#NewThisDay Writing From My Photo Stream
Crossing the meadow this morning, such big sky. It’s good to look up and think expansively. The leaves are just beginning their coloring and floating to earth and the river’s surface captures some too. Sun through the trees is so hopeful. What drama there is in our country today, what spectacle and conflict on tv. Distracting as the day’s politics are, I get so much done! I am fully present and engaged where I need to be: two IWWG committee meetings (via web), and a 90-minute coaching session on my book (also via web). Then, in the late afternoon, a second, much needed, long walk with both my daughters around the pond at Wellesley College on a cool fall afternoon - and we vent and we download and we sort out all we’re feeling and thinking; there is so much to unpack and evaluate and express with outrage. Our voices are loud on the path, we are heated up with passion over the Kavanaugh hearing and Christine Blasey-Ford’s testimony. It’s a relief to walk and be together, listening to each other. I keep imagining every man and woman, jogger and dog-walker is as preoccupied and fired up as we are. We miss our turn and have to take the long way around, and the dogs are leashed, but passing a crowd of geese on the beach of the pond, Charlie breaks free from my daughter’s grip on the leash and sprints toward the geese and they scatter and swim, he’s riling them up! and he doesn’t stop, he runs into the water, they are squawking and swimming as fast as they can, and he’s happy to chase them, and cause all this ruckus. He takes his sweet time swimming back. We are late now, but patient with him. Tonight, I have the pleasure of leading my Unity Farm workshop on writing from photos. Our time together is rich and deep, the writing is full of surprises and emotional depth. I open with an exercise in embodying a poem: we stand up, close our eyes, hear the poem read aloud. Feel it in our bodies. We open and close the windows of our rooms.
“My life was the size of my life.
Its rooms were room-sized,
its soul was the size of a soul.
In its background, mitochondria hummed,
above it sun, clouds, snow,
the transit of stars and planets.
It rode elevators, bullet trains,
various airplanes, a donkey.
It wore socks, shirts, its own ears and nose.
It ate, it slept, it opened
and closed its hands, its windows.
Others, I know, had lives larger.
Others, I know, had lives shorter.
The depth of lives, too, is different. . . ”
