Writer's Season

Attending to grief and praise

These mornings, the air is crip when I wake up, the light through the living room windows more faint. Everything dialed back a bit: bird song, glare, the length of days. All the subtractions calling our attention to what’s left; the bare bones of the trees, the silence. I like to call it Writer’s Season, season when there’s a little less pull to be outside, and a little more pull to go inward. I probably do the bulk of my writing in the colder season, a candle lit by my desk at night, slippers on my feet.

The thing about writing, and especially about writing poetry, is that it teaches us to attend to two things: grief and praise. The ode invites us to admire what is: the profusion of lilies on the hill behind the house, our grandmother’s hands. And the elegy gives us on altar on which to lay flowers for our dead. Most poems engage both grief and praise, as all writing is an attempt to navigate the distance between the real, and the desired. In other words, to explore longing. The poet Robert Hass once wrote, “They call it longing because desire has such distances in it.” And those distances can be profound. In the ideal world, the marriage lasts, the sister is still alive, the house still standing. In the ideal world, all children are safe. In the ideal world, there is no war. We can go on and on.

Our hearts ache in the distance between one truth and another. I had the privilege of spending some time in conversation this week with Koshin Paley Ellison for the Poetry of Resilience series I co-lead with James Crews. Koshin Ellison is the co-founder of the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care. I asked him how he tends to his own heart in these dark days. He was quiet a moment, then answered, “I let it break.” Yes. That. Allowing what is to be. Our hearts break in the news of the world, and for our own losses.

Our lives, like a poem, take place in the space between the wished for and the real. I am reminded of Rumi saying “Out beyond wrong doing and right doing, there is a field, I will meet you there.” Let us all meet ourselves there, in a place in between, a place where we can sit with our sorrows, and the great sorrows of our kind, while also holding our capacity to praise. 

And I praise you for your bravery, the courage to sit in the unknown, in the chaos of the world, in our losses, and still attend, with tenderness, to what’s left; fallen apples, a robin perched on a branch. Your own broken heart. The silence.