binge thinking and other things in life
You would have loved today’s weather.
That small accidental sunrise.
You would have noticed it. Immediately.
The absence of rain. I knew you would.
Nothing about today
says anything about you’re not
being here. So this poem
wanders instead.
Nothing is the same, I’m sorry.
I know you would have loved
this morning. The lights
slanted just perfect only because
there’s s small fracture in the sky
in the shape of your face. I would
have taken a picture but honestly,
I have wished for it to rain.
In these tough times, must we speak about love, flowers, books, and poetry and rainbows? Yes we must.
Writers must write, and poets must keep poetry flowing through their brain into longing souls.
We must let our words do what they do, and that is to exist as tomorrow is not promised.
We must wake up with our hearts open, tending to our being on earth with patience and care.
We must brew our coffee and look around us and keep each other safe, and not let any force divide us.
We must remember, feel, love in everything we say, and do. We must be kind, or try to be. As much as we can.
We must press gently each other’s wounds to acknowledge them and take them into our consideration before we speak.
We must embrace the differences of our skin and love all colours and marvel at the oranges of the sunset, and rainbows at the end of stormy rain.
We must keep each other close to our hearts. And our minds, and remind each other of hope and compassion, the long road ahead of us.
We must treat heartache, misunderstanding, baseless assumptions, misplaced hostility as parts of our humaneness.
We must not forget our humility, our tenderness, our blossoming into the vast forest that is life, our becoming.
We must consider others’ hearts, sorrow in their face, their vulnerability, so we can start our path into generosity.
We must thank each other, and look each other in the eye, and speak low.
We must teach each other to sit with our discomforts so there will be less shouting, lashing out, anger and frustration.
We must understand differences and try to find peaceful middle ground. Build one. Make one.
We must think of children, waterfalls, the lakes and the seas. The quiet wisdom from the oceans that have been carrying out the earth for centuries.
We must study resilience from that of wildflowers sprouting everywhere in the cold and rain and snow.
We must touch the grass to feel the softness of our hands. To remind us that we are capable of loving. That we are love. And therein, we must speak love.
We must begin, again.
sit beneath the shade of a barberry’s branches and understand that generosity is older than thought. trees feed the weak. they slow their growth for the young. they give what is theirs to the sick. on this there is no debate.
run your fingers over moss-covered bark and know you’re touching layers of time. a tree’s outer skin is also its diary, marked by drought and storm and calm. it bears itself freely, wearing its history.
notice the ragged years after a mass flowering, when trees look bare and exhausted. beauty often requires sacrifice. our generosity leaves us vulnerable. but it also ensures a certain blooming; that the dance will go on.
watch insects devour a leaf, and understand: being alive means being part of a whole, not above of one. we all give. we are all taken from. you are not the exception.
observe the way seedlings wait in the earth for years, sometimes decades. patience is a strategy. timing is everything. growth is not always immediate. readiness is the only door.
much like trees, we are the improbable survivors of a vast and silent lottery. the odds of you reading this, breathing, are as slim as a beech seed becoming a forest elder: your life is, by all accounts, a statistical fluke. our heart beats, our lungs fill, but like trees who endure storms and rot to one day blossom, we are the rarest outcome of a million failed tries.
and when a seed does catch in the earth perfectly, prepared to sprout, survival is still a rarity, aging an even more unlikely accident of chance. so too with us. we are not guaranteed survival. we are not guaranteed joy. and yet we still spend ourselves— our time, our strength, our youth— on the sensible, human work of living. we raise children, plant gardens, write poems, and fall in love; make soup, care for aging parents, whistle and cry and pray and believe in one other.
My offering to you on this gray December morning is this: I want you to understand, in your heart, inside your bloodstream, deep in your marrow, that everything will always hurt your feelings and that’s a good thing. In the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald describing Gatsby, you have something rare and special, a “heightened sensitivity to the promises of life,” “an extraordinary gift for hope,” “a romantic readiness” that’s precious and worthy of respect.
When you’re aligned with this truth, you recognize that your huge heart makes it very, very frightening to invest in what you love. Your heightened sensitivity makes it extremely difficult to stick with the people, places, and things that light you up the most. Your ebullient soul will sometimes abandon what you need the most and you won’t even know why. You will simply lose the thread, get distracted, move on, withdraw, and you won’t recognize what you’re doing.
But when you dare to feel the pain of being what you are — a sensitive instrument, an open window, a tiny bird perched on the shaky limb of a huge tree in a windstorm, fragile and uncertain and volatile and wildly alive — you gain renewed respect for yourself. You understand why the world is so hard on you. When you respect this pain, you can feel vibrant inside your sensitivity, passionate inside your fear, hungry inside your anger, soulful inside your sadness, brilliant inside your anxious need for more love.
tiny hearts
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