Opal, harmonicas, and not wasting time



1.
Opal is lonely. She’s got a small body and a small voice, and before I can even say hello she’s asked me to move her chair. It’s scary, she says. Can you make it so I can see people walking by?

She’s 90 (though she insists she’s 98) and tells me how to live a good life: Don’t waste a moment, she says. Get up, get to work, don’t waste time.

2.
I don’t know what to say about the state of the world. It feels like a rotten melodrama with a long intermission — until you realize this play doesn’t end, and it’s not even a play. This stage set is real life and we’re part of the show.  It’s all too much.

Lots of hand-wringing: What do we do now? what do we do?

My refrain: I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. 

3.
Poet Ron Padgett has some suggestions. Among the litany:
 
Take out the trash.

Love life.

Use exact change.

Those are directions I can follow. 

4.
And so we go to work. Not the “work” of resistance, rebuilding or rebuke, but the actual paycheck work because, well, life goes on. Breakfast, lunch, dinner. Laundry, dishes, bills. Read, write, sleep. Repeat. Everything changes and nothing changes.

5.
Fun Fact: the harmonica is the only instrument in which you both blow in and out, and this action helps strengthen the lungs and the muscles that support breathing. Because of this, my dad takes harmonica lessons with a group of pulmonary patients.  

Last week we attended his harmonica concert. Seeing him beaming with ability, with life, turned me tender. I cried all the way through You Are My Sunshine.

6.
And this, I think, is proof of good moments. They move like fog. And while I want to pay attention, some days I’m too weary and these brief moments lift and waft away. But Opal says we mustn’t dawdle. I think she’s right.

Let’s live wide awake, looking for good. 

 

And the people turned to poems

A wonderful thing happened this week: poems. 

In the wake of anger, uncertainty and unrest, my phone and email filled with poems. From people I hardly knew and from those I hold close. Because poems often say what the heart cannot yet grasp, I was heartened to know that in times of turmoil we still turn to poems to speak for us. 

Hours after a new president was announced, this poem arrived: 


Change 


Change is the new,

improved


word for god,

 

lovely enough

to raise a song

 

or implicate

 

a sea of wrongs,

mighty enough,

 

like other gods,

 

to shelter,

bring together,

 

and estrange us.

 

Please, god,

we seem to say,

 

change us.

 

— Wendy Videlock

 

 

As dismay turned to resolve, this poem arrived:

 

Still I Rise 

You may write me down in history

With your bitter, twisted lies,

You may trod me in the very dirt

But still, like dust, I’ll rise.


Does my sassiness upset you?

Why are you beset with gloom?

‘Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells

Pumping in my living room.


Just like moons and like suns,

With the certainty of tides,

Just like hopes springing high,

Still I’ll rise.


Did you want to see me broken?

Bowed head and lowered eyes?

Shoulders falling down like teardrops,

Weakened by my soulful cries?

 
Does my haughtiness offend you?

Don’t you take it awful hard

‘Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines

Diggin’ in my own backyard.


You may shoot me with your words,

You may cut me with your eyes,

You may kill me with your hatefulness,

But still, like air, I’ll rise.


Does my sexiness upset you?

Does it come as a surprise

That I dance like I’ve got diamonds

At the meeting of my thighs?


Out of the huts of history’s shame

I rise

Up from a past that’s rooted in pain

I rise

I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,

Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
 

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear

I rise

Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear

I rise

Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,

I am the dream and the hope of the slave.

I rise

I rise

I rise.

 

— Maya Angelou

 

  

As the streets turned ugly and solace felt scarce:  


The Peace of Wild Things


When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

 

— Wendell Berry

 


What brings you comfort and clarity in these divisive days? 

 

Thankful Thursday: What to Do?

To Say Nothing But Thank You

All day I try to say nothing but thank you, 
breathe the syllables in and out with every step I 
take through the rooms of my house and outside into 
a profusion of shaggy-headed dandelions in the garden
where the tulips’ black stamens shake in their crimson cups.
 
I am saying thank you, yes, to this burgeoning spring 
and to the cold wind of its changes. Gratitude comes easy
after a hot shower, when my loosened muscles work, 
when eyes and mind begin to clear and even unruly 
hair combs into place.
 
Dialogue with the invisible can go on every minute, 
and with surprising gaiety I am saying thank you as I 
remember who I am, a woman learning to praise 
something as small as dandelion petals floating on the
steaming surface of this bowl of vegetable soup, 
my happy, savoring tongue.

— Jeanne Lohmann

 

All day I try to shake the rain, the blues. Thankfulness takes root in the small spaces and I look for where gratitude can lift and carry me out of myself.  

After all these years I still find solace in gentle things: soup, books, soft sweaters, talking and not talking. Some days I do not talk at all. And when I resurface words mean more. 

What to do when you're blue? Talk to Betty, Edith or Opal. In other words, visit a nursing home. 

Today I met Opal. She's 90. Her voice is soft and thin, her smile gentle, and when she tells me how her family moved across the country in a Model A Ford, I am right there with her, bumping along rough winter roads with gas cans and a washtub strapped to the roof. 

She tells me more stories, most of which seem dubious, but I don't mind. We all have unsteady moments, in our bodies and our minds. I appreciate the murky places.  

"Opal," I say, "you're a good egg." 

"Well, we have to be," she says. "We must be kind." 

What to do when the sky is gray and the gloom is large? Be kind. Talk softly. Make soup. 

 

It's Thankful Thursday, a weekly pause to express appreciation for people, places and things. What are you thankful for today? 

 

Thankful Thursday: Thinking of You


Because attention attracts gratitude and gratitude expands joy, it's time for Thankful Thursday.

This week I'm thankful for a bounty of kindness: letters, cards and emails in response to a piece I shared here with you recently. 

It turns out the platitudes are true: In life's rough season, friends do make a difference. Childhood friends. Writing friends. Even blog friends, people I've never met but who offer comfort and companionship across computer screens. 

Thank you. 

When my head and heart are a jumble, I reach for paper and pen to make sense. This process yields letters, poems, wishes, regrets and grocery lists. This week, in an unexpected turnabout a friend wrote a poem for me. What a surprise and honor. Thank you Shirley.

 

5 Oct '16      to Drew 

What you wrote today is beautiful.
I am upset for you
For you were clearly upset

But I shrugged it off without tears
though they were close
for I did not know who was ill or dying or dead

I shrug it off as most of the world does
the drownings in the small seas around the Mediterranean
Or the deaths of those crossing the desert
those who might prefer drowning
to escaping across borders where there is no water

And so I did not share your grief
the expression of it so great
I thought the person must be important

Perhaps not
Since it was not your husband
and without a child
who else could tear your heart so

Perhaps the person was no more important
than many of the predecessors
but like a stone,
last in a long line of stones,
that finally presses enough
to collapse the lungs
to remove the last breath 


I have aged to a softness that makes
my throat thicken . . .
my tears run over . . .
my breath too shallow to allow speech . . .
all at the mere saying 'sad' 
with not even a story attached

There is so much pain and grief
I assume it all . . .
and it is devastating

I pretend humor, nonchalance . . .
I deny that I am touched . . .
as a matter of survival. 

— Shirley Plummer

 

 

It's Thankful Thursday. What are you thankful for today? 

 

You Gotta Eat


I'm not a great cook. I like food but I'm not fussy about it. I go for chips, dip, pasta, pudding and popcorn (well, not together). And Diet Coke with everything.

And yet, I enjoy making soup and baking cookies — the lingering, low-pressure foods.

That's why, in part, I am buying this book for friends and family (Spoiler Alert: Merry Christmas!): Good and Cheap: Eat Well on $4 a Day.

 “I think everyone should eat great food every day,” says Leanne Brown, author and food scholar (yes, that's a real thing). "Eating well means learning to cook. It means banishing the mindset that preparing daily meals is a huge chore or takes tremendous skill. Cooking is easy — you just have to practice.”

Just as any recipe is more than its individual ingredients, this book is more than the routine instruction manual. Good and Cheap is research project, grassroots activism and cookbook all-in-one!

Learn all about this unique book and its author at 3 Good Books, the blog series I host.

Enjoy!

 

 

Letter to No One, Someone, You

What tools do you use in your writing practice, she asked.

I write letters to a friend, I said, on paper and in my head. 
  

1.
Death is not a crisis.  

A friend said this years ago, and we built a book around the idea — Sweet Grief.

She painted through the death of her husband and I wrote poems alongside her experience. We took the show on the road, packed up paintings and poems and travelled to galleries. See, we said, this is death but it’s not horrible. It’s a passage in pretty pictures and poems.

But what did I know? How tender it now seems, how naive. Because now I’m in a storm, and all around is pain and grief that swallows, spits and keens — and that feels a lot like a crisis.

After the swirl of events and activities, the meal train, flowers and full fridge, life turns inward, turns still. Sadness works into the crevices, lodges deep. We don’t want to go home. And we don’t want to go out. This is what the living do, and the dying too: wait, cry, wait.

The house is quiet, she tells me, and sad. 

2.
Don’t get me wrong.

I knew death. Before this, I knew illness and loss. Friends, neighbors, grandparents, grief. But each loss is fresh, and old, and resurrected.

Don’t get me wrong, I know nothing.

3.
Years ago, my neighbor was “poet laureate” of her church. Each week she would share a poem with her congregation. When she was dying she gave me her poetry books — a stack of Mary Oliver and David Whyte, and several others that I took home, placed lovingly on my bookshelf, and forgot.

Last month I opened one, a thick anthology, Cries of the Spirit. And I've made it my own. Dozens of pages are now marked, lines rising to meet me:


Prayer is

circumference

we may not

reach around,


space for all we cannot hold,

the rim of Love toward which we lean.

 

- excerpt from Nothing So Wise
by Jeanne Lohmann
 

4.
Pray until you believe, my mother says.

Each in our own way, we're crying, feeling, praying. Isn't it all the same? I want to make this suffering beautiful, our sorrow poetic, but it’s not. It’s eating too much, sleeping too late, talking and not talking. It is lashing out and curling up. It is, at turns, loud and hard, soft and slow. It is never quite right.

5.
Not long ago, my husband and I paddled our boards across the Columbia River, against wake, wave, wind and swirl.

Confused seas, he called it, a sailing term to describe current, wind, and wake at competing angles. Well that’s a metaphor, I said, and a few moments later my jaunty aside turned to tears, and he scrambled across waves to comfort me as I screamed, no, no, no, you’ll tip me. And so, as a barge passed, fishermen fished and sailors sailed, we sat on ours boards in the center of the river, and I sobbed.

Because everyone is sick or dying. Because sadness is no excuse, not tool or aid. It does not act. It does not do. Because it is not enough to absorb and feel. Because one must do and help and sometimes fix. Because I cannot fix. Because grief immobilizes and I want to do good, do better, do something.

6.

 
    Let me be tricked into believing

    that by what moves in me I might be saved,


    and hold to this. Hold

    onto this until there’s wind enough.

 

- excerpt from To a Milkweed
by Deborah Digges

 

 

 

Thankful Thursday (on Friday): Kindness

Photo by Rajah Bose/Gonzaga University, via On Being

It's been a rough week and my defenses are low. Sometimes a poem arrives just when you need it. One of my favorite poems and poets popped up this week. 

Naomi Shihab Nye was recently featured on the radio program On Being.

First, the poem: 

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

- Naomi Shihab Nye

 

And the interview (transcript and podcast): here.

There are so many gems in this interview. Here are a few nuggets:
 

Writing things down, whatever you’re writing down, even if you’re writing something sad or hard, usually you feel better after you do it. Somehow, you’re given a sense of, “OK, this mood, this sorrow I’m feeling, this trouble I’m in, I’ve given it shape. It’s got a shape on the page now. So I can stand back, I can look at it, I can think about it a little differently. What do I do now?” And very rarely do you hear anyone say they write things down and feel worse.

 and:

You could write a little and still gain something from it. You don’t have to be spending an hour and a half to three hours to five hours a day writing to have a meaningful experience with it. It’s a very immediate experience. You can sit down and write three sentences. How long does that take? Three minutes. Five minutes. And you're giving yourself a very rare gift of listening to yourself.

 and:

And so I would get in a little trouble, and my mother would say to me — her charge to me — “Be your best self.” And I would think, “Wow, what is that self? Where is it? Where is it tucked away? Where do I keep it when I’m not being it? And are you your best self? Is my teacher her best self?”

That was just something intriguing to me that we had more than one self that we could operate out of. And I think one nice thing about writing is that you get to encounter, you get to meet these other selves, which continue on in you: your child self, your older self, your confused self, your self that makes a lot of mistakes. And then find some gracious way to have a community in there inside that would help you survive.

 

It's Thankful Thursday and I'm filled with gratitude for poems that move me to my soft self, my best self. 

And you — what are you thankful for today?


Thankful Thursday: The Past is Now

It's Thankful Thursday.

Please join me in a pause to express gratitude for people, places and things that bring joy. 

1.
I like lists. 

I fill scraps of paper — from post-its to journal pages to the empty space on envelopes — with things to do, buy, be. Long after the writing, I find these reminders at the bottom of my messy purse, under the area rug, between couch cushions. 

In these forgotten essentials I discover eras: a burst of good health in which I listed calorie counts and exercise routines; ideas for poems and stories; website addresses for jeans I must have (and never bought); phone numbers for a hair salon, a great massage, acupuncture.

I find words I like and want to remember: belie, agronomy, citron . . . Yesterday when I ordered my coffee, the barista responded with "super!"

I commended her enthusiasm.

"I'm trying to find words to say instead of perfect," she explained. "I want to bring back the good words, like super and keen, words my father used."

And so I wrote down super. 

Writing makes it real, makes my intention stick, and helps me find my way amid life's distractions. 

2.
Sentimental journey: these shoes are as old as my marriage. Both have worn well. 

3.
Today I turned the clock to 1995 and rollerbladed through my past. No, really, I rollerbladed. 

When you were younger and at the park, did you see an old lady rocking the rollerskates and did you smile with a mixture of delight and pity? Well, I'm her! I'm rolling past your craft beer and coffee culture to give you a blast from my past.  

 

What's happening in your world? Are you in the here and now, or yanking at the past? What are you thankful for today? 


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Hello Reader,

In this season of sun and shine, I'm writing today with gratitude. Thanks to you, 3 Good Books, my labor of love, is thriving.

The blog series now features almost 50 fabulous writers & artists and hundreds of book recommendations from a variety of voices, including Paulann Petersen, Jan Gill O'Neil, Tracy Weil and more.

Together we've explored Dreams, Divorce, Praise, Play, Resilience, Silence, Food, Fishing, and more.

Who cares? I do! You do! Because when we read, creativity stirs. And when we create, life expands.

Thanks for joining me in the expansion.

Read on,

Drew

 

Poetry in Action

The Poets Are In: Khalil Jazz Jenkins (left) and Kyle Sutherland work the Poetry Booth. Sometimes, too much of the time, I live in my head. Writing, reading, stewing. 

What a relief it is to come up for air. To find a world alive with good people and poetry.

I was recently revived at the Denver County Fair.  Now in its sixth year, this new-fangled fun has been called the "craziest county fair in America." It's a mix of old and new, with pies, pickles, drag queens, trick pigs and more. And amid the side-show antics, poetry shines.

As the Director of Poetry, I get to orchestrate all kinds of fun: a poetry contest, a poetry performance, and a poetry booth.

Winners of the Poetry Contest, from left: Carolyn Oxley, Emma Miner, Laurie Duncan.

The Poetry Performance featured Art from Ashes, a nonprofit literary youth organization that jolted us with a reminder of the power and purpose of creative expression; Jovan Mays, poet laureate for the City of Aurora, and instructor at Lighthouse Writers Workshop; and Judyth Hill, my mentor-friend, who years ago taught a writing workshop at the Taos Institute of Arts that turned my head and heart to poetry. 

Poet Jovan Mays performs at the Denver County Fair.

Judyth Hill shares her internationally-known poem, Wage Peace.

Nearby, the Poems-Write-Now table hummed with poets-in-action. Poets penned on-the-spot poems for "customers" (donations benefited Art from Ashes). This was poetry as verb. Sunday morning reverence meets freak show mystery.

"Jazz," an Art from Ashes poet, wrote a poem for my teenage niece. She provided limited info — her name, what was on her mind, and we wandered away to watch the bug eating contest. When we returned 15 minutes later, he had turned out a complete and surprisingly perceptive poem. In the busy hall, with its rumble and echo, we clutched together, bending in to hear his words lifted from page to ear, and we stood teary-eyed and awed. 

Sometimes I'm too much in my head. That day I was all heart.

 

 

What Divides Us

 

    If what divides us is fear —

and surely the root of hatred

and greed and the lust for

power over others is fear —

telling our truths and seeing

ourselves reflected in the

stories of the 'other' might be

not just the best answer

but the only answer.
 

— Bette Husted 

 

Bette tells it true, at 3 Good Books, a blog series I host. 


Please join me there, go here. 

 

 

Send Supplies!

By Warsan Shire, from "What They Did Yesterday Afternoon."


Sheesh, cut us some slack!

I'm not sure to whom I'm addressing this plea, but please may I jump to the front of the line?

I'd like to return this era. Okay, exchange. I'm not even asking for money back.

I'm not swearing (too much), or crying, or even sulking. I'm mostly wandering and sad. 

But, really, who's in charge here, and how do we get out from under this heavy rock of reality? 

It's a rough season, and we're crashing about in the wreckage of politics, killing, and manuevering and manipulation. We're trapped in a mashup of House of Cards meets Veep, with a splash of Real Housewives.

(Yes, I've found escape in the world of television, and it turns out life is mirroring make-believe. There's just no escaping the crazy).

And it's a season of personal sickness and loss. Some seasons are long, and even while flowers burst and the sun shines criminally bright, our hearts remain heavy. 

And yet this is the stuff of life, the swirl and the sink. 

And so, dear readers and friends, how to keep on? Where do you turn? Words, books and poems?

Please send replies and supplies — and quick! 

 

 

Baffled, Flustered, Intrigued

So much of life is slots. This fits there. This doesn't. 

The mind likes to sort and file. And so, when we bump into a person, or a poem, that doesn't fit neatly into our definition, we are baffled, flustered, and then, ideally, intrigued.  

That's how I found Sarah Sloat, in the pages of her unusually titled book of poems: Excuse Me While I Wring This Long Swim Out of My Hair. 

Are these poems experimental? ironic? confessional? post-modern something or other? I don't know. I just know her lines lured me in, and I paddled about with, yes, an initial fluster, that expanded into a lovely backfloat of appreciation.

And so, I invited Sarah to take part in 3 Good Books. There, she offers her favorite books that defy category. 

I think you'll like the book suggestions, and Sarah too.