Shelter

The Worlds We Make

Well, what days we live in. The news is rough and has been rough, something that plays out in so many ways. I’ll get through this first part quickly: It’s four days after the election and I just experienced the first round of post-election hate speech, a Zoom bomber repeating an epithet I don’t need to name here. Only to say that certain factions feel emboldened in their hatred. I was struck by how badly I wanted the tirade to end, but also by how the language of belittling rolled over me somehow, and back into the soil, ready to be broken down into humus, feed plants, become new. At least that was what came to me. I could see it cycling back into the ecosystem. My host, who stopped what was happening while I logged off, then back onto the call, was lovely and also apologetic. “No need,” I said, “We all know the world we’re living in.”

I felt mostly unscathed. But even more than that, I felt the rightness of coming together and sharing poems, now and always. But especially now. The group stayed the course, sharing some of their own work at the open mic, or work by poets they admired. The poet Lana Hechtman Ayers read Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “Shoulders,” which I will share with you here.

Shoulders

Naomi Shihab Nye

A man crosses the street in rain,
stepping gently, looking two times north and south,
because his son is asleep on his shoulder.

No car must splash him.
No car drive too near to his shadow.

This man carries the world’s most sensitive cargo
but he’s not marked.
Nowhere does his jacket say FRAGILE,
HANDLE WITH CARE.

His ear fills up with breathing.
He hears the hum of a boy’s dream
deep inside him.

We’re not going to be able
to live in this world
if we’re not willing to do what he’s doing
with one another.

The road will only be wide.
The rain will never stop falling.

(from Red Suitcase)

And I saw how we were sheltering each other with words, how sharing poems is like building a house together that we can live in. Same with art. Same with music. Same with planting a garden. Same with so many things.

What do you do that builds a kind of house? Who do you want to share it with? Who builds a house that offers you solace and warmth?

I don’t ask lightly. I ask because our joy depends on it. Yours and mine. And because tending each other and tending our deep joy is a part of survival. Not just ours as individuals, but the world’s.

So thank you for all the things you do to make a space for each other, to honor each other, to carry forth some small light and build a house around it. We need you.