Dear Stranger,

1. 

There was never not a bridge 

from your chest to mine. 

My heartbeat was always 

the sound of your feet walking towards me. 

I can’t believe how many years 

I lived without knowing 

the air you were breathing out, 

was the air I was breathing in. 

Forgive me for not saying ‘thank you’

before our lungs had reason to hide.

2.

Fear is what you make it 

and I’ve been trying to make it my teacher. 

When the lesson starts to break me

I remember the dogs in the shelters-- 

how even those we call ‘the mean ones’

will follow their fear to each other’s sides 

in the middle of the night,

make pillows of each other’s chests 

when they think no home is coming.

Almost everyone in the world

is softer than they look.

3.

Do you pray now more than you used to? 

I pray all of the time. I pray to The Big Bang 

and to The Tiny Bang and to The Bangs 

we’ll all have to cut ourselves so we can see 

what beauty can only be seen from 6 feet away.

4. 

Last night, a poet whose writing I love said he hasn’t written 

a single poem since the beginning of the quarantine.

He said every time he’s inclined to 

              he calls someone he loves instead.

5.

The first thing I learned from this virus 

was to question everything wanting to go viral.

The second thing I learned was to dream 

only giant dreams.

6.

A giraffe’s neck is 6 feet long. 

A decade from now will I remember the week

I spent wondering if I could hug a giraffe’s torso 

and not get sick if the giraffe coughed?

I don’t want to forget anything about this. 

Especially not how it feels to worry 

about everyone I love at the same time. 

So much of the world had been doing that already.

7.

If every heart-worthy novelist weeps for days 

before killing a beloved character off, 

how many centuries must god have spent sobbing 

before pressing a pen to the page of this year?

8.

I used to be a gardener in New Orleans. 

Every evening I’d spend almost an hour 

cleaning the earth out of my nails. 

She held on so tight. I loved her more for it.

Later I moved to the desert and was sitting

beside a cactus in my living room

when I heard a hurricane named Katrina 

was about to hit my former home. 

'Save the flowers', I said out loud, 

watching a storm cloud rage its hungry spiral 

across the television screen. 'Save the flowers', I said, 

having no idea we wouldn’t save the people.

9.

When the water left the city I went back,

drove through the 9th Ward to a church

that had been gutted by the storm.

The preacher had spray-painted his phone number 

across the length of the falling building.

There was something about his phone number

being as tall as the door––I couldn’t stop crying.

The world falls apart and people 

become foundation.

--Andrea Gibson

In the 1970s, Pete Seeger was invited to sing in Barcelona, Spain. Francisco Franco's fascist government, the last of the dictatorships that started World War II, was still in power but declining. A pro-democracy movement was gaining strength and to prove it, they invited America's best-known freedom singer to Spain. More that a hundred thousand people were in the stadium, where rock bands had played all day. But the crowd had come for Seeger. 

As Pete prepared to go on, government officials handed him a list of songs he was not allowed to sing. Pete studied it mournfully, saying it looked an awful lot like his set list. But they insisted: he must not sing any of these songs. 

Pete took the government's list of banned songs and strolled on stage. He held up the paper and said, “I've been told that I'm not allowed to sing these songs.” He grinned at the crowd and said, “So I'll just play the chords; maybe you know the words. They didn't say anything about *you* singing them.” 

He strummed his banjo to one song after another, and they all sang. A hundred thousand defiant freedom singers breaking the law with Pete Seeger, filling the stadium with words their government did not want them to hear, words they all knew and had sung together, in secret circles, for years. 

What could the government do? Arrest a hundred thousand singers? It had been beaten by a few banjo chords and the fame of a man whose songs were on the lips of the whole world. 

-- Richard Chamberlain

We Lived Happily During the War

And when they bombed other people’s houses, we

 

protested

but not enough, we opposed them but not

 

enough. I was

in my bed, around my bed America

 

was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house.

 

I took a chair outside and watched the sun.

 

In the sixth month

of a disastrous reign in the house of money

 

in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money,

our great country of money, we (forgive us)

 

lived happily during the war.

Copyright © 2013 by Ilya Kaminsky. 

"There are two kinds of suffering: the suffering which leads to more suffering, and the suffering which leads to the end of suffering. The first is the pain of grasping after fleeting pleasures and aversion for the unpleasant, the continued struggle of most people day after day.

The second is the suffering which comes when you allow yourself to feel fully the constant change of experience - pleasure, pain, joy, and anger - without fear or withdrawal. The suffering of our experience leads to inner fearlessness and peace."

- Venerable Ajahn Chah

you are but a collection of atoms

working together

in temporary harmony

before being dispersed

back into the universe

your earthly task is to help

those atoms

radiate

imagine the simplicity:

you need not

achieve anything

but gently glow

--Daniel Baylis

"You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen." 

Rene Daumal

In the Meantime

Meanwhile, flowers still bloom.

The moon rises, and the sun.

Babies smile and somewhere,

Against all the odds,

Two people are falling in love.

Strangers share cigarettes and jokes.

Light plays on the surface of water.

Grace occurs on unlikely streets

And we hold each other fast 

Against entropy, the fires and the flood.

Life leans towards living

And, while death claims all things at the end,

There were such precious times between,

In which everything was radiant

And we loved, again, this world.

--Tom Hirons

“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power.

Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.”

~Arundhati Roy, ‘The Cost of Living’

The Question

All day, I replay these words:

Is this the path of love?

I think of them as I rise, 

as I wake my children, 

as I wash dishes, 

as I drive too close behind the slow blue Subaru, 

Is this the path of love?

Think of these words as I stand in line at the grocery store, think of them as I sit on the couch with my daughter. 

Amazing how quickly six words become compass, the new lens through which to see myself in the world. 

I notice what the question is not.

Not, 

"Is this right?" 

Not,

"Is this wrong?" 

It just longs to know how the action of existence links us to the path to love.

And is it this? 

Is it this? 

All day,

I let myself be led by the question.

All day I let myself not be too certain of the answer. 

Is it this?

Is this the path of love? I ask as I wait for the next word to come.

~ Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, 

Family Recipe

All day, I search for it,

the secret ingredient—

something my father

believed in. He always

made stuffing

with something extra

special something,

then made us guess

what the secret was.

All day, I notice

what goes into a day—

a total of 86,400 seconds,

and in every second

a choice of how

we will meet that second.

If the day is stuffing,

then this day has

some unusual ingredients:

a couple dozen folks

in swimsuits on the sidewalk,

one woman with a dying parrot

she has tucked in her sweater,

a whole garden full of lemon trees,

one ripe hour alone

in the sunshine on a rooftop,

a generous measure of laughter

as my daughter and husband and I

climb a near-vertical hill,

and bittersweet tears

as I think of Dad

and his love of secret ingredients.

All day, the world

shows off its flavors.

All day, I revel in the recipe,

this extraordinary day,

something that can never

be made the same way again.

-- Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

"It is easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living. Easy to wish we’d developed other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we’d worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.

It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn’t make and the work we didn’t do and the people we didn’t marry and the children we didn’t have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.

But it is not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It’s the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy.

We can’t tell if any of those other versions would have been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on."

From "Midnight Library" a fantasy novel by Matt Haig

The world is violent and mercurial- it will have its way with you. We are saved only by love -- love for each other and the love that we pour into the art we feel compelled to share: being a parent; being a writer; being a painter; being a friend. We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.

--Tennessee Williams

The first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It's shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult.

-Frank Herbert (Dune, 1965)

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter

To regard the frost and the boughs

Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time

To behold the junipers shagged with ice,

The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think

Of any misery in the sound of the wind,

In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land

Full of the same wind

That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

--Wallace Stevens

Beannacht ("Blessing")

On the day when

the weight deadens

on your shoulders

and you stumble,

may the clay dance

to balance you. 

And when your eyes

freeze behind

the grey window

and the ghost of loss

gets in to you,

may a flock of colours,

indigo, red, green,

and azure blue

come to awaken in you

a meadow of delight. 

When the canvas frays

in the currach of thought

and a stain of ocean

blackens beneath you,

may there come across the waters

a path of yellow moonlight

to bring you safely home. 

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,

may the clarity of light be yours,

may the fluency of the ocean be yours,

may the protection of the ancestors be yours.

And so may a slow

wind work these words

of love around you,

an invisible cloak

to mind your life.

~John O'Donohue

Don't Hesitate

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,

don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty

of lives and whole towns destroyed or about

to be. We are not wise, and not very often

kind. And much can never be redeemed.

Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this

is its way of fighting back, that sometimes

something happens better than all the riches

or power in the world. It could be anything,

but very likely you notice it in the instant

when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the

case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid

of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.

--Mary Oliver

In the midst of hate, I found there was, within me, an invincible love.

In the midst of tears, I found there was, within me, an invincible smile.

In the midst of chaos, I found there was, within me, an invincible calm.

I realized, through it all, that…

In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.

And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.

--Albert Camus

Love, Like Water

We could say the pain

was a block so great

        it could not be moved.

We could say love

did not try to move it.

        Love simply surrounded the mass

and dissolved it

the way water meets a block of salt,

        breaking apart each ionic bond

until every atom of sodium and chloride

is surrounded by molecules of water.

        And in this way,

and sooner than you’d think,

the pain was rearranged

        into minuscule bits,

and there was no part of the pain

that was not touched by love.

        The pain was no less, it’s true.

But mixed with love, dispersed,

the pain became something new.

        Something vital that encouraged

a different kind of life,

a substance that supported buoyancy—

        a medium to carry me.

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Hope is … is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something is worth doing, regardless of how it turns out.

--Václav Havel

Part of our work as people who dare to believe we can save the world is to prepare our wills to withstand some losing, so that we may lose and still set out again, anyhow. 

--Julian Aguon 

Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

—James Baldwin

Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love.

—Reinhold Niebuhr

We have to meditate

on being the rivers

so that we can experience

within ourselves

the fears and hopes

of the rivers.

—Thich Nhat Hanh

As she stared at the restless pixels on her screen, her impatience grew. This agitation was familiar, a paradoxical feeling that built up inside her when she was spending too much time online, as though some force was at once goading her and holding her back. How to describe it? A temporal stuttering, an urgent lassitude, a feeling of simultaneous rushing and lagging behind. 

--Ruth Ozeki, "A Tale for the Time Being"

During the darkest days of the AIDS crisis, we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced all night. The dance kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for. It didn't look like we were going to win then and we did. It doesn't feel like we're going to win now but we could. Keep fighting, keep dancing.

--Dan Savage