Dear Soulful Revolutionary,
Today’s newsletter is short and sweet. I hope you receive it as a gentle hand on your shoulder (or another gesture you’d find comforting) — a reassurance that you’re not alone. A reminder that what you are doing to make the world more livable is a beautiful and worthwhile and appreciated.
I wrote a little poem the other day that I wanted to share with you. I could hem and haw about how it isn’t much, and how I really should get around to practicing poetry more ( maybe even working on honing my form!) But you know what? It helped me capture and appreciate a few moments that have mattered to me lately. It helped me pause and pay attention.
A spirituality of attentiveness
That attentiveness, as the poet Mary Oliver so often advised, feels massively significant, because my mind is so frequently cluttered these days. I draw blanks when trying to come up with simple words, or when trying to recall a detail I just looked at in my calendar. Emotionally, I am worn thin by the constant barrage of bad news. I find myself snapping at my spouse and children over little things that wouldn’t generally raise my hackles.
I wonder if any of this experience of mental and emotional overload resonates with you.
This weekend, I was camping in the mountains with my family and some of our dear friends, out beyond the reach of cell phone towers. And it was liberating. These 48 hours away — sleeping on an uncomfortable air mattress, not showering, and eating charred food cooked over the fire — returned me to myself.
In moments like this, channels of my heart previously blocked by anxiety and overstimulation often open up, and the words flow.
This little note of praise is brought to you by poet
’s inspired lines:“Everything is on fire, but everyone I love is doing beautiful things and trying to make life worth living, and I know I don’t have to believe in everything, but I believe in that.”
Here’s my poem:
After Nikita Gill
Everything is on fire,
but my dear friend is taking up tango
after a devastating breakup,
and my toddler — beaming —
presents me with “Berry,” her latest masterpiece,
and my mother just left a three minute voicemail
to let me know she was thinking of me,
and I know I don’t have to believe in everything,
but I believe in them.
Beckoned toward gratitude
The three little moments in this poem are a few of the thousand ways I’m holding onto hope and meaning and belief in mind-numbingly chaotic times. It calls to mind a practice my seventh grade English teacher had us do for the entire school year. We kept a daily gratitude journal, noting three things for which we were grateful. Come to think of it, I wrote poetry that year that was genuinely good, at least for a seventh grader. I suspect paying attention to that which gave life joy and meaning was a big part of my poetic process.
My friend Andre Henry just released a new song called “Grateful”— the latest in a series of anthems about the practices of resilience that allow us to keep going in the struggle for liberation without losing ourselves along the way. It’s utterly danceable and totally soul-uplifting. And he shared it out with the same quote from Gill that inspired my poem.
Enumerating what is good and beautiful and holy helps me make it to tomorrow, as Andre would say. It doesn’t extinguish the flames, but it helps me withstand the heat. Like a cool drink of water at the top of a mountain, or dipping my feet in an alpine lake (I did both this weekend — what a divine experience of refreshment!)
I hope the same for you: refreshing moments of pause as you notice what is beautiful and good in your life, and give thanks. I know I write a lot here about how we can address what is wrong with the world. Yet I wonder: if our hearts are not regularly awestruck by the ordinary and everyday gifts of our lives, how can we ever hope to dream beautifully for the world that could be?
Exquisite Soulful Revolutionary, I wonder who is inspiring you to see the possibility of beauty in the world? What beautiful things are they doing? I’d love to hear from you in our community chat.
