Why is poetry so life-saving?

Writing it feels as good as reading it

We had a beautiful holiday meal with our daughter and longtime friends, each of whom brought delicious dishes. We felt blessed and read the Native American blessing I shared last week, which helped ground us all in deep appreciation for nature. My mother was sick and couldn’t come, which was sad, but we all thouroughly enjoyed our evening anyway and I brought her a plate later, and the ease with which I accepted her decision and didn’t try to pressure her to come felt like a mini triumph.

For Thanksgiving this year, our guests and I all made cards for homeless people who will be receiving a CompassioNATE Care Package from an online grief and writer friend of mine, Barb Klein, who honors her late son Nate by giving out 110 stuffed nylon knapsacks filled with food, a $5 bill, underwear, socks, toiletries, water, Narcan, fentanyl-testing strips, and so on, along with a kind card. So my guests and I made some sweet cards that Barb will put in some of the bags—look how beautiful they are! (And I’ll be mailing them to Barb tomorrow with a little check to help fund what she’s giving out). Plus Jamie and I agreed to try to do this (though not 110 bags, but maybe 20), a renewal of our Kyle Kindness Kits, holiday bags we give out with things homeless people might appreciate getting, like cash and sanitizer and water bottles and gift cards, etc. If you want to send something from her

These were the beautiful young people at our dinner! There is a special delight in being around young people who still have so many different paths open before them. I may not always have young people at my family dinners and I wanted to acknowledge how extra-special this feels. (Which is to say, friends, you are always welcome.) [Photo deleted]

Meanwhile, I have been wholly immersed in poetry this month as I’ve participated in a 30 Days of Poetry fund-raiser for Center for New Americans. (I just need $9 more dollars to hit my doubled goal of $2000! Please consider getting me over the top by clicking here.) So I’ve been reading lots of poetry to fuel my writing lots of poems. I know some poems are too much hard work to understand, but many poems are wonderfully accessible and thoughtful and uplifting, and I hope if your teachers made you hate poetry by making you analyze it to death, you will give it another chance, because so much of it says profound things in distillied, imagery-filled ways that speak straight to your heart. Here’s a great poem sent out by American Public Media’s “The Slowdown,” a daily poetry podcast. I loved it, as it spoke directly to the conflict many of us have between self-care and paying attention to the world’s problems:

A Garden and a Street
by Teresa Cader

Where in my body do I feel peace, the meditation leader wants to know,
and I scan my mind trying to remember the Japanese white stone garden

raked in concentric circles around smooth dark boulders, no human footprint
visible, as if some spirit had descended from the sky to rake before dawn.

Instead, I see a street of rubble from bombed-out buildings, jagged hunks
of concrete blocking the way, bits of bloodied cloth snagged on top like flags.

Can I use my breath to unclench my mind, returning to the white stones,
letting go of fear and my attachment to the suffering of the world, he asks,

and I say I don’t know. If I find peace in the white stones of the garden,
but don’t clean up the rubble of the street, what good is my mind?

“A Garden and a Street” by Teresa Cader from AT RISK © 2024 Teresa Cader. Published by Ashland Poetry Press. Used by permission of the poet.

I struggle with this, too, and I haven’t yet figured out the answer. But for now I err on the side of self-care, because I know I won’t be any good to anyone if I don’t keep my own needs in mind, particularly in the midst of my mother’s caretaking crisis.

My wife and I watched a movie on Prime Video this week, Parachute, which had five stars, and while it was a good movie, those five stars must have been a glitch, as it wasn’t all that. It was kind of a rom-com but not as much as the above photo makes it look; the main character had a severe eating disorder, so there was a lot of sadness in the story, too. But the main actors were good and the movie was good. (Just four stars good for me, though.) This offers a lesson in how low expectations are better than inflated ones.

We tried another episode of Kevin Can Go Fuck Himself and I continue to hate it. Can any other people who’ve recommended it to me tell me any reason I should continue to force myself through the ick of more episodes?

My daughter sent me an Instagram message from a woman named Veda Austin who’s doing experiments with water in which she puts words or images under a petri dish containing water for 30 seconds, then freezes the water and the water appears to be responding with corresponding shapes or symbols. I texted back my daughter saying we needed to discuss this woman’s assertion that water is an intelligent designer. I looked at her page and found an even more amazing video she made:

She is putting the same word in many languages under the petri dishes and when she gets at least 50 repeats in the symbol or image that is formed when she crystallizes the petri dishes, she feels she has discovered what she calls a heiroglyph — a symbol that water means to represent that word that she put in many languages. You have to see this:

vedaaustin_water

A post shared by @vedaaustin_water

Then I did abit of research on whether anyone else is talking about this scientific proof of our ability to communicate or receive communication from water, and hardly anyone is, which seems crazy as water communicating sounds remarkable to me and if we really stopped and thought about this, it might change our conception of our connectedness to the universe. But I feel our capitalist consumer culture discourages that kind of deep spiritual thinking, so although someone wrote four books about the signs water makes depending on what we say to it or write under it way back in the 2000s, there is very little in the media landscape about this, which seems crazy. Seriously check this out and let me know what you think.

My family and I went with our friend Steph to see Wicked today. We had to buy advance tickets; everything was crazy crowded; there was an hour wait for concessions—but at least with good reason. The movie is visually exciting and moving and filled with stirring songs and scenes. Ariana Grande, despite her desperate need for a sandwich, is fantastic, and her co-star Cynthia Erevo also has a crazy tiny waist (were they okay? they must have had breathing problems in those cinched costumes) and was a fantastic singer and actress. Highly recommend, though maybe wait a couple of weeks til it’s less of a madhouse. I’m sure this movie will be playing for a while.

Now that my 30 Days of Poetry is over, I’ll go back to Paying (More) Attention more regularly. But doing the poetry was helping me pay attention in a different way, and I consumed less this month, which I think is a good thing. As always, I’m eager to hear what you’ve all been consuming lately, too.