Friends,
It’s day one. Here we are.
Take a deep breath. Take another one.
Maybe one more.
Settle in.
Words. Poetry. Embodiment.
What do they mean to us?
I can’t wait to go on this journey with you. As I shared over the weekend when I announced the theme for this month, we live in a heavy time. We need reminders of hope, and that comes so often through words.
So I find it so fitting that the first word of our month is lifeline.
Lifeline
I knew it right when it happened, the moment that everything shifted, that I was in the in-between, liminal space between life and death, where there are people to notice, choices to make, a life to examine. I walked the path of every childhood home, remembered each person who held me, grieved many lost relationships and identities, and celebrated once again the small moments when I found my way back to myself. But it was there that the lifeline appeared, small as a child, myself as a child, standing there with a vase full of tulips, all kinds of colors I’d never seen before, asking me what I believe is next. How could I know? I whispered, but she just smiled, holding out the vase, holding out the possibility of what could be, asking me to believe something, anything, about the entire journey away from myself and back. I took the vase of tulips in every color, and she quietly smiled, tugging a string beside her, a line, to follow toward the New Way, toward Home, onto Another Path, any path that might be the one to guide me back, once again, to the life I’ve been waiting for.
I can’t wait to read what you write, friends.
Until tomorrow.
"I see you"
those words bringing me to tears
after months of cleaning toilets
and taking out trash
homelessness
failed marriage
failed attempt to become a professor
someone took the time
to notice me
to see that I
am more
than even what
I think of myself
there is no more powerful
lifeline
than that
I was drowning
Which is obvious
That’s why people need lifelines.
But when you’re drowning
and someone throws you a rope
a floatie
that orange ring with white stripes,
There’s a moment where gratitude
turns to dejection.
Is this it?
Is that all?
I can only be grateful
when I have been pulled out of the water.
Not when I still float
barely head above death.
So I collected it all
the driftwood of my shipwrecked past
the ropes and buoys sent from connections
cloth made from my worn out vocal chords,
And I built myself a raft.
And I survived a little longer.
That raft helped me gather food
And coconut husks became the sides of a ship.
Each thing, a lifeline
Each lifeline, a step to thriving
instead of surviving.
I did the work to save myself
but the lifelines along the way made it possible.