Oh, for weeks I’ve been drifting in a long stream of ennui—a blah removal from the world, tired and bored—that I feel terribly ashamed even mentioning because things are so good in my life. Both my lovely sons home, laughing and elbowing one another. Peaches and mangoes to eat dripping over the sink, bags of cherries at my desk while I work. The very fact of my desk itself: the dining table I wrote two books at, once shared with my sons’ books and dishes now sitting in a sunlit dome of my own, filled with my books and precious collected knick knacks. Each night, I curl my full belly up against my warm warm love and when sleep returns me to my body in the morning, there is coffee to drink, another day of sunshine.

Summer is humming all around me, but I have felt removed, like I’m watching it through a window or reading about it. Or standing stock still while it happens at a different speed than I can compute. I’m moving at 2 frames a minute and all around me things are whizzing and whirring at 200 frames a minute and I barely grasp one corner of the ongoing conversation before it slips away and moves on. I can’t keep up. And there is much to keep up with.

It’s a hard time for the business of publishing. It’s a hard time for fundraising. Working, as I do, on building pluralistic communities, feels incredibly hard. Everyone is on edge. People are prone to lashing out, brittle and sharp and defensive and unforgiving. And I get it.* Everything is covered in nettles.

It makes the ennui thicker, sticky.

Who cares? I catch myself saying to myself while I scroll on my phone,** flattened by the enormity of my to do list, the complexity of the problems I’m supposed to be trying to solve. To begin to solve them, I need to live in the realm of ideas, of imagination, of possibility. But I feel stuck in the slow motion now.

It is fortunate that my who cares doesn’t extend to everything as it has in the past. My plants are well watered, my garden reasonably weeded, my hair acceptably recently washed. But it is difficult to mobilize for a future that feels so precarious. I can barely grieve what has been lost, what we are losing. Even writing this, I feel yards from it. I just want to sink into something soft, into the liquid of the swimming pool, the bathtub, I want to dissolve.***

And then last week I decided to wake up every morning very early and get to my desk to read a dense text and force myself into conversation with ideas. It helped. And then I found this poem, Greensickness by Laurel Chen.

Chen writes: I didn’t know I’d reached a shoreline till I felt it

The lush description of grief resonated so fully that I felt whatever is taking up so much space inside me dislodge a little bit. I shared the poem on Friday, in my workshop, and a person whose face I don’t think I’ve ever seen, read a poem about her survival through art and poetry with us at Mission Belonging. It made me weep from the teacher’s seat. She shared it with me and I have read it again and again.

Who cares? Well, I do. And I think that’s what’s been making me feel so very stuck and scared. I care so much and I feel a bit helpless and I don’t want to fail and I know it’s not in my control. I am trying my best and it may not be enough. I know the darkness will ebb and flow but

Chen: Grief isn’t the only geography I know.

Thank you for reading this. If you’re looking for a prompt, here’s the one we used after reading “Greensickness”: Write a green poem.

notes:

*I have found myself more prone than ever to flying into absolute rages over perceived slights: a few weeks ago, I was crossing the street and the car that had stopped to let me cross started honking its horn before I reached the other sidewalk and I was so angry I stood in the middle of the crosswalk shouting “What the f**k is your problem?” Before I realized that the person in the car was known to me, honking to say hello.

**Or playing this addictive puzzle game that I will not tell you the name of, for your own protection.

***Perhaps this is not the sort of thing one should post on the internet, on the soft-core professional space of substack (because everything is part of your personal brand, which we are selling! at all times!). I am supposed to be a poet-in-service. Grateful for what I have. And I am grateful for what I have, but I am also very tired.

dropped this prompt thing right at the end, didn’t I? Here I am four days later.

My grandmother died. She was 98 years old. We had a complex relationship—I was one of a big pack of grandkids, not the favorite by any means. We laughed a lot. She was dryly funny, mercurial in her moods and regimented in her habits. But she was a part of my creative life. S…

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500 words

I think I missed yesterday. That’s actually okay. It is a writing day for me, the day when I am at my desk. It’s messier than I prefer, so I’ll tidy it up and roll up my sleeves, stretch out my typing fingers, gather all the little notes and ideas I’ve been writing on meeting and email days and…stare at them blankly.

Wi…

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Only three days of the month left and I’m still struggling to remember to post. But grace for it being Monday. Today is one of my favorite days of the entire month. It’s when I get to lead my More Than One Story workshop for women & non-binary veterans. We all kind of hover up above our seats with the absolute power of the p…

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The day got away from me. Yesterday these doors were hung in our new house. I got the three on the right maybe 15 years ago. The boys and I were going through a period of tremendous grief and upheaval and a friend and I got them from an antique market and hung them, the idea being that they’d serve as “spirit doors,”…

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make a list, then write an ode to one thing (sorry for the repeat Friday workshop crew, but please share what you wrote if you’re up for it).

Sun on my back, slipping into water, waiting for a new leaf to unfurl, observing lizards from a distance, ‘drinking’ the crumbs of chips from the bag, when one of my sons lols at my joke des…

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(just a light one on this Friday morning)

Yesterday I got to have the most wonderful conversation with my friend Belena, who I was interviewing about her art-making practice, which beg…

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A few months ago at the pool at the gym, an older woman walked back and forth in the chest deep water in the lane next to me. She had on goggles, a gray swimsuit, a swim cap, and, as I began my laps I noticed: tennis shoes. Not water shoes, but regular sneakers with laces and thick soles. She walk…

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Happened upon a trivia night last night and discovered how little I really know about the things that have happened on earth, but especially things related to sports.

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(skip ahead and read the quote at the end for more context)

In 2011 I picked up the habit of wr…

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It’s cold and sunny like spring should be and though my body doesn’t exactly love the upheaval, I’m glad. The other day I did this exercise of looking at a big blank canvas and asking my inner child artist self what she wanted to do with it and then I drew what I saw with my non-dominant hand. Maybe try that.

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last night we saw Florence and the Machine with many favorite people and many many many delighted strangers. I haven’t been to too many big big concerts in my life. I’m sorry to admit it, but the hassle of buying tickets, planning transportation, and being in a crowd all seems a bit overwhelming to me. But goodness. To be one face…

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“Sometimes I think I want…”

Be ironic and cynical and silly if you want because obviously if you really wanted it, you’d like, do it.

Here’s an old poem of mine from When The World Breaks Open that still cracks me up. In the writing of it I was like oh yeah shit even though I sometimes feel wistful for some other version of me, I obviously like being this…

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A while ago, I lived in an apartment that I adored and had these windows that were filled with sky, and instead of getting curtains I kept sunglasses on my bedside table and just put those on while I drank coffee in bed on bright mornings. Now I have a desk under a skylight and sometimes I have to put a hat on while I sit at…

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fractured focus. I have had more social time than is typical for me during the week, and while each opportunity to connect has been incredibly wonderful, it becomes difficult to hear my own thoughts when I am attuned to others for more hours than not in a given day or few days. I think I actually find it harder to…

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(Photo above of a little schematic I drew of a closet)

Halfway through the month!! I haven’t written a poem a day by a long shot but thinking of these entry points with all of you in mind has tuned me toward a practice of finding more ideas than my email-overrun life has allowed. Which is to say, it’s changed how I pa…

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A little frozen by the logistics of the to do list this morning, the order of operations of breakfast, exercise, work. And running in the background, a little ticker tape of concerns: being behind on many things, second guessing renovation decisions, calls I hav…

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100 words.

(my mother sent me this photo I’d never seen of me and some cousins at a wedding in Kolkatta, 9 or 10 years old. And this blank sleepy spacy thinking about a book face I’m wea…

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Yesterday I read that the human eye can discern more shades of the color green than any other color and thus strikes me as an especially beautiful thing to get to learn in the spring, when all the green is popping out and offering relief after the starkness of a particularly long winter. I’ve been in a house on a mountain watching…

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Where has friendship carried you?

A friend of mine says “friendship is my religion” and she lives it. And her friendship has been lifesaving. She practices it.

more tomorrow.

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