
or a game of catch with invisible balloons.
They bounce between us, growing and shrinking,
sometimes floating like cloud medicine balls,
and sometimes bowling at us like round anvils.
You toss a phrase and understanding blooms
like an anemone of colored lights.
My mind fireworks with unasked questions.
Who is this miracle speaking to me?
And who is this miracle listening?
What amazingness are we creating?
Out of gray matter a star spark of thought
leaps between synapses into the air,
and pours through gray matter, into my heart:
how can I not listen generously?

I found this poem via On Being’s poetry archive; I’ve heard Nelson on their podcast before. It seems to me – in a year marked by isolation and loss – that we especially need generous listening right now.

April is National Poetry Month, and I am sharing poetry here on Fridays this month, as I do every year. 

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Poetry Friday: Paula Gordon Lepp

Notions

Look at the silver lining, they say.
But what if, instead,
I pluck it off
and use that tensile strand to bind
myself to those things I do not 
want to lose sight of.

Families knit together by evening walks,
board games, laughter. 
The filament fixing us to friends
no matter the distance apart.
A braid of gratitude for small kindnesses.
The thin gauge wire of loss.

Let me twist that lining 
around my finger, 
it’s silvery glint a reminder 
of just how quickly life can change. 
I will remember to love more.
I will remember to give more.

I will remember to be still

I will knot the string tightly. 
So it won’t slip away.
So I won’t forget.

I found Paula’s poem in the anthology How to Love the World, and was struck by the idea of silver linings becoming tangible. You can read more of her poetry on her Facebook page.

April is National Poetry Month, and I am sharing poetry here on Fridays this month, as I do every year. 

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#31things: yoga in the studio.

Twinkle lights, masked smiles, mats spaced apart on wood floors. We don’t talk during class, but there’s a richness to practicing together. I love the friendly chitchat before and after, too.

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#31things: walks with friends.

We meet (bundled in coats and masks), wave hello, stroll the river or park or neighborhood. We trade news, talk books, share hopes for a return to some kind of normalcy. 

(Image from last fall when it was warm enough to walk without coats!)

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#dailytulips and church online.

Good morning, friends. Here we are in week 9 (I think). The weekends do still feel a little different, mostly because I’m not trying to work from my kitchen table.

The past few Sunday mornings, I’ve been tuning into a livestreamed church service from Highland, my church in Abilene. This is a little fraught, I admit: Highland is where I spent countless hours singing on the praise team with my ex-husband, who was the worship leader there. We had our rehearsal dinner in the Highland atrium, and we lived across the alley from the church when we were first married. It was our place, and it is still full of people who love both of us.

Many of you know that we lost our church community here in Boston in September 2018, a loss which has echoed through the following year and a half, especially when my marriage subsequently fell apart. I did make a few attempts to find a new church, or just a place to sit and cry, after we stopped going to Brookline, but it was always hard. (The exceptions were special occasions, like the glorious carol service at Memorial Church in early December, and the lovely, twinkly Christmas Eve service at my childhood church in West Texas.)

In this time of quarantine, I couldn’t walk into a church if I wanted to, and while that is tough, I’ve also felt a sneaking sense of relief. I’ve been turning back to the things that comfort me (haven’t we all?), and the familiar sight of the Highland auditorium, and a few faces and voices I know, is a deep comfort to me. They start with singing – my favorite part of any church service – and then a child recites the Lord’s Prayer via video. I’ve enjoyed seeing a few of the elders, whom I know, get up and lead prayers, too. Sometimes I skip the sermon, but when I’ve listened, I have found wisdom and grace there.

I’ve also been enjoying some of the “Daily Thought” videos from St Aldates, the big, vibrant, loving church in Oxford where I went as a student. And the best “sermon” I’ve heard in this strange time came from my friend Richard Beck, who spoke at the last virtual chapel of the semester for ACU, my alma mater, last week. He reminded the graduating seniors, and all of us, that status and productivity and wealth don’t really matter: what matters is that we are deeply, inherently loved. (His talk starts about 30 minutes into the video.)

Where are you finding encouragement – spiritual or otherwise – in these times? I’d love to hear.

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#dailytulips and thoughts: a May blog series.

Hello, friends. Happy Monday, and happy May.

I’m writing to you from my kitchen floor, where I sometimes sit for a bit these days to give myself a break from the kitchen table. (A couple of weeks ago, I started having serious soreness and muscle tightness – at least partly caused by weeks of sitting on a hard chair.)

I was a bit burned out after 30 straight days of posting stories from quarantine, but I’d like to keep creating and sharing with you during May. To that end: daily tulips, and a daily thought, at least on the weekdays.

It is tulip season in Boston (hallelujah), and I’ve been snapping and sending daily blooms to a friend in California (hi Allison!) who loves them as much as I do. Both the parks around town and my neighborhood are full of glorious, nodding beauties, and I want to share them with you. (I may switch to #dailylilacs or something if we run out of tulips.)

Today’s thought, like so many of mine right now, is related to connection. In this extended time of social distancing, I have been missing time with my people, though I still get to hug my guy, thank goodness. Several friends of mine are feeling the same way: those with kids/partners at home need some additional adult interaction, and those of us who live alone are dying for face-to-face connection, period.

As we head into the next phase of whatever-this-new-normal-is, I’ve got to make some shifts: I can’t count on one person for everything, nor can I spend all day, every day, alone with my own thoughts. We are all taking calculated risks, even if they’re small, and I need some of mine to include community.

So last week I took a (distanced) walk with a girlfriend, and made plans to check in regularly with another on the phone. I FaceTimed a friend from high school, and took a long, glorious Sunday afternoon ramble with a local friend. We stopped by Downeast to buy some cider, and we waved at a few folks I know. It might not be magic, but it’s helping.

My therapist expressed it well: how can I sprinkle in moments of being seen throughout the week? As we head into May, I’m keeping that in mind: how to seek out that space for connection, and create it for others.

Where are you this week, friends? I’d love to know. I’ll be back tomorrow, with more tulips.

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Stories from quarantine: You and Me and Everyone We Know.

One of the strange gifts of this time in quarantine is the chance to reconnect with friends I haven’t talked to in a while. I’ve had several phone chats, FaceTime dates and Instagram exchanges with girlfriends from college, and am texting with my best friend from high school more regularly. And last month, I spoke to my friend Brent for his coronavirus podcast, You and Me and Everyone We Know.

Brent and I were part of the same friend group in college, and we followed each other’s blogs as I went back to Oxford and he went to the Peace Corps, and then I moved to Boston (after another stint in Abilene) and he found his way to Minneapolis, where he lives now with his husband and their kids. We keep up on Instagram, but hadn’t actually spoken in years. It was such a treat to catch up a bit and hear his warm, kind voice.

The episode I’m on includes two other conversations: one with Brent’s younger sister, Macey, and one with his friend Kedrin. Brent and I talked running, isolation in a one-bedroom apartment, social distancing with friends at the park, the approach of spring, and more. You can listen on his website, on Spotify or on Apple Podcasts. Enjoy!

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Poetry Friday: Naomi Shihab Nye

Two Countries

Skin remembers how long the years grow
when skin is not touched, a gray tunnel
of singleness, feather lost from the tail
of a bird, swirling onto a step,
swept away by someone who never saw
it was a feather. Skin ate, walked,
slept by itself, knew how to raise a
see-you-later hand. But skin felt
it was never seen, never known as
a land on the map, nose like a city,
hip like a city, gleaming dome of the mosque
and the hundred corridors of cinnamon and rope.

Skin had hope, that’s what skin does.
Heals over the scarred place, makes a road.
Love means you breathe in two countries.
And skin remembers–silk, spiny grass,
deep in the pocket that is skin’s secret own.
Even now, when skin is not alone,
it remembers being alone and thanks something larger
that there are travelers, that people go places
larger than themselves.

I went looking for a poem to share with you today and found this one via Shihab Nye’s episode of On Being. I love her work, and in this time when connection looks different, this poem seemed particularly apt.

Many of us will remember being alone, and also connected, in these days. I am grateful for the technology that’s letting us talk and text and wave via Zoom and FaceTime, but you can bet I look forward to hugging my people when this is all over.

April is National Poetry Month, and I am sharing poetry here on Fridays this month, as I do every year. 

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To turn on the light

 

A few weeks ago, I was at the grocery store on a Sunday afternoon when I noticed my cashier had a tattoo: the word Lumos surrounded by a few small starbursts, on the inside of her wrist.

“I like your tattoo,” I said, and her expression – tired and preoccupied – transformed into a grin. “Thanks,” she said. “It reminds me to be happier.”

I puzzled over that for a second and then realized what she meant: that Dumbledore quote about happiness. He tells the Hogwarts students that it can be found “in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light.” I told her I have that line on a t-shirt – my mom gave it to me for Christmas.

“Ah, the Harry Potter generation,” she said with a smile. I confessed I was late to that particular party (my friend Val finally talked me into reading the books, to my everlasting delight and gratitude).

We chatted as she kept bagging my groceries, and she told me she used to have a job at Scholastic, where she got to work on Goblet of Fire during the publishing process. (!!!) She recalled having to sign nondisclosure agreements, and refusing to answer pointed questions from her friends and fellow students. (I wanted to invite her out for a drink and ask her all the questions – but I restrained myself, since I didn’t want to creep her out.)

“What’s your house?” she asked. “You look like you might be a Ravenclaw.”

“I’m a Gryffindor,” I said. (Though – like Hermione – I have strong Ravenclaw tendencies, which I told her.) She nodded, and proudly owned being a Ravenclaw herself. We smiled in shared understanding.

I walked away with full grocery bags and a grin on my face, thinking: she has no idea, but she helped turn on the light for me that afternoon.

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A Bit of Earth

This was my fourth summer growing a balcony garden. And I’m feeling a little guilty about it.

My roots are on two Midwestern farms, where I spent my childhood summers watching cows graze on quiet hillsides and riding in the tractor cab with my grandfather. I spent hours shelling peas and snapping green beans into stainless-steel bowls, pulling dinner – or at least part of it – from the earth outside. I learned about how the land fed us, how in turn we tended the land. How our hard work and care, combined with rain and soil and light, produced the vegetables and meat that ended up on my grandparents’ table.

These days, the most I can manage is a row of pots on a balcony.

I’m a city dweller now, living above the land instead of on it, in a second-floor flat on a suburban street in a bustling town just south of Boston. My husband and I have yet to own any of the places we’ve lived; we are renters, tenants, temporary residents with a lease, not a deed, to our names.

There are perks to this way of living, of course: when a faucet sprouts a leak or an electrical circuit shorts out, we call the landlords (who conveniently live downstairs) and let them deal with it. But since we live upstairs and don’t own our place, the yard – the land – doesn’t belong to us.

Most of the time I don’t mind, but sometimes I wish we could have a garden. I wonder if it would help ground me, help me feel connected to the city I’ve lived in for three years but still hesitate to call home.

I’m over at TRIAD magazine today, talking about my balcony garden. Please click over there to read the rest of my essay and see Kristin’s gorgeous photos of my plants.

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