Arrivals

Self as Destination Unknown

I keep thinking about how life is parceled out in moments. As in, one moment I’m boarding a plane, taking in the faces of the seated people I pass, trying not to hit them with my carry-on. And another moment and I’m standing on a stage under a glaring light, reading a poem I wrote one night late in the privacy of my office, in front of a crowd sitting in the blurred dark. How strange that it’s the same me, the same self that moves though these rooms, or corridors, down paths and up stairs. Same, but different.

Once, I stood by my brother’s grave, looking down, for the last time, at his face as shovelfuls of dirt fell into the hole in the ground. How is that self me?

Once, I was a child living in Beirut, eager, each day to go to school and see the pet turtle. Except days it was too unsafe and we weren’t allowed to go outside.

So many once-upon-a-times. Some terrible. Some tender. Most a combination of the two. I recall holding my newborn for the first time and saying, “It’s a baby!!!” as though, in a rush of elation, I couldn’t believe that this was actually true until it happened and I saw him with my own eyes.

Sometimes life feels as if time’s been condensed, one moment folded in on another, as if, just yesterday I was someone else: That woman, that child.

But I know those other, distant moments are why I sit in my living room on a night like this––a night on which I have a cold and have spent most of the day in bed or on the couch––and marvel at how my dog curls up to sleep in the crook of my arm while my husband brings me a cup of tea. “Each moment,” says the poet Jane Hirshfield, “is ringed by lions.” And sometimes the lions are close up, and sometimes they’re way in the past, or in the future, with names like Nothing Lasts, and Time Takes All. Sometimes they have their teeth in us, and sometimes we seem, for a time, to evade them all together.

Each of us is here both because and in spite of. I think of the poet Lucille Clifton writing, “Come celebrate/ with me that everyday/something has tried to kill me/ and has failed.”

We follow the moments again and again, showing up as different iterations of the same self, altered by the gateways through which we’ve passed. And so, I take this moment to pause and bow to you and all you’ve endured, celebrated, survived. And to honor your arrival.

Upcoming opportunities to explore who you are and who you’ve been. Click on class title to follow links:

Jackson Hole Writers: A Dot Went for a Walk, Jackson Hole, Wyoming, June 28th-29th: A moment is so small you could say it’s merely a dot. And somehow these moments line up into a story, the story of a life. We have been at so many different points on the map of our own experience, in the story of being human. And then we find ourselves somewhere else entirely, moved by time or happenstance, or choice, or (if you believe in it) fate. 

We will spend time celebrating the dots, seeing how they line up. In other words, finding moments of thought, story and experience that have mattered to us and then putting them down in our own words, and then in our own handmade books. We’ll have time for craft conversations, prompts and free writes, intentional music dives. 

Writing the Broken Poem: An online craft series Sundays August 4th-September 1st. On Zoom. All things are broken and carry at their core a fissure, a rift. Everything has a fault. The best writing honors the scuffed imperfect world. We’ll explore how to write brokenness in ways that give our poems greater depth, texture, and even open a gateway to the sacred.

The reader is like a carpenter bee, looking for a way into the siding of the poem. Where is the crack to get in? Where is an opening? There are many ways to offer an entrance by “breaking” our writing: The lines, the images, the syntax, the thinking, and more. I’ll give a series of five craft talks exploring each of the arenas in which we can invite brokenness into our poems.