Drew Myron's Blog, page 34

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 lightening 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? 

 

Borrow Some Sugar

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The story says 

that when

hard-hearted

borrow some sugar. 

 

Kiss

the tendency 

to go through danger. 

 

- Drew Myron 
extracted from Thorndike Century Junior Dictionary via Ex Libris Anonymous 

 

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

 

 

 

Love that Line: Random Bad Luck

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Somewhere along the way, people in this country had developed the assumption that life should be unvaryingly logical and just — there was no recognition of random bad luck, no allowance for tragedies that couldn't be prevented by folic acid or side airbags or FAA-approved safety seats." 

- Anne Tyler
The Amateur Marriage 

 

Fierce Field Guide

 [image error]

    I write in hopes 

of recognizing myself

and seeing you more clearly.

I want to know when truth 

turns from solid to liquid

to gas in the alchemy of  

language. 
 

— Sage Cohen

 

Sage Cohen, author of Fierce on the Page, is now featured on 3 Good Books, a blog series I host. 

Please join me there, go here.