Last year my editor at Goldfish, Koon Woon, sent me this link–to a 2017 PBS news story about poetry in Seattle. I recently ran across it while cleaning up my in-box, and I wanted to share it.
“Navigating Seattle’s Ever-Evolving Streets Through Poetry”
This is my belated Thanksgiving post.
I had lunch with an old friend today, and I spent a great deal of the time griping about my life. About my husband. About my difficult teenager. About all the sugar and starch I’ve been eating. About my difficult dog. About…well, pretty much everything.
I’ve been feeling weirdly angry, and I have sort of been taking it out on everyone around me.
Maybe it’s just because I’ve been coping with a fairly bad cold for the past two weeks, while trying not to miss any more days in the classroom. (Maybe it’s because I spent my Thanksgiving break grading papers.)
Maybe it’s because my husband is freaked out about the stock market and is hell-bent on getting me to freak out, too.
Maybe it’s because I have so much I want to write, and I’m not finding enough time to write.
My friend listened patiently, shrugged, and said, “Sounds like grief.”
And maybe it is because my mother died and no matter how rational the grown-up me can explain away my feelings, my child-heart is sad, sad, sad.
Another friend, a day or so ago, sent me a meditation from Father Richard Rohr. I fired back, “And how do we DO that?” But I’ve found myself rereading and thinking about his opening words:
All healthy religion shows you what to do with your pain, with the absurd, the tragic, the nonsensical, the unjust and the undeserved—all of which eventually come into every lifetime. If only we could see these “wounds” as the way through, as Jesus did, then they would become sacred wounds rather than scars to deny, disguise, or project onto others. I am sorry to admit that I first see my wounds as an obstacle more than a gift. Healing is a long journey.
If we cannot find a way to make our wounds into sacred wounds, we invariably become cynical, negative, or bitter. This is the storyline of many of the greatest novels, myths, and stories of every culture. If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it—usually to those closest to us: our family, our neighbors, our co-workers, and, invariably, the most vulnerable, our children.
This fits beautifully with something else I’ve read, somewhere recently, about how art creates a safe place for us to contain our pain. It’s why “art therapy” is a thing, and it’s why we watch scary movies and escape into tense, fever-inducing novels, when you’d think “gentle” and “soothing” would have more appeal. We want that place where we can feel what we feel. It’s why I’ve been watching twisted, psychological mysteries late at night and reading one mystery novel after another all quarter long.
They have not been helping.
Of course I know what to do when I’m feeling this way–this frustrated, out-of-control angst-y way–and you probably do, too.
Just write. And I don’t mean whine and moan in your journal (I’ve also been doing that).
If you don’t know what else you can write, try writing down what you’re thankful for–start with the smallest of stuff, the celery stick your husband brought you while you were writing your blogpost; your daughter’s friend who showed up out of no where and spent a little time with your dog.
Write what you want to focus on–put it in your best positive language. Imagine what small action steps you can take to move your butt a tiny bit closer to that. Write those steps down. Choose one. Do that.
With our time together almost over, my very patient friend asked me what I was going to do with my time, not right now, but in January, when I won’t be teaching two classes, when I won’t be driving my teenager anywhere (a big part of my job this past year–until she got her own car this spring), when I won’t be worrying about and rushing over to visit my mom (a huge part of my life these last several years).
I’m going to get up every morning and write, I said.
Wow, she answered. Do you know how lucky you are?
Yeah, I kinda do. I’ll end with this quote that I found over at the Holstee blog:
Practicing gratitude means recognizing the good that is already yours.
If you’ve lost your job, but you still have your family and health, you have something to be grateful for.
If you can’t move around except in a wheelchair but your mind is as sharp as ever, you have something to be grateful for.
If you’ve broken a string on your violin, and you still have three more, you have something to be grateful for.
– Alan Morinis, founder of the Mussar Institute
Thank you for reading.
On this coming Sunday, 18 November 2018, at 4 p.m., I’ll be reading at Village Books with my friend, poet Jayne Marek. (Click on the Village Books link to read their page on the event.)
I’ll be reading from Body My House, and it would be so wonderful to see you there!
I’m a pretty busy person. Despite my teaching schedule this quarter, I’ve managed to get away for poetry weekends and readings. I’ve met friends for coffee or lunch (if they could drive to Everett!). But there’s something about my mother’s final days, about her death, about her burial and her memorial that has made me I feel as though I’m driving through a long tunnel. I’m aware that there’s a world “out there,” and yet to get through these days and weeks I’ve had to focus on staying in my lane and moving forward. There’s light, somewhere up ahead, but no scenery or detours or flashy billboards to entertain or distract me.
This morning (Friday, when I drafted this) I have been reading some poems — getting ready to do a Veteran’s Day poetry unit for my daughter’s fifth grade class — and this poem by D. H. Lawrence twice crossed my path. I think there’s a message for me here, but I’m not quite sure what it is.
The White Horse
The youth walks up to the white horse, to put its halter on
and the horse looks at him in silence.
They are so silent they are in another world.–D. H. Lawrence
What we know about tunnels is that they feel dark and endless, but they do end. Tunnels are thresholds. They lead us to what comes next. In her book, The Soul’s Slow Ripening: 12 Celtic Practices for Seeking the Sacred, Christine Valters Paintner calls thresholds, “liminal times when the past season has come to a close but there is a profound unknowing of what comes next.” She continues:
“Thresholds are challenging because they demand that we step into the in-between place of letting go of what has been while awaiting what is still to come. When we are able to fully release our need to control the outcome, thresholds become rich and graced places of transformation. We can become something new when we have released the old faces we have been wearing, even it means not knowing quite who we are in the space between.”
I don’t know quite who I am just now. I want to stand still in this place, to be silent. I want to let all that is becoming, come.