Updates and poems on getting through it

Whatever your specific version of it is.

I’m sharing below a list of things (notes from lurking, memos from conversations, observations made in crowds and alone in therapy, poems that made me weep) from the past months. I hope they give you something/ the same things they’ve been giving me, which is hope — tiny little shoots and buds, green, curling fists that reach for the sky and help me reach for tomorrow when today feels hard.

1. Vow - Emily Jungmin Moon
I love you: I don’t know how else to begin.
How we began, though, was almost as if
it were already written. The details of how we arrived
at each other, to say, I love you, even as we fall asleep
To let each other’s name be the first sound
we utter each morning, can only be a gift of careful construction
a design of an elsewhere where we were already together.
Say nothing, you make me want to live
More menaingfully. The world is wild, beautiful
and terrifying, and everywhere we turn, a new atrocity.
Then I close my eyes, and picture joy.
Among other things, there is this day. Among faces,
there is yours. And I am no longer afraid.

2. Emergent Strategy - Adrienne Marie Brown
Small is good, small is all (The large is a reflection of the small)
Change is constant (Be like water)
There is always enough time for the right work.
There is a conversation in the room that only these people at this moment can have. Find it.
Never a failure, always a lesson
Trust the People (If you trust the people, they become trustworthy)
Move at the speed of trust
Focus on critical connections more than critical mass—build the resilience by building the relationships
Less prep, more presence
What you pay attention to grows

3. Love Poem With Apologies for My Appearance - Ada Limón
Sometimes, I think you get the worst
of me. The much-loved loose forest green
sweat pants, the long bra-less days, hair
knotted and uncivilized, a shadowed brow
where devilish thoughts do their hoofed
dance on the brain. I’d like to say this means
I love you, the stained white cotton t-shirt,
the tears, pistachio shells, the mess of orange
peels on my desk, but it’s different than that.
I move in this house with you, the way I move
in my mind, unencumbered by beauty’s cage.
I do like i do in the tall grass, more animal-me
than much else. I’m wrong, it is that i love you,
but it’s more that when you say it back, lights
out, a cold wind through the curtains, for maybe
the first time in my life, I believe it.


More updates soon x

Nish