[Image description: close up of dried leaves in a creek bed, with a delicate ice formation curling between them.]
Keep showing up for work, at school events and the supermarket. Keep acting like the world isn’t fraying around the edges, unraveling, coming apart in so many ways.
Make sure to put on a normal face, because that is the expectation.
Don’t let it show that pandemic waves and unsustainable practices and societal demands and personal crises might be getting to you, freezing your once-easy grins into worried eyes and forced half-smiles.
Unless.
Unless we stop pretending, stop letting status quo demands keep us frozen in place and admit that things need to change.
Unless we make it okay to say things like “We’re not okay” and “This is hard” and work together to find a different way forward.
[Image description: Photo of a collage of pictures taken from magazines. The bottom picture shows a shoreline with large rocks and a tall island silhouetted against a blue and orange sky and the sky is reflected in the shallow waves of the water. The top picture is a black-and-white ghostlike picture of trees with drooping branches reflected in calm, glasslike water. In the center of the collage, overlaying the other top pictures is a Viking ship. The word “Gathering” is pasted on the ship.]
We are told not to live in the past, or dwell on what has been, yet our lives ebb and flow and some wisdom is gleaned only in hindsight.
Memories, waves veining across sand in the rose-golden light of retrospection beckon us, carry us, navigate back to gather in the previously unobserved.
Wandering revealed as labyrinth path, the trivial unveiled as meaningful, former aches and longings rediscovered as deepest truth.
Time offers perspective, not forgiveness. Perspective offers understanding, shows the way to forgive ourselves for what we didn’t know.
[Image description: close-up of a black-eyed Susan blossom, with most of the bright yellow petals unfurled, except for two that are still joined together over the brown center of the bloom. In the background are green stems, leaves and buds of other black-eyes Susans.]
You don’t have to keep wasting time in attempt to fit in, to conform, to meet arbitrary expectations.
There are reasons you are the way you are.
Learn them. Examine them. Take the time to understand all their light and shadows.
Follow the breadcrumbs to the mysteries you haven’t yet discovered, the truths yet to unfurl.
Your Pandora’s box fears are unfounded.
Your truest self is a gift of beauty to yourself and to the world.
Sometimes I want to listen to something different. Folk music. Indie pop. And sometimes I do, even though I have to pay attention to the words, get caught up in any genius of the lyrics, get distracted from whatever else is going on.
But mostly I listen to Claudia Berti and Hania Rani on repeat for hours every day, no lyrics to get tangled in, just vibrant piano notes resonating, tones filling chest, clearing mind, softening breath.
God, I’ve always loved the sounds a piano makes.
Sometimes the music makes me think of my six-year-old self who longed to learn all the notes as well as the lady who played hymns on the old piano at church, who would sometimes let me sit next to her on the hard wooden bench and nod at me when it was time to turn the music page.
I would tell that younger me it’s okay she couldn’t make herself sit long enough to really practice and never passed book four.
Sometimes music calls to mind my teenage self, desperate to fit in, find her place, her people, who learned to play music by chords on the keyboard to join the youth group praise band. Even then, always on the periphery. Performing music, performing roles, none of it coming naturally.
I would tell her it’s okay the group dynamics always felt forced, through a mask, never intuitive.
I would tell her one day she’ll discover she forms connections in a way that make certain attention and certain relationships feel just out of reach, near-misses, through a veil.
And I’d tell her someday she’ll discover the way her mind can meander, swirl into being a collage of words that connect, invoke clarity, resonate, piano-music tapestry, woven by others, the backdrop of her own expression.
Our eyes perceive only destruction when all that remains are remnants, desolation, isolation, severed branches, tangled roots.
Relief, impossible to comprehend, desperation closing in. But Spirit whispers deliverance, painting wild possibilities.
A new day will dawn, Wisdom’s reign, when the poor and the meek and the child are safe and warm and held and equal, when harmony abounds.
Connection with the source of Love will permeate, infusing every human and non-human interaction, the world overflowing with collective liberation and we will finally know peace.
–
Note: This is one of nine poems I wrote to complement the nine readings for Lessons and Carols the Sunday after Christmas. Many commentaries I read–both Jewish and Christian–cautioned against reading Isaiah as Messianic text. So, I shied away from that, opting instead to view it through the lens of hope promised to those living in times where hope seems distant.
The Forest and the Trees 