Author: Christina's Words

“The darkness around us is deep.” ~ William Stafford

“Advice to Myself” by Louise Erdrich

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Leave the dishes.
Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator
and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.
Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.
Throw the cracked bowl out and don’t patch the cup.
Don’t patch anything. Don’t mend. Buy safety pins.
Don’t even sew on a button.
Let the wind have its way, then the earth
that invades as dust and then the dead
foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.
Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.
Don’t keep all the pieces of the puzzles
or the doll’s tiny shoes in pairs, don’t worry
who uses whose toothbrush or if anything
matches, at all.
Except one word to another. Or a thought.
Pursue the authentic-decide first
what is authentic,
then go after it with all your heart.
Your heart, that place
you don’t even think of cleaning out.
That closet stuffed with savage mementos.
Don’t sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth
or worry if we’re all eating cereal for dinner
again. Don’t answer the telephone, ever,
or weep over anything at all that breaks.
Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons
in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life
and talk to the dead
who drift in through the screened windows, who collect
patiently on the tops of food jars and books.
Recycle the mail, don’t read it, don’t read anything
except what destroys
the insulation between yourself and your experience
or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters
this ruse you call necessity.

“Advice to Myself” by Louise Erdrich from Original Fire. © Harper Collins Publishers, 2003.

“Enough Music” by Dorianne Laux

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Sometimes, when we’re on a long drive,
and we’ve talked enough and listened
to enough music and stopped twice,
once to eat, once to see the view,
we fall into this rhythm of silence.
It swings back and forth between us
like a rope over a lake.
Maybe it’s what we don’t say
that saves us.

 
 

Poem copyright ©1994 by Dorianne Laux, “Enough Music,” (What We Carry, BOA Editions, 1994).

“In the Kitchen” by Caitlyn Siehl

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You make me think of Joni Mitchell.
Of red wine and dancing on tiled floor with my hands up, like I’ve surrendered
to the rhythm of my body when it
is singing about you.
You make me think of sun dresses
and citrus and rose oil.
I peel fruit and it is exactly like saying
your name, so I don’t wash my hands
and I touch you until we both smell like tangerines, until we’re sticky with it.
On a Saturday that is not this one,
I will go for a walk while the sun yawns, and everything will turn quiet.
It will be a small moment, I can promise you that, and it will take me to you.
Somewhere with a big kitchen and brick walls.
You will be cutting an onion with a butter knife and I will be
drinking Merlot out of a coffee cup while you cook,
and Joni will be singing in that aching way she does, like she’s got all the time in the world to fall apart.
Here, you will be the voice inside my talk of forever.
Here, you will be the open window and the sway of my skirt in the wind.
Here, you will kiss my stained mouth until it is its own sun
and every word is golden.

– Caitlyn Siehl, “In the Kitchen” (via alonesomes)

Exhaust the Little Moment by Anna Quindlen

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Exhaust the Little Moment

I was 19 years old when I was told that my mother had ovarian cancer and was not going to live much longer. I’d just finished my first year of university, but I was the oldest of five children, and my mother was dying. So at the beginning of what would have been my second year, I packed up my university things and found myself instead making meatloaf and administering doses of morphine in a house in the suburbs.

It is amazing how much you can learn in one year. I went home in September and my mother died in January. By April, I realized I had salvaged one thing out of the ruin of my life as I had known it: I was still alive, and I could actually take pleasure in the feeling of my lungs filling and emptying again. I looked at the daffodils and the azaleas, and Lord, they were beautiful.

I went back to university and I looked around at all the kids who found life kind of a drag. And I knew I had undergone a sea change. Because I was never again going to be able to see life as anything except a gift.

Oh, I’ve lost this feeling from time to time. Bad days and good days. Life cycles and dark moods. We’ve lived through a period in which pessimism was the fashion. And some days we wake up and find on the front page of the papers that we have totally underestimated the human ability to be sadistic and destructive.

And yet… and yet. It’s all so terrific – the conversation and the relationships and the scenery in the midst of all our troubles. That’s why we feel so deeply when it’s endangered – because if we think about life, we know how quietly wonderful it can be. We know that if we had only six moths of it left, we’d hold on as tight as we could with both hands to every day, every hour.

It’s ironic that we forget this. We have more time than ever before to remember it, those of us who are surrounded by high-tech appliances, cars, family rooms – the kinds of things our grandparents thought only rich people had.

Yet instead of rejoicing, we find the glass half empty. Our jobs take too much out of us. Our kids are an awful responsibility.

Let’s be honest. We have an embarrassment of riches. Life is good. And that’s why we have an obligation to make it better. If each of us doesn’t give something back, it makes a mockery of all we’ve been given.

It is easy to say to yourself, I cannot give a minute more. There aren’t enough hours in the day. Whenever I feel that way, I remember a day I spent with a woman who worked twice a week at a neighborhood soup kitchen. She had a busy husband and two kids to take care of along with a job, and I was standing at a sink watching her scrape carrots. And I said to her, “How can you find the time to do this?”

She looked up at the line of men and women forming outside. And with scarcely a pause in her peeling, she answered, “How could I not?”

The question is not whether we will do this. Because we must. But first we have to recognize how much we have. Life is divine. I don’t mean in any cosmic way, but in all its small component parts: the feeling of one of my kid’s hands inside mine, the way my husband looks when he reads with the lamp behind him, fettucine Alfredo, fudge, Pride and Prejudice. Life is made of moments, small pieces of silver amid long stretched of gravel. It would be nice if they came unsummoned, but given our busy lives, that won’t happen. We have to make the time for them.

So I offer this challenge: Learn to be happy. Learn to look at all the good in the world and to give some of it back because you believe in it passionately.

Embrace the little things of life that sometimes get left in the dust of our frenetic schedules. Without the inner satisfaction that comes with them, our accomplishments will be nothing more than the stuff of résumés. And a résumé is cold comfort on a winter night.

Gwendolyn Brooks wrote:

Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies.
And be it gush or gold it will not come.
Again in this identical disguise.

Sometimes we lose that wonder. And sometimes we regain it through hard lessons, the way I did. Because the year my mother died, I learned something enduring about life: that it is glorious, and we have no business taking it for granted.

Anna Quindlen, A Short Guide to a Happy Life

Good read: “A Short Guide to a Happy Life: Anna Quindlen on Work, Joy, and How to Live Rather Than Exist,” via BrainPickings.org

“The Afterlife” by Billy Collins

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry

While you are preparing for sleep, brushing your teeth,
or riffling through a magazine in bed,
the dead of the day are setting out on their journey.

They’re moving off in all imaginable directions,
each according to his own private belief,
and this is the secret that silent Lazarus would not reveal:
that everyone is right, as it turns out.
you go to the place you always thought you would go,
The place you kept lit in an alcove in your head.

Some are being shot into a funnel of flashing colors
into a zone of light, white as a January sun.
Others are standing naked before a forbidding judge who sits
with a golden ladder on one side, a coal chute on the other.

Some have already joined the celestial choir
and are singing as if they have been doing this forever,
while the less inventive find themselves stuck
in a big air conditioned room full of food and chorus girls.

Some are approaching the apartment of the female God,
a woman in her forties with short wiry hair
and glasses hanging from her neck by a string.
With one eye she regards the dead through a hole in her door.

There are those who are squeezing into the bodies
of animals–eagles and leopards–and one trying on
the skin of a monkey like a tight suit,
ready to begin another life in a more simple key,

while others float off into some benign vagueness,
little units of energy heading for the ultimate elsewhere.

There are even a few classicists being led to an underworld
by a mythological creature with a beard and hooves.
He will bring them to the mouth of the furious cave
guarded over by Edith Hamilton and her three-headed dog.

The rest just lie on their backs in their coffins
wishing they could return so they could learn Italian
or see the pyramids, or play some golf in a light rain.
They wish they could wake in the morning like you
and stand at a window examining the winter trees,
every branch traced with the ghost writing of snow.

(And some just smile, forever on)

 

Billy Collins, from Questions about Angels