A Three-Dimensioned Life
A poetics of reality
Weekend Exhale is a slice of creative margin and embodied attention. You’ll find bits of poetry, discussions of art, and embodied practices that keep me centered and living slowly in a culture that often pulls the other direction. If this work resonates with you, please consider becoming a subscriber. Or you can buy me a coffee. I’m so glad you’re here.
I arrived at one of my favorite local bookstores yesterday with all my most earnest writerly intentions in tow: I’ll get a cup of hot tea, I thought, write for a while, maybe apply for a residency I’ve been considering. I arrived wearing yoga pants with dog hair stuck to them, on the heels of a morning during which I pried my boys apart from near-fist fights more times than I could count.
As I searched the bookstore for a place to park my laptop and bag, I noticed loads of people handwriting letters. Turns out, our local chapter of the ACLU had gathered to write holiday cards to men on death row.
These were mothers and sisters and aunties and cousins—and folks (mostly women) who had no tie to the men on death row other than shared humanity. I heard them encouraging each other, saying things like, “We’ll keep praying, we’ll keep working. They (the powers that be) will fight us, but we’ll keep fighting, too.”
I so often want the creative and contemplative life to transport me somewhere more tidy and ethereal than the real world ever is. As far as I can tell, I learned this tendency in my early days of personal “quiet time,” when I’d get everything in my apartment just so before sitting down for a fidgety and often frustrating session of prayer.
But life is both death row and poetry. Always both.
You know the lesson here. As much as I (consciously or subconsciously) seek to insulate myself from life’s extremes, the harshest and most miraculous points of reality always find a way to startle me to attention.
It’s my job, when these startlements come, to heed them.
The cold had worked its way thoroughly through the air, into the wood frame of our 100-year-old windows. I was rushing to get myself and my kids out the door, some day in the bluish blur of January or February. One of those mornings when the kids’ socks didn’t fit right and we couldn’t find a water bottle and all my underwear was dirty. I remember getting my boys strapped into the car and running back into the house to grab something I forgot, huffing all the way.
Outside, an orange streak, a flicker of movement. In the bush just beyond our window, a blush of robins had perched, nearly all faced toward me. They weren’t looking at me (of course they weren’t), but I swear it felt like they could be. Like they were reminding me, do you really need to be so huffy about your good and beautiful life?
I’m writing of minor annoyances. But there’s a posture here that has helped me with life’s larger griefs, too. Glennon Doyle said it well when she spoke to a mother whose son was very sick, in the midst of a long and arduous stay in a children’s hospital.
She said to the woman (and I’m paraphrasing here, because I can’t for the life of me find the original reference): “I know sitting beside your sick child doesn’t feel good or right or beautiful or meaningful at all. It’s not fair. But does it feel true? Does it feel human?”
I’ve carried that question with me since. I can’t assign any sort of meaning to suffering, of the children’s hospital sort or the minor grief sort. But I can say that a woman accompanying her son as he fights for his life feels true. So does a group of women writing letters to inmates. It’s nonsensical—and so hard it hurts to look at it straight on—but it is what it means to be human.
The only way I know to write poetry is out of the material of my real life.
I can’t write in a void of intellectual theory. Instead, the material comes from a blush of robins, my grandmother’s hands in pastry dough, the weight of a sweaty toddler on my chest. It comes by way of church bells and protests, long walks and natural disasters. Entire ecosystems of glaciers and moss. Letters to prisoners.
Maybe someday I’ll ascend to some superior plane, where I can explore ideas without needing the immediacy of real-time, embodied inspiration. As it is, poetry only arrives on my doorstep by way of the five senses and three dimensions.
I find that poetry, like prayer, is the outgrowth of unmixed attention. I can’t enter the strange, dimensional territory of poetry when I’m busy dwelling in the flat world of pixels or insulated by tidy answers.
So I got a holiday card from the ACLU gal, and I did the only thing I knew to do. I wrote some bumbling, honest words. And I transcribed a poem on the back of the letter, “blessing the boats” by Lucille Clifton, in hopes that it might offer something like solidarity, dignity, and hope.
And with that, I’ll leave you with a poem about being startled by the world when everything’s on fire.
Limón wrote this poem for the Fifth National Climate Assessment. She wrote of blue-bellied lizards in light of the planet’s burning. The startlement comes, for the speaker, at the realization that “we were never at the circle’s center.” That humanity is but one expression of life on earth, not the epicenter of it.
The speaker arrives at this posture of startlement by way of the slithering, fluttering, buzzing natural world—and, perhaps, its steady diminishment. The lizards are disappearing. But they are still here. They can still startle us.
Startlement, by Ada Limón
It is a forgotten pleasure, the pleasure
of the unexpected blue-bellied lizard
skittering off his sun spot rock, the flicker
of an unknown bird by the bus stop.
To think, perhaps, we are not distinguishable
and therefore no loneliness can exist here.
Species to species in the same blue air, smoke—
wing flutter buzzing, a car horn coming.
So many unknown languages, to think we have
only honored this strange human tongue.
If you sit by the riverside, you see a culmination
of all things upstream. We know now,
we were never at the circle’s center, instead
all around us something is living or trying to live.
The world says, What we are becoming, we are
becoming together.
The world says, One type of dream has ended
and another has just begun.
The world says, Once we were separate,
and now we must move in unison.
From the beaver I recently witnessed crossing a four-lane highway, to the men on death row awaiting pardon from the powers that be, “all around us something is living or trying to live.”
Of course, we already know we can’t solve all the world’s problems. Not alone, anyway. But when I feel hopelessness start to build, I know this is the work I can do: the work of seeing what’s in front of me. Offering my attention. A willingness to be startled by all the dimensions of reality—impossibly good and impossibly hard, in both serenity and struggle.
The only way forward is, as Limón says, “in unison.” All of us, together.
For further reading:
If you happen to be local in OK, you can learn more and get involved with the ACLU’s work here.
Here is a virtual art gallery by incarcerated and formerly incarcerated artists.
This book by Suleika Jaouad is one of the best, in my opinion, on holding two contradictory truths in the same palm.
Lucile Clifton is one of my favorites. I hadn't read that one, though. It's lovely!
Your writing is a reminder that life is always simultaneously fragile, chaotic, and miraculous. Interesting how you honour both the ordinary moments, yoga pants, forgotten socks, the weight of a toddler,and the extraordinary, like letters to men on death row or glimpses of robins in the cold. There’s a sacredness in your attention, a willingness to be startled by the world as it really is. Reading this feels like being invited into a practice of presence, of noticing the layers of life that are easy to overlook, and finding connection and care in them.