A Nice Breakthrough

The other day at church, I went over to my friend-and-sometimes-guru Andrea Durham to ask if she wanted help with the upcoming Diwali celebration. She asked how I’d been doing and I told her I’d been feeling off and a bit disconnected. She out-insighted everyone.

She said that after a trauma (In this case the Hostile Work Environment/social justice awakening of my old job.) you go into survival mode. One you’re finally convinced that you’re safe, the grief from the trauma might need to come out.

It was such a relief to hear her say that—to acknowledge (as my attempted therapists hadn’t) that I’d been through something big and needed time and space. I felt a little glimmer of this-might-not-last-forever.

Being affected by the HWE is getting really old. It is not a good lens to see the world through. She said, though, that if I just take my time and keep myself from being isolated, that I should expect to be in a better state by next year. “Just look at how far you’ve come” she said.

If you need a Life Coach, I highly, highly recommend her. She can even validate you from afar, over Skype. 

Poetry Saves the Week (Mostly)

I’ve had a real hard time keeping the ol’ chemicals up this week. Sadness and loneliness have just been real hard to fight. Even though I’ve been keeping my resolutions, I’m just not liking myself.

The thing that’s kept me mostly afloat, though, has been poetry, of course. Here’s some ways poetry loved me this week:

1. Sitting in the bookstore reading a wonderful collection called The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing. (Okay that’s kind of a sad activity.)
2. Listening to the overwhelming and diverse talent of my students.
3. My kid student wrote FOUR poems yesterday! Two poems asking questions to animals, (after The Tyger) two practicing rhyme.
4. I wrote my friend in CA a poem for his birthday and he wrote a BEAUTIFUL poem back.
5. Got to spend some time catching up with my co-host.
6. Got to sing the praises of Daniel Ladinsky, badass translator of
Love Letters from God—think I accidentally helped sell the book.
7. This poem by Tony Brown that really hit the spot:

Hummingbird Prayer
If there is
a right of return, I
would like to return
to a holy land
fitted to me. In a place
that allows hummingbirds
to be fierce warriors
in their universe
instead of precious gems
in ours, for example,
I may worship
on the scale I prefer,
where every moment
is its own, where the smallest details
are clear and crucial.
Examining their blurs
and hovers, I can say no
to the glorious and impenetrable wings
I have always been told were behind me,
and come back
to the source of flight
itself: the need to feed,
to thrive and pray, with those of my kind,
and to see those hummingbirds
as my kind, in spirit if not in body;
to stare into the cloud of their wings
at the spark of divine humor
that sits still and smiling
within each.