note to self
type: reminder
The wind this morning is much louder than my inner voice. This icy blast is what they would call a bora in Slovenia. It roars around the eaves, through the holly outside my bedroom window, and down the snowy slope to jangle my neighbor’s windchime way too roughly to be at all soothing or musical. A skein of wild geese just flew by high above our tucked-in houses, loudly announcing their strength. But they are not really keeping to a V-shape against this wind.
My inner voice quietly says things like “I’m so glad it’s Sunday morning” and “make soup today” and “support what you can.” But it feels overwhelmed by the screaming news cycle of the past week. Seeing coverage of the national protests over ICE activity plus the damage from the massive winter storm and continuing dangerously cold weather, I start to feel frozen.
This is where a poem can help. Remember? American poet Mary Oliver gave us that poem Wild Geese, which many people turn to for the reminder.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
For a typewriter poet, this act of being open to and intuiting the despair of others is the core practice.
We don’t ask where the wind comes from or where it’s going, and the same goes for emotions. While the expression of despair is rarely on the surface of my poems, there is that difficult feeling deep in its source more often than I’d like to believe. Mary Oliver answers it this way in her poem:
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offer itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting
I think these lines are a reminder to try to accept the world’s invitation to reimagine it. That it is entirely up to each of us individually to accept the invitation is a bit scary. But the freezing blast of despair should scare us more. Reimagine the world.
Some people who make requests at the typewriter ask for something like Mary Oliver’s poem. A reminder to stay grounded in what’s true for them.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves
Oftentimes, I’ll ask them for an image, object, or something about the season that they love. The concreteness of something tangible and relatable gives their reminder poem some heft, like the stones piled on Slovenian roof tiles as ballast against the bora.
Here’s one such poem that used leaves and flowers as the prompt:
Radial life
By design,
balanced.
Flowers unfurl
balanced petals,
and leaves wave with
evenly spaced fingers.
I take my life in hand
with gentleness and care.
With both hands.
Today, no flowers or leaves, and the windchill is -7°F, but the songbirds at the feeder are undaunted. A junco hopped out into sunlight and then right back into the relative shelter they found between the wind-sculpted snowbank and the low wall at the edge of our patio. I think poetry feeds us and offers us shelter. That’s not a small thing.
I’m offering a 6-week online writing workshop starting on March 20 (the first day of spring, for something to look forward to in this deep freeze!) Watch for details and registration, coming soon.