In praise of light

We're half deep in the official month of giving thanks. Why limit our gratitude to a single day?

In my childhood, we wrote thank you notes year-round. Taught by my mother early on, offering appreciation was an exercise, both in writing and in the power and importance of gratitude.

As I got older, I was glad for the training. I knew that attending a party, or landing a job interview, required the same decorum: Express your gratitude, and right away.

It’s probably because I love to write — from grocery lists to customer service surveys — that I’ve always enjoyed penning thank you notes. And I’m nearly giddy when I am the recipient of the same.

The magic of gratitude is that the more you acknowledge good acts, gifts and intentions, the more you attract. Goodness multiplies. The more you appreciate, the more you see to appreciate.

The other night at the Young Writers Group (a weekly gathering of teen writers and adult mentors), I shared Barbara Crooker's “Praise Song," a poem I had carried with me for three years.

We went around the circle, each of us reading a line. As we focused on every single word before us, the air shifted, grew still and reverent. We seemed lifted in a sort of poetic praise. Indeed, we were in song.

We then used the poem as a prompt, writing on thankfulness for 15 minutes. The students were rapt. Pens flew fevered across paper. The results were strong.

And that just may be the beauty of gratitude. It encourages a single-minded focus while flooding the heart with rest and rejuvenation.

The next afternoon, after three days of high winds and fire-hose rains, the sun reappeared grand and sure. A full moon brought the drama of high tides, coupled with a clear blue sky.

From a damp sandy beach, I sat washed with appreciation. I wrote scores of thank you notes, and offered gratitude like candy, sweet and easy.

I praised the post office crew that keeps me connected to the busy world beyond this small town and big sea.

I praised volunteers who join me each week to read with the youngest and write with the oldest. Those whose greatest gift is the willingness to listen and to love.

I wrote more and more — notes sent and unsent — to teachers and mentors from years ago, to people who’ve come and gone, who touched me deep for just a bit, or stayed for years steady and sure. To those whose names I never knew but whose actions marked my heart. To those who have passed, and to those still finding their way.

As pelicans circled the churning shore, I sat hushed and still, praising soft light and long shadows, all it touches, all it reveals.

Praise Song

Barbara Crooker

Praise the light of late November,
the thin sunlight that goes deep in the bones.
Praise the crows chattering in the oak trees;
though they are clothed in night, they do not
despair. Praise what little there's left:
the small boats of milkweed pods, husks, hulls,
shells, the architecture of trees. Praise the meadow
of dried weeds: yarrow, goldenrod, chicory,
the remains of summer. Praise the blue sky
that hasn't cracked yet. Praise the sun slipping down
behind the beechnuts, praise the quilt of leaves
that covers the grass: Scarlet Oak, Sweet Gum,
Sugar Maple. Though darkness gathers, praise our crazy
fallen world; it's all we have, and it's never enough.

— from Radiance, 2005, published by Word Press

From the pens of babes

We've had over a week of post-election reflection, analysis and punditry. Now, Max Beaulieu, 8, of Seattle, Washington, offers his election night report:

Secrets

This and more at Post Secret, a simple art project that began four years ago with a collection of anonymously decorated postcards revealing secrets never told. The idea -- and the catharsis -- proved so powerful that secrets now fill several hefty volumes, and a wildly popular website that is updated weekly.

Applause at the intersection

Eager to drive in the traffic of creative space, I am giddy with the intersection of art and words at Action Poetry.

Simple and brilliant, the website features 11 poems written and read by Billy Collins, with each poem paired with a short, animated film.

A prolific writer and a former U.S. Poet Laureate, Collins is considered one of the nation’s most ‘accessible’ (code: he writes poems that are easy to enter, understand and enjoy) poets.

Produced in 2007, the animated poems were initially intended as filler between programs on the Sundance Channel. To that end, advertising powerhouse J. Walter Thompson commissioned a variety of artists who created a blend of wry, amusing and unexpectedly touching poems-on-film.

As with Poetry in Motion (the New York program that posts poems on subways and buses) and Poem in Your Pocket Day (celebrating National Poetry Month), Action Poetry shows what happens when words climb out of books to lift off the page and soar into a larger world.

Poetry lives in the everyday — and what a beauty when it emerges in such unexpected ways.

Yes and No

Simple questions can reap the most conflicted answers.

The other day a friend who is contemplating a cross country
move asked if I enjoyed living on the ocean's rim. The question
spun in my head for days before this answer emerged:

From the Oregon Coast, in answer to her inquiry

When she asks how I like living on the edge of the earth,
I do not answer right away. On the third dawn, rain arrives,
steady and firm, wears me awake. I cocoon in bed.
In the dark hours, I say cocoon. I make it mean that I am
happy and satisfied in this warm bed with its thick blanket.
But my cold feet want to burrow in familiar softness,
want to know a morning without socks.

I have turned inside myself.

In these four years on the basalt line, I know variations
of mold, beyond the fuzz of overgrown cheese, the kind
of insistent dank that coats every corner, eats every crevice.
And mildew. My sense of smell as strong as sight. The sour
milk of old homes, the odor of wet wood and dirty secrets.

When she asks, I know she wants hope and harmony and the
possibility of every new thing. I know. I asked, too.
On my first visit, I sat under an airbrushed sky, sated on a
soft beach shore. I grew tall, lithe, lean.
Here, I said, I will be a better person.
I did not know irony or hesitation.
Every pore bore happiness.

When she asks, I am lying on the couch,
curled over hot coffee. The air is heavy as stone.
Hundreds of gulls float like confetti across a static sky.

I am fixed, haunted with sadness or fear or illness,
I’m not sure which, and I write letters to friends I no longer
know. My husband brings flowers and rubs a calloused hand
over my lined, tired face. Without words or pause, he is trying
to erase what we don’t understand. And I am eating peanuts
by the bowl, and moaning with regret. And I am driving the
car and crying because it is only in motion that I feel progress,
and only in progress that I remember to breathe, and though I
clutch the inhaler in my sweaty palm, this is not an asthma attack
because attack implies sudden and for weeks my throat closes
around words, my lungs grasp for air.

I call it malaise because with this word, like cocoon, my mouth
goes soft and southern and I am reborn gracious, relaxing on a
wraparound porch, talking in a drawl that pulls us in a warm,
full circle.

When she asks, I pause, remind myself that we chose this place.
To leave family and friends and jobs and cities and movies and
restaurants and all that seemed too big, too much, too pressing.
All of it crushing us into small, petty people with small, petty
gripes about heat waves and barking dogs and freeways clogged.

When I answer, I will remember how we invited this adventure,
the Uhaul packed tight, our smiles wide and sure as we drove
from everything safe and good and right. We were exploring
what we didn’t know, in a place that would ebb and flow,
test and reward.

I will tell her of light on waves, after days of rain
how the sun meets the shore, breaks me down and apart,
releases something like hope.

And everything is green and fresh and ferns and quiet.
Vast.
I will offer this: Words cannot explain the beauty
but I keep trying in letters, in lines like this,
in the way I return his grip, grateful, saying,
Yes, I am blue in this bigness.

And still, and still, again and again,
though I doubt and forget,
the sky opens, gulls circle and land,
my heart flutters and expands.

— Drew Myron