Article voiceover
I forgot for a moment that the point is not poetry It’s not a book or a job or any task The point is learning to live deep in the seasons of life to fold laundry and inhale the cleanliness of it to sweep floors to make food that’s good for your body The point is to see the seasons around us to follow bright Venus across the moonless sky From springtime mornings to cold clear autumn nights To hear finally the full crunch of dry autumn leaves to leave them there for burrowing creatures The point is to live so closely with the truth with our perfection that we see and tend and nurture and cheer on the honesty of ephemeral beings The animals wandering stray and hungry on property that I will not call my own The broken-hearted young woman learning to trust herself again with flat eyes and tenuous legs The man without a house whose only roof is the belly of a broken-down truck whose bed is cold asphalt whose cover is the unseeing blanket discarded by someone who found something better When I finally hear and smell and see and touch the seasons of years of days, even hours When I sense deeply the seasons of my own bones All pretense dries up flies away with the wind That’s when my heart is finally porous enough to love when I finally understand Why the loneliness of autumn is also so painfully beautiful —- Brave is not the confrontation of demons The clinched teeth resolve of I will jail myself this way or that for some higher theory some noble idea True courage is finally answering the question for yourself Do I love myself enough to sleep? Do I love myself enough to eat what’s good for my body? Do I love myself enough to sweep my floor? Am I brave enough to move my legs to wash myself inside and out in hot truth? If you can finally muster the courage it takes to care for yourself the rest will come Your demons will confess themselves shadows on the floor Your worst tendencies will walk away neglected, undernourished Your heart will break into the shattered mosaic it was meant to become that cannot resist loving that cannot resist the call of what is loss and pain and love and truth of loneliness and belonging that will understand finally its tilting relationship to the earth Once we submit to the perfect gravity of ourselves all things orbit right and true All from the courage to sleep in the rhythm of our breath to sleep at night and rise to the soft exquisite truth of new days — Courage is to finally abandon all that is dead for what is dynamic, moving, and alive The moment we devote ourselves to the completion of any of product no matter how noble or soulful or sublime no matter how perfect it appears we’ve lost the living of its creation of our own creating of our own being created The sweet gum never says to me "look at me now I’m finally done" The mourning dove doesn’t call her mellow love for the melody The gauzy nests of web worm moths fall from trees when they are intricate, beautiful and empty It is so elusive the truth of this life Our beauty is created in the process of living in constant becoming in the midst of making--which I would call prayer in the nature of our own melting hearts Yet how distracted we are by the glittering jewels we imagine in the design of a cold heavy crown the satisfaction of what is no longer being made and therefore no longer lives Devote yourself to all that is alive to what is necessarily incomplete to the process of it The jewels of many crowns will handle their own making fading in and out of their own glory but the Aurora Borealis will surprise your nights with color the sweetness of days will melt on your tongue like warm honey grainy and dissolving and real