A Spring Song

I watched the last fall leaf fall 
I heard the first spring bird call
I felt the old snow’s melt flow
I smelt the new year’s bulbs grow 
You are wide and long and high and deep
You branch and root and wake and sleep
You are old and young and far and near
You are there and there and there
          and here

my photo

This was the first poem I wrote for NaPo last month—it’s a little ditty and it makes me happy. And that’s rather a miracle for this spring because NaPo was hard for me this year. Normally I get into it the first few weeks, flush with inspiration and the novelty of a challenge, and then it wears off like artistic Advil and I hit a slump mid-month where I feel like I’ve written certain themes to death and I have no remaining creative spark left in me. And then I’ll explore different wacky ideas and the muse will return and I’ll end the month with a motley assortment of poems, most so-so, a good bunch of crap, and a handful of poems I feel good about.

This month? After the poem above I stumbled along, feeling the drought of inspiration far earlier in the month than normal, and while I finally did scratch out a few drafts that have promise in the last few days, overall everything felt hard and unsatisfying. I feel like I’m in between styles or voices, and writing this month felt like stumbling around in the dark, searching for a window with my hands.

I don’t think I found the window.

I’m not sure where my poetry is at, I’m not sure what’s brewing, what my writing is becoming. Fortunately I’ve been at this long enough that I know I don’t need to do anything—except keep writing. I don’t need to analyze how my writing is changing or force it to be something. I can imitate other poets, I can play around, I can keep a regular practice. I can write in faith until the as-yet-unformed substance takes shape and emerges from the chaotic waters within me …

So maybe I’m being dramatic—maybe I’m just in a rut. But I felt like I was trying to say things I’m not ready to say, or saying them in a style that I’ve not yet mastered. I didn’t get the same kind of catharsis that I usually get from journaling my thoughts and feelings through NaPo, which is not exactly the point of the practice but a benefit I’ve come to expect. I also had some intense anxiety the second half of this month but despite all of that, I did end the month with thirty new poems. That’s victory.

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In Other Words…

I’m so honored that an essay of mine, “I Found God in the Rosebushes,” was published in the newest Vessels of Light journal, Resurgam. It’s a beautiful collection of poetry and essays celebrating resurrection, light and growth from dark places and seasons. I so value this journal’s commitment to both facing darkness (mental health, physical challenges, spiritual pain, etc.) without giving it the last word—resurgam is Latin for “I will rise again.” The essay I shared is a reflection on my experience of wrestling with God through chronic pain. Here’s a snippet:

I sit on the edge of my soft bed and stare out the window at sweet swaths of wisteria and contemplate the bleakness of my life.

In the back of my throat is that post-cry stickiness, and I finally say out loud what the storm of my weeping has brought me to:

“Really, what I'm most scared of is You.”

I feel emptied once I say it, totally spent, the way I used to feel after a good workout. Back before pain started pulling the carpet of my life out from under my feet and unraveling it before my eyes.

Goodreads (book reviews) 📚

It’s been awhile since I’ve updated these!

• The Last Song of the World by Joseph Fasano | 3 stars

  • Poetry collection with some amazing gems (like “For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper”); 3 stars because the images and themes started to feel redundant

• Adam: God’s Beloved by Henri Nouwen | 5 stars

  • Beautiful, brief book about Nouwen’s relationship with Adam, a man with severe disabilities, and how Adam’s life reflects Jesus’s, and how our limitations can lead us into belovedness

• The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis | 4 stars

  • Inside the 2008 financial crisis and the people who predicted it; funny, fascinating, sobering, horrifying (language warning)

• You Are a Sacred Place: Visual Poems for Living in Climate Crisis by Madeleine Jubilee Saito | 5 stars

  • Visual poems in comicbook format with watercolor-style illustrations and sparse, piercing words that hold both despair and hope as we look at our shared, broken, God-breathed world

If you did NaPo last month, tell me how it went, even if you ended it with twenty poems, or five poems, or two! Here’s to the hope of spring.

to staying awake—

Aberdeen