Finally on my way to yes
I bump into
all the places
where I said no
to my life
all the unattended wounds
the red and purple scars
those hieroglyphs of pain
carved into my skin and bones,
those coded messages
that send me down
the wrong street
again and again
where I find them,
the old wounds
the old misdirections
I lift them
one by one
close to my heart
and I say
—Pesha Gertler
We make meaning of the world through being in relationship with each other. If we don't actually engage with the real feelings that people have, the real confusions, the real contradictions, and meet them there, and make out and work through reality together, we'll leave people to be co-opted into these movements that actually don't serve them. … I'm interested in disturbing their certainty. And I'm interested also in honestly having mine disturbed too. I am done with any iteration of a movement that doesn't require me to listen deeply, … to live with curiosity … to empathize. I want to build the kind of movement where I can really, really talk to people. I can really, really meet people. And that that is bringing me back into some deep humanity. Bringing me back into who I really am, into who we really are and into the collective.
—Prentis Hemphill
Water that is too pure bears no fish.
DEAR READER,
Alex Dawson
I want to tell you the truth, my truth,
even if it hurts me, even if it hurts
you, I want to give name to
the nameless, to bring light
to things you carry in your
darkness, I want to look so deeply
inward, to the secret places we all
keep, those stories tucked between
our ribs. Every time I write a
poem, I am performing
open heart surgery, every time
you read my words, it means that
I survived.
"Love Letter from the Afterlife" From Andrea Gibson
My love, I was so wrong. Dying is the opposite of leaving. When I left my body, I did not go away. That portal of light was not a portal to elsewhere, but a portal to here. I am more here than I ever was before. I am more with you than I ever could have imagined. So close you look past me when wondering where I am.
It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
—Wendell Berry
Passage from Letters to a Young Poet
"Through a fortunate mimicry of our natural surroundings, we have grown so adapted to life after thousands of years that we can hardly be distinguished from the living forms around us. We have no reason to distrust our world, for it is not against us. If our world has fears, they are our fears. If it has an abyss, it belongs to us. If danger appears, we must try to love them. And if we will live with faith in the value of what is challenging, then what seems most difficult will become our truest and most trustworthy friend. How could we forget the myths about dragons who at the last moment transform into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses waiting to see us act just once with courage. Perhaps, every terror is, at its core, something helpless that wants our help.
So, dear Mr. Kappus, do not be afraid when a sorrow as great as any you’ve known seems about to engulf you, casting its shadow over all you do. Remember, when you fear what might befall you, that Life has not abandoned you, that it is holding you, and out of its web you cannot fall—why would you want to exclude from your existence any unrest, any pain, any heaviness? For you don’t know yet how these will shape you. Why do you want to torture yourself with questions about where all this may be coming from and where it is going? For you know that you are in the midst of a passage and nothing could be more desired than transformation. If there is some illness in your system, think of it this way: Illness is the means by which an organism frees itself from invasion. Then the organism must only be helped to be sick, to break through into the full sickness, for that is the way forward."
— Rainer Maria Rilke trans. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy
No need at all of hills and streams
For quiet meditation;
When the mind had been extinguished
Even fire is refreshing.
Sitting quietly, doing nothing,
Spring comes, grass grows by itself
From The Allegory of the Pit: Or the Irony of Victory, https://www.bayoakomolafe.net/
We think of death too strictly I think, as this absolute terminal point. I am interested in spaces in culture, for gatherings, where we touch the traces of our unbecoming and notice where we are falling apart. Where we reimagine death not as something down the line, but a paradigm, a thick now, an immanent field of loss and creativity that is entangled with what we rudely tease out as ‘life’. Modernity is about putting things together neatly, proliferating still images, being coherent, noble, independent. Consider what might be produced if, instead of thinking of death strictly as a firm line or an isolated event, we find ways to experiment with how we are already falling away, and how, for example, your identity is dying, how you are nomadic, diasporic, constantly moving, even when the habits of my perceiving you compel me to see you as a white woman. If we had practices to notice the ways where our names, our bodies are changing and giving way to something else. How we are actually ghosts
(...)
This is what I mean by fugitive exile: leaving the plantation which reproduces images and instead helping us to see we are beyond static images. We are not as photographic as we think we are. We are abroad in ways that escape the ‘Man’, the head of the pyramid, of the capitalist structure. And that is the invitation of a constellation of processional relational ontologies.
Alexandria
A woman lived in ancient times;
she could not read or write.
But oh, the stories she could tell
were each a soul's delight.
The introvert has many thoughts,
but most will stay within.
And when he dies, those thoughts
will fade,
as if they'd never been.
The elderly have lived their days,
and time has left its mark.
There's history within their minds,
of love and loss and lark.
Who knows what knowledge becomes lost
Each time life's hourglass turns.
For people live, then people go;
with each, a library burns.
another list of poems I adore in no particular order:
On Joy and Sorrow, Kahlil Gibran (one of my favorites that a friend shared with me)How Much Longer Will We Be Still?, Mats Svensson
Ettas Elegy, Maureen Seaton
Wild Geese, Mary Oliver
Hieroglyphic Stairway, Drew Dellinger
Coal, Audre Lorde
Poem, W. H. Auden
Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower, Rainer Maria Rilke
Widening Circles, Rainer Maria Rilke