To Breathe

Poem + Prompt

To Breathe

Thank you to the glimpse of blue
through the branches through my window.

Thank you, eyes,
pulling in world in a weave–
words colors pixels.

Thank you, ears,
you seashells, filling
with waves, roaring song. 
 
Thank you, legs, 
still working, still able to walk me
to woods where I stand, neck
tilted, laugh my thanks to angles
of reprieve.

Thank you, precarity,
naked and near, my need
laid bare, 
body
laid bare,
soft, mortal, animal thing, 

woundable
and therefore always wounded.
I am fallible
and therefore always
freshly wrong. 
 
I know less, it seems, every year.
Certainty, that cliff, erodes to sea.
Each calendar hung 
is salty bewilderment,
an ocean of questions,
new gashes like gills. 

The most reliable way to (temporarily) relieve the pain in my neck/shoulder/arm is to stand with my legs wide apart, hinge from the hips, and fold so that my neck and head hang loose. It turns out this a great way to view the sky—especially when you can’t tip your neck up or lie on your back. I took this picture while hanging upside down, looking through the window of my legs. Thank you, angles of reprieve!

The Prompt

January, for me personally, has been a month of gashes. I am trusting that I will learn to breathe through them in time. For the world, it has been a month of gashes, too. I see so many people taking deep, creative, courageous breathes in and out—exhaling goodness into the chaos and cruelty. And I see people holding their breath—because of course! What a natural reaction when things are hard and scary.

I truly believe that, in time, our gashes can become gills, our wounds can awaken our deepest compassion, and constraint can catalyze our wildest creativity. We need that creativity right now, in every facet of our lives and every aching corner of our world.

I am sorry that I’ve been a little slow to get to this post. I’m still dealing with pain, numbness, tingling, and weakness on the right side of my body, and the MRI results aren’t what I was hoping for, so this may drag on for some time yet. I’ll still be here, and I’ll still aim to post once a week, but that’s a soft aim for now.

I’m going to offer you a really odd prompt for today. It’s an idea that came into my mind when I was having my cervical MRI. Lying on my back causes excruciating pain (thankfully, this is getting better), and so it was very difficult to get through the imaging. The tech told me it would take 16 minutes and gave me a button I could press if I needed to come out. Just make it to eight minutes, I told myself, then you can always come out and take a break. It took everything I had (even with an assist from benzos) to just keep breathing and hold mostly still and not push that button. But right around what was likely the halfway point, just as I was getting ready to cave and press the button, I pictured a vast hole opening up along my shoulder and back, like all of my pain was just cut out of me. And then I pictured my loved ones with holes of their own—a hole through my son’s aching knee, a hole through my friend’s injured finger, a hole through an anxious mind, a hole through a breaking heart. I imagined the whole of us, strung together like beads on a vast necklace and hung around the neck of the earth. Our wounds are what held us together. This image carried me through the rest of the MRI. I didn’t press the button after all.

You might find this image macabre. Or you might find it beautiful. Or maybe both. But if you’d like a prompt to play with today, then I invite you into the first part of that strange visualization. If there were a hole through the most aching, pained part of you, where would that be?

What about the people around you? Your family, your dearest friends, your coworkers? What about the stranger you pass in the grocery store? What about the stranger who offends you on the Internet?

What hurts? And what meaning—or lack thereof—do you see in this hurt? How do our individual hurts relate to one another? How are our private wounds connected—or not connected—to our collective ones?

If some aspect of this reflection and visualization holds heat or interest or emotion for you, follow that spark. Write your poem from there. If the idea of sharing your poem creates another spark for you, please do! I would be so delighted to read it in the comments thread. Or if you post one on Notes or to your own Substack, please tag me so I can read it there.

Thank you for being here, dears! I’m sending love from my wounds to yours.