Thankful Thursday: Soft Socks


The Week in Review 

I bought soft socks. Ate too many chips. Got lost in books. 

An old woman and I held hands. "I don't know if I'm coming or going," she said. "I don't know why I'm here." 

I went to a ranch and met the cows. Wide-eyed, we shared a certain numbness. 

Snow met sky and erased horizon. Everything silent and still. I didn't reach for camera or phone. Didn't reach at all.

In the distance a thin ribbon of blue broke through. 

 

It's Thankful Thursday, a weekly pause to express appreciation for people, places, things and more. Some weeks are tougher than others, but every week offers some small thing that redeems and heals. What are you thankful for today?

 

 

Move me

I've been enduring a long stretch of perfectly fine, readable books that failed to move me. I failed to feel. Is it the book? Is it me? 

So much of "good" art — books, film, paintings, music — is timing. When we are tuned in, when we are in time, art moves in us, through us. But when the timing is off, it's just a bunch of words, splotches of paint, a dull rerun. 

But last week I hit the jackpot. I was moved by a novel, a television show, and music.  

BOOK:  A Little Life
a novel by Hanya Yanagihara

Everyone was talking about this book so naturally I turned away. I like an underdog. I wasn't going to cow to the crowd and read the latest big-deal book. But I finally did, and "they" were right. This is a brutal, beautiful, moving book. I read it in two days, with minimal breaks (my husband made me eat so I put it down, then scurried back). 

Here's a tip:  I didn't know anything about this book but the title and awful cover. No plot. No blurbs. No reviews. It was refreshing to enter a book without expectation or explanation. 

 


TELEVISION: Good Girls Revolt
on Amazon Prime

This 10-episode show, inspired by the book by Lynn Povich, tells the story of the sex discrimination lawsuit filed against Newsweek magazine in 1970. Though soapy at times, the show captures the era and centers on the young women at the magazine who work alongside male reporters but are given none of the credit, opportunities or financial reward their male colleagues enjoy.

Sadly, the show has been cancelled and will run for only this one season — a decision that was reportedly made without any female input. Still, and again, it seems as much as we move forward, we always have further to go.  

 

MUSIC: Lemonade
a visual album by Beyonce 

I know, I know, Beyonce?  I'm as surprised as you to discover I'm enthralled. Lemonade is both concept album and short film/long music video, and it's gripping. I don't like blockbuster movies or trendy tunes, and so I ignored the hype when this was released last year. Recently I heard an excerpt and the sound was haunting. Watching the film — an elegant and moody hour-long experience — reminded me of watching Pink Floyd's The Wall so many years ago. I didn't understand what it all "meant" but I was moved by the mood. Lemonade stirred me, in large part because of poet Warsan Shire, whose words stitch this album together to create a heightened state of love and ache. 

 

What's moved you lately?  


Thankful Thursday: Comfort, Joy

Hello dear friend.

For the last month, two words have hung in my head, circled my heart: comfort and joy.

A holiday card offers these wishes. A song is sung. And later, I spot the words in huge black letters blazed across a downtown building. Words have power, we know this, and while I can't explain — other than longing — why these words hound me, I know enough to take notice when words won't shake away.

Comfort, in the throes of grief, illness and loss, seems a tall order. Joy, in this state, seems impossible. 

And yet. And yet, we spend a few hours together and you shine with a rare smile, laughter even, and the room breathes open. Against our long wall of sadness, for a brief time the air turns light with comfort. And in this small opening, joy. 

I'll keep looking. For half-smiles, softness, and slices of light. I don't yet know but want to believe our grip will loosen and love will hold us tight. 

 

Where the Map Begins

A Blessing for Epiphany

This is not
any map you know.
Forget longitude.
Forget latitude.
Do not think
of distances
or of plotting
the most direct route.
Astrolabe, sextant, compass:
these will not help you here.

This is the map
that begins with a star.
This is the chart
that starts with fire,
with blazing,
with an ancient light
that has outlasted
generations, empires,
cultures, wars.

Look starward once,
then look away.
Close your eyes
and see how the map
begins to blossom
behind your lids,
how it constellates,
its lines stretching out
from where you stand.

You cannot see it all,
cannot divine the way
it will turn and spiral,
cannot perceive how
the road you walk
will lead you finally inside,
through the labyrinth
of your own heart
and belly
and lungs.

But step out
and you will know
what the wise who traveled
this path before you
knew:
the treasure in this map
is buried
not at journey’s end
but at its beginning.

—Jan Richardson

 

It's Thankful Thursday, the first of the fresh year. Please join me in expressing appreciation for people, places, poems and more. What are you thankful for today? 

 

Good Books of 2016

As the year comes to a close, I'm looking back at some of my favorite books. 

Though I usually spend most of my time in novels, this year fiction left me wanting. Nothing moved me. But non-fiction pulled me in, with several touching, funny, unbelievable tales. And, as always, poetry never lets me down. 

8 Good Books I Read This Year   

NON-FICTION

The Bitch is Back
edited by Cathi Hanauer 

In a collection of excellent essays, women in their 40s, 50s and 60s — bestselling authors, renowned journalists, and critically acclaimed novelists — share hardwon thoughts on love, sex, work, family, independence, body-image, health and aging.



Heads in Beds
by Jacob Tomsky 

This tell-all is a funny, irreverent and engaging book offering a behind-the-scenes look at the highs and lows of hotel life. 

 


Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble
by Dan Lyons 

A gripping, entertaining and savage account of the unstable and artifical life in Silicon Valley, written by a journalist-turned-tech insider (who then spent two years as a writer for HBO's hilarious sorta-satire Silicon Valley).

 

POETRY


Bright Dead Things
by Ada Limon

A slim collection of beautifully aching poems.   

I'm learning so many different ways to be quiet. . . There's shower silent and bath silent and California silent and Kentucky silent and care silent and then there's the silence that comes back, a million times bigger than me, and sneaks into my bones and wails and wails and wails until I can't be quiet anymore.

— from How to Be Quiet 



The Tijuana Book of the Dead
by Luis Alberto Urrea 

A gritty and honest collection of poems about life at the border. 

You, who seek grace from a distracted God.
you, who parse the rhetoric of empire, who know
in your guts what it is but don't know what to call it,
you, good son of a race of shadows—
your great fortune is to have a job,
never ate government cheese,
federal peanut butter . . .

— from You Who Seek Grace from a Distracted God 



The Cure for Sorrow:
A Book of Blessings for Times of Grief
by Jan Richardson  

Though billed as a book of "blessings," these prayers read as tender, unpretentious poems. 

Let us agree
for now
that we will not say
the breaking
makes us stronger
or that it is better
to have this pain
than to have done
without this love . . .

— from Blessing for the Brokenhearted


FICTION


You Will Know Me
by Megan Abbott 

A gripping page-turner of a novel, tightly wound and wonderfully delivered. 

 


The Guest Room
by Chris Bohjalian 

A captivating, chilling story about shame and scandal.

 

Your turn:  What did I miss? What's on your list? 


Thankful Thursday: Because it changed me

Next week! I just realized Christmas is next week. 

No, I haven't been living under a rock (though I have spent some time on the couch in a cocoon of books). In a flurry of planning, shopping and generating holiday cheer, I lost track of days. 

In the mad dash of shopping and shipping, the spirit of giving gets lost. I lose the thread of intention. Too often the giving spirit turns into the ugly machine of gotta-get-it-done. 

And then I ran across this poem. And then I took a breath. 

On this Thankful Thursday, I am grateful for the pause in which I can remember and unrush, in my head and in my heart. 

 

When giving is all we have
 

We give because someone gave to us.

We give because nobody gave to us.

 

We give because giving has changed us.

We give because giving could have changed us.

 

We have been better for it,

We have been wounded by it—

 

Giving has many faces: It is loud and quiet,

Big, though small, diamond in wood-nails.

 

Its story is old, the plot worn and the pages too,

But we read this book, anyway, over and again:

 

Giving is, first and every time, hand to hand,

Mine to yours, yours to mine.

 

You gave me blue and I gave you yellow.

Together we are simple green. You gave me

 

What you did not have, and I gave you

What I had to give—together, we made

 

Something greater from the difference.

 

— Alberto Rios

 

 

It's Thankful Thursday, a weekly pause to express appreciation for the people, places and things that bring us joy. Please join me! What are you thankful for today? 

 

 

 

 

Try This: Get a Reference

Desperate for a creative jolt, I often thumb through the dictionary for words that catch my eye and stir my mind. 

Wanting to go deeper, this week I pulled out a stack of reference books and discovered a random but flush collection of new words, concepts and ideas. I jotted down phrases that struck a chord: lava tongue . . . meander scar . . . a peatbog is a trap. . . passages allow movement . . . related to pass, a way through a mountain. . . between large bodies of water. 

And then I stopped thinking and let my hand and mind loose. Words filled the page in that delicious delirium of a freewrite. I was writing about land and scars and passage. A seed was planted, and grew into "a crumble of breath and bone" and other surprising lines. 

I'm not sure what will become of the material from this exercise, but I do know that each time I return to the page, and turn off logic, something shakes loose. Each time I'm closer to making sense, and making something that feels solid and true.  

Try This:

• Find a reference book — a cookbook, dictionary, history book . . .

• Randomly scan for "poetic" phrases or inviting passages. Write them down (the physical act of writing is important in this exercise, and helps engage the writing mind).

• After you've gathered a good selection, do a 10 minute freewrite in which you write anything that comes to mind, and keep your hand moving at all times. If you get stuck, simply repeat your line until you become unstuck. Don't worry about punctuation or logic. Just write. See what pours out. See what rushes in. 

If you like, share your results in the comment section. Don't be shy — let's share our starts and scratches, our works-in-progress and works-at-rest. Let's exercise the writing muscle, aches and all.

Some of my favorite reference books:  Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, Food Lover's Companion, and books on landscape architecture and design. 

What reference book sparks your creativity? 

 

 

 

Thankful Thursday: Small Things


My mother said every persimmon has a sun  

inside, something golden, glowing,  

warm as my face. 

 
— from Persimmons, a poem by Yi-Young Lee

 

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

This week I am thankful for persimmons. I'm late to discovery — just last year I tasted my first — and now again, this week. A gift. A seasonal surprise.

Lately gratitude comes in small bits: a slice of pie, the relief of sun, a long walk. 

I search for big moments but experience no epiphanies. A friend and I once laughed about people who use God to justify dramatic actions, like quitting their jobs or traveling to foreign countries to "save" others. Why doesn't God call me? I'd half-joke. I've got a phone and a passport, why don't I get a lightning bolt or a grand vision? 

 But I'm not a grand kind of person. I cocoon to soft music, books, quiet. God meets people like me in the library or in other quiet people. 

"You can't tell people enough that you love them," a friend said the other day, and it seemed the truest thing I'd heard in weeks. Maybe that was God talking. Sometimes I don't hear, or don't listen, and I miss these moments, small as they are. Big as they are.  

 

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


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?