each stalk of grass is hollow and barren this time of year skeletons of viridescent pasts like raw leafless trees memories of living and of dying the pulling back the cocooning of life in silent night, darkness chambers, interiors of many plants and animals teaches us all about the death and the rebirth of life, light so that we won’t fully despair
Deer Creek. Image, my own.
The Return
the light returns this morning with the owls they call from tree to branch, as sun
pinks surely over the charcoaled horizon kilned through night, and sealed in the new, cold light
of this winter morning where I’m aghast at the magic, memory magnificence, majesty transitive verb
of the whole thing where I am present when the light is seven minutes old and each
photon graces my retina with the reminder that the light always returns until it doesn’t
until the whole sky is bathed in numinous halogenic possibility the presence of the now
as the light returns may we remember the power of the darkness the importance
of slow, intentional rest, the rejuvenating properties of sleep for a world that simply needs to listen to
the magic of the intransitive verbs of owls
Christmas Windmill. Image, my own.
Dark
Enfold me in your blackness, I don’t want to be afraid of the dark In fact, I want to embrace my shadow Shadows of all that I thought would Suck the marrow out of me, but instead Offered me a respite, a resting place A hallowed breath of solace and silence Dark, the thing that so much incandescent Luminosity is meant to fight, to ward off, as Humanity wilts under all this light
Tamarisk and Gray Skies. Image, my own.
Space
Maybe the most surprising thing about poems is that they take a fair amount of space and time The words are often all there, waiting on the lip, the tip of consciousness, but flow takes room Takes open-ended realities, wide skies like altars in the arcing air, vast closenesses and distances Which the heart contemplates, the healing place, the hell, the compassionate lengths to which a Human will go to tell a truth, a peace, a playful nothing, a love, a life, a poem
The Road. Image, my own.
Don’t Die
when it began, I’m not quite sure, but as of late my son has a new post script for nearly every exchange, “don’t die” he tells me as I start the engine of the car, “don’t die” he encourages as I head off to work “don’t die” when the rain is falling in sheets that darken each atom of exposed earth, he must understand something about the nature of life
Beloved and Time. Image, Aubreigh Parks.
Celebration
sometimes the celebration will be the growing of the light minute by minute over the horizon, moment by moment in our children’s eyes. Sometimes the celebration will be the sleep, the forgetting, the separation and the longing which brings deeper communion with the divine, the place, the way, unsure, the path, the journey, one precious step at a time. Sometimes the celebration will be the growing of the self, the yearning, expanding, nearly cracking open of your sternum with the enlarging, ever-beating heart, the lungs full-burdened with life giving nitrogen plus oxygen, exhale the heaviness and grief, inhale, close your eyes and let go
So here we gather On this bright and Dark day in the Fresh World, to see if there Is a turkey of love Between us– siblings, cousins, lovers, parents, Friends. And there it Is– LOVE– carved out For us in some miracle Since the creation of the Cosmos scuttled us All together on this blue- Green blessing of a planet Quantum journey, accidental Adventure, maybe in another Life we don’t know one another We haven’t stood witness To one another’s joy and Pain. But here, now We are the people we Know and love because Of particles of song shared Between us, and mud Fights on Thanksgivings Long ago, and stories that Have connected us all Bringing us to this Moment– to Gather to Settle softly into miraculous Gratitude. Thank you I love you. Forgive me, I forgive You. I love you. All love.
Art Center. November 2024. Image, my own.
Other Ghosts
So now there are other ghosts The angels of the past have Come to comfort and protect, To bring peace and stability I don’t know how I know, but Others feel it too, they enter They awe, I feel the ancestors In the daily spirals of My existence, the soil of My backyard, the song of The trees and birds in the Ancient ash. Many others feel them, too, and tell me They are near, they are Present. I know that I am Not the only one who has Ever been separated from My alter, my shelter, my Building, my dreams torn For a vision of the future I could not ascribe I’m learning each day That each ancient has Been sent as a guide The present and the Beyond, they’ve become one
Fall-Winter Bridge. November 2024. Image, my own.
One
Of the most powerful Things happened to me And I can both be humane And protect myself against Smiling scoffs, unkind people Who would make a mockery of Pain, I am so glad that I can live My life wild and free, I was Given a second chance at Love, at happiness You too? I will never take that for granted, My joy– that joy will go on to Fill me, myself, my people And all the rivers of song
Community Garden. November 2024. Image, my own.
The “Last” Great Thanksgiving
That’s what the menu read And then they were all gathered In one place—humans—with the Most similar genetic makeup of Any group of sapiens on planet Earth. Siblings. And it was good
Woods– lovely, light, dark, deep. November 2024. Image, my own.
In the eleventh hour, your girlfriends come to hang the final doors in your soul.
They know it is your funeral, your wake. The death of so much you have built and known.
You know that’s how it will be when you die–literally– or you pray, or wish it to be so, women and men surrounding you.
Understanding you need to build this one last thing before this death, they come with drill bits, and toolboxes,
and dirty jokes, and Beyoncé ballads. You’re *Drunk in Love* together in the night.
They come with highly absorbent towels and borrowed vacuum cleaners because they know
you need to laugh and cry at the same time. They do the same. It’s no coincidence when
you look down at your watch, it’s eleven twenty. And then you clutch your heart as if you could offer it beating
out of your chest to show them how much this grand act of love matters.
In the eleventh hour, you call your guy-friend and desperately ask him for a recommendation for a plumber.
The upstairs faucet won’t stop leaking, like your eyes, broken, and you call him again when the plumber tells you the only fix
is to drill through the wall behind the tub to replace the valve. Your friend gives you the okay, and the world is made right for that moment.
Another friend, a man, gifts you a ring, a broken piece of turquoise healed with gold, Kintsugi. Mixing Urushi Laquier into your internal joinery.
Another tells you to drink the good wine and offers you a bottle to catch all the confusion, upset, anger, chaos, tumult, of these tender days.
Another wraps you up in Spring in Seattle. God-parent to your sons playing super-smash until dawn.
In the eleventh hour, your friends, who are no longer young spread the table with salmon and homemade spice chutney
for a feast to last through the wind. They don’t know you’ll go home to silently sob at their magic on the shower tiles.
Your girlfriend jumps on her bike to ride with you through the rainstorm, sunshine yellow cut-leaf balsam root punctuating each meadow.
The rain, the sun, the rich smell of the greening earth make you laugh with joy, woop with pleasure over the berms
Revel in the living of it as they’ve each given their day, their night, precious moments of their one precious life, to be with you, to cradle you,
to eat *Thunder Cake** and salty tears together. It will never be final or forgotten, this Gift. The fact that they knew
and understood the challenge and all stepped in with Windex and mops with arms outstretced
Ready to hold you as your once-life died and you were made anew. You, free entirely
-MM
“In the Eleventh Hour” has to do with ambiguous grief and the power of others to help heal us in our deepest darkness and pain. You see, our society honors and marks certain types of grief, specifically the death of a loved one. The death of a partner, parent, child, sibling, or close friend presents the mourner with its own unique fire, dragons, daemons, and oceans of grief. 🌊 But some griefs in our culture do not have specific metrics or physical markers. These bereavements may be losing someone to dementia, substance abuse disorders, divorce, familial estrangement, watching someone slip away in mental illness, or leaving our religion or faith origin. When someone dies, we generally mark their grave. But when someone miscarries a baby, we often don’t have ritual to mark that grief event. The same goes for things like childhood abuse. When you grow into an adult after this abuse, who is there to mark the unimaginable path you have trod out of the way you were treated by those who were meant to be your protectors not perpetrator(s) of your worst nightmare?
I’ve found that grief is holy, sacred even. Whether you experienced an ambiguous or more direct loss through death. Human opportunities to walk through the circles ⭕️ of life and death can both teach and strain the body, heart, and soul.
When I got divorced, I sat down with Google to see if a human really could die of a broken heart. 💔 That is how bereft, how torn and sad I was. And it turns out, yes, sure enough, you can die of a broken heart. Takotsubo cardiomyopathy syndrome is the term for this condition. Your heart, in essence, cannot withstand the excess adrenaline caused by a stressful grief-induced event.
All grief has the potential to break our hearts. But, in fact, not a lot of people literally die from this condition which means that a whole lot of people who have experienced deep, great, wide grief live to tell about it. One thing that saved me in my grief was the net of love, care, catching that my family and friends spread out under me and my family. “In the Eleventh Hour” details that love.
*So worth a read. Thunder Cake, by Patricia Polacco.
*Also important in this conversation, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong.
Malaka Gharib of the NPR blog Goats and Soda has created a comic that explains COVID-19 in simple terms for children. Gharib is the creator of I Was Their American Dream, a graphic memoir about her upbringing as an immigrant with parents from Egypt and the Philippines; the book was chosen as one of SLJ’s Best Graphic Novels of 2019.
The day came. Quietly, unlooked for, relatively unannounced—at least not preemptively announced at my High School. I left school on a Friday afternoon in March, set to pick up sick-work for my own elementary school student at his school. (No, he didn’t have SARS Co-V2. He had strep throat.) As I pulled into Midway elementary, my husband called, “Did you see the text from the school district?” he asked. “Nope,” was my brief reply.
“They’ve instructed elementary students to take their devices home this weekend,” he explained. “Ah, good to know. I’m here at the school now, and I can pick up both devices for the boys,” I returned. “I’ll call you back in 15 minutes, okay?” And that was the beginning of the new reality which most of us face.
Thirty minutes later our Governor announced a “soft-closure” of school. Two weeks later, a May 1st extension, and after two more weeks, it was announced that our schools will be closed for the rest of the school year.
We—the community, the parents, the teachers, the students, the administrators, the staff, individual states, the nation—let each new wave of distance sink in. (While some were desperately unable to gain distance because of their circumstances, and I’ll address this harsh reality later.) But sometimes the tide has risen so quickly, as each new day dawns on our brave new world of online schooling, we’re still caught off-guard, brought to turmoil, left (some) in tears.
For those of you who are struggling—and, yes, I’m pretty sure I’m speaking to a universal WE—TAKE HEART! I know that this road has been constantly changing, ever updating, inundated with crashing breaker upon crashing breaker of the new, the not-normal, the unknown. Yes, it has felt like a dystopian reality has been thrust upon many of us; and yes, I understand that holding the education of your own children in your own purview has got to be scary.
I spent the entire first weekend after the school closure working. When I say working, I mean that I put in two solid twelve-hour days. Scouring my lesson plans, shifting my expectations, creating a video welcome, expeditiously scanning text into PDF, drafting a parent email, assuring my students that their current assignments were still due, grading my current assignment load, and scrupulously re-designing my instructional rubric to fit our new reality—online schooling.
I’m a teacher. I share this not because you didn’t read the last paragraph where I explained all of the hard work and effort that went into shifting my classes to online models, but because I want you to understand that I feel you, parents, when you describe the hardship of schooling all of your people at home. Wednesday of the following week I entered upon an educational arena that I will hence forth and forever refer to as “The Rodeo.” We’re god-fearing cow and sheep folk here where I live, and I can only describe that those first few days of EVERYONE online, everyone collapsed into one space, one classroom, one life was a POOP-SHOW to behold.
My husband on a conference call with the East-coast. Myself on a Zoom meeting with my teaching team. My sons on a host of platforms, apps, and technological learning tools that left my head spinning, and my heart overflowing with passwords that I hopelessly cast into the soft-shod muck of my working memory.
Holy cow. We were failing. We were failing, and we were going to fail. It took my breath away. This instant shift, and equally instant knowledge– that while I felt aptly, even confidently, prepared to transition (with a 24 hours-worth of weekend-work) to teach eleventh graders both the art and science of reading, writing, speaking, and thinking with the flip of a switch– my own little family, my own pride-and-joy, my own little think tank was going to fall flat on its face in the mutton-busting, teeth brown with animal crap and tears, and there was nothing I could do about it!
Then Thursday dawned, and we were all okay. The kinks were there. You better believe there were kinks, and still are some. But we began to piece together our new reality. My second grader, who is bright, and silly, and a handful to be around for eight hours at a stretch, was completely overwhelmed just to see the “to-do” list his teachers posted. “Thirteen pages of math, MOM!” he yelled. As I tried to explain that those 13 pages were really just slides– on a Power Point, or a Nearpod, or a … you fill in blank with the app your student is using to ingest and then submit work—which meant that there were only THIRTEEN PROBLEMS. In total. Much less than he had done for his homework the week before.
So it has gone in our home. Sometimes we are able to re-visualize, re-imagine, re-calibrate our thinking about school. We’re riding high and feeling the adrenaline of success for every one of those eight seconds. My oldest son has quietly gone about his work, day-in and day-out, nary a hiccup. But we had some good old-fashioned ride-the-bull sessions when he couldn’t explain to me why his work was left “unsubmitted” on some of his assignments. We’re working it out. Sometimes we still get bucked off the bull.
But it is also very obvious to me that my children’s teachers got the news about school closures, went out to their own virtual rodeo arenas, got on the saddle bronc assigned to them, and WENT. TO. TOWN! (Go Wranglers!) We came back, to online school, to a system that was ready to deliver learning– targeted, essential learning– to each of my children in practically the eight seconds it takes to ride a saddle bronc. The execution, the preparedness, the effort, the instructional stability, the stamina, and the standards were astounding. Their style, their grace, their precise timing was everything. My children weren’t going to sit out this pandemic twiddling their thumbs. They were going to be learning. Truly gaining in knowledge, education, and standards-based instruction for their grade-level. It was and IS remarkable.
I also want parents, students, community members, and administrators to know that MY STUDENTS ARE SHOWING UP! My students are here. They are in their classrooms. Some of them in record displays of participation. It is so easy to give High School students a bad rap. To label them with some derogatory generational disparagement. But I want you to know that my students have been there for me as much as I have been there for them. They are writing, they are reading, they are thinking, they are responding to online discussions, and submitting FlipGrids full of poems, and rocking this brave new world in a way that I could not possibly have imagined.
This online learning platform IS accessible, IS relevant, IS possible, IS working. And, no, in my opinion, it is not the best there is to offer. I am an eternal advocate for the face-to-face classroom. I love the people. There will always be outliers. There will be those whose situations, livelihoods, family environments, and living situations have been thrown into such chaos by this change that they will not be able to either succeed or survive in this online learning platform. We should begin to plan for their recovery now. How will we offer make-up credit, re-teaching, re-assessment, and re-vitalization of those whose educational opportunities really did go down the tube when social distancing became a reality.
But above all, I want us to remember, and I believe that this moment in education has re-taught us, the incredible resiliency of the human spirit. We are all experiencing this rodeo together and yet separately. Almost all lived human experiences are like that—individual and collective. My hope is that we’ll continue to reach out with that human spirit of support and core care. I hope we will ban together in care and community-interest not just blast our latest emotion into the social media echo chamber. But take up the banner of education because it is one that we all must bear. Here’s to that next great ride of Old Glory around the rodeo arena in real-time. As the horse picks up speed, and the wind takes that banner of freedom into endless ripples of hard work, good will, and committed effort, may we remember learning and pedagogy are built upon the backs of those educational bronc riders—past, present, and future. You’re one of them now. We are all in this together.
Refined + Rugged 