Conversations With Friends

Conversations With Friends

Today I talked with starfish
and with seaside cliffs,
who told me 
not to be afraid—
not even to be afraid
of being afraid,

and I know they’ve been hit
with some shit in their days,
over and over
the pounding of waves.
Salt blasts in.
Salt slips away.

Can I shine like basalt
and stay,
stay,
stay?

The Prompt

We live in a perpetual high tide of information—wave after wave of news breaking against our heads and hearts. Wave after wave of change breaking against our heads and hearts and against the lives and bodies of so many members of of our society—trans and non-binary folks, immigrants, and members of other already-marginalized groups. I want to show up. I want to be an ally and friend. I want to do the right thing in every moment. I also know that I can’t be on all the time. Even seaside cliffs are offered a reprieve from the strongest swells. We need low tides, too. This reality is an ever-shifting edge at which I am trying to grow. I am trying to cultivate a sustainable balance between absorbing information, witnessing suffering, taking action, and leaning into rest, beauty, connection, and joy. How are you navigating this? For me, it requires daily adjustments and tenderness and attention—but then, our growth edges often do, don’t they?

What growth are you leaning into—or feeling dragged into—at this moment? When you scan the landscape of your life, where is the leading edge of your own becoming? Where do you feel the plates shifting, new mountains rising, new spaces opening, new horizons appearing? If you think of life as a conversation, how is your participation shifting in this moment? How do you hope it might shift still?

If you would like a prompt to play with today, then I invite you to contemplate those questions. If you can, kindly, compassionately, curiously, playfully identify an area in which you are growing or trying to grow. (If you can’t muster kindness toward your growth edge, then maybe you can be gentle, at least, with that inner brute, who brandishes a dagger and club at your every imperfection—poor, militant thing.)

Carry whatever awareness you land in with you through your day—not with the goal of buckling down and achieving perfection but rather with an intention to simply notice. Notice the ways you’re growing. Notice the ways you’re feeling challenged. Be aware of the thoughts this gives rise to and of where it all sits in your body. Be aware, if you’d like, of the way this stretches back in your own history or stretches out and connects with broader systems or societal trends. How does this desire for change or growth link you with the whole of the human world? Might it connect you with the more-than=human world, too?

Watch for metaphors around you. What would a cliff have to say about your particular growth edge? What would a bird say? What strange parallels might appear in your coffee mug, your laptop keys, or your next door neighbor’s dog? Get weird, friends, if you aren’t weird already.

One of the weird (and delightful) ways I’m playing around with building more intentionality in my news consumption is by checking in with an accountability partner. I’m trying to curb the habit of reflexively opening the news on my phone in moments when I don’t actually have the time or bandwidth to read (e.g. when all I’m going to do is doom scroll headlines). This repetitive headline browsing drains me of energy that could be used to actually become more informed or actually take action or actually connect with a neighbor or friend. My accountability buddy, the amazing Keith Aron, came up with the brilliant idea of assigning haikus as penance when I slip up. It turns out my thumbs have minds of their own and without any awareness from my skull brain, they can flip open The New York Times, just like that. So yesterday, I had to write two haikus. Here’s one of them:

Forgive me, Father
for I have sinned with my thumbs 
dopamine snacks yum

Keith assured me I’m forgiven. The miracle of this playful form of accountability is that instead of wrestling with myself (and my own brain chemistry), I’m treating myself to something far better than the chemical cocktail that doom-scrolling offers up. Every time I “fail,” the assigned penance demands that I redirect my energy to awareness, creativity, and connection instead. This injects play and joy into the process. When I reflexively opened the news for a second time yesterday, I burst into laughter, immediately shut it, and began crafting another haiku. It has me wondering how else we might play our way toward progress—even when faced with so much very big and very bad shit.

So, dear friends, now that I’ve droned on and on, here is the prompt: take your reflections and experiences and ideas based on what I’ve offered above, and find whatever poem is gleaming in the glorious muck of your own humanness. If you’d like to write your own haiku of penance, have at it! If something else bubbles up for you, go there. Follow your heart, not mine. But know that I’m right here being a never-perfect, ever-growing human alongside you. The world feels so ripped apart at the moment. And yet we’re all still the same stardust, still just atoms recycling ourselves over and over again, still just one giant organism (seemingly suffering from an autoimmune disease). I want, above all else, to show up to that conversation.

I look forward to reading your poems and comments! Thank you for the generosity, kindness, uniqueness, and creativity you bring to this space.

P.S. Have I mentioned before that I’m a life coach? I know that term makes some people run for the hills. When I use it, what I mean is that I hold space for people as they tap into their own deepest wisdom, and then I support them in watering it, so that it can bloom more fully into this shared conversation we call life. I do plenty of traditional let’s-get-together-on-zoom-and-talk sessions, but my favorite way to work with clients involves going “together” (over the phone) into green space, then weaving guided forest bathing into the coaching session so that we can draw on the healing, clarifying, connective powers that nature offers up. I currently have space for two new clients. If that’s something that interests you, send me a DM or go take a peek at my website!