Hi there.
It’s been a minute — and by a minute, I mean a few weeks. So before I get to this week’s poem, allow me to tell you what’s been growing and digesting in my world.
With the weather rapidly warming, I’ve been offering more private foraging tours in Portland, not to mention a lecture at the Eugene Public Library.
It’s been invigorating to share my knowledge and delight in the beauty of springtime with guests, providing valuable motivation for me to get further from my treadmill of to-dos and closer to the grounding support of Mother Earth. Some of the questions and feedback I’ve gotten will certainly inform foraging-related posts on here in the coming months.
Interested in booking a live foraging tour, lecture, or workshop? Message me to learn more.
As well as offering spring foraging tours and lectures, my creative energy has been locked into finishing my first attempt at a full-length poetry book, titled Breakup Flavors, to submit to contests at the end of April. Meeting this self-imposed goal entailed a lot of stress and late nights, but I’m glad I did, because it forced me to release perfectionism and forge onward despite the inevitable doubts that accompany the creative process.
Finishing this draft feels especially monumental as a culmination of the intense process of grief and transformation I’ve undergone in the past two years, from leaving my marriage, traveling in Costa Rica and Nicaragua, unexpectedly becoming a father, and relocating to Portland.
Although these shifts have been painful at times, processing it through art and story has helped me makes sense of it all, and thus evolve harmoniously into a new place, new relationships, and a new identity. In other words, I’ve been making sense of the changes, as well as accepting the parts that don’t make sense — not yet, anyway.
One of the things I love most about poetry is how it can evoke both the clarity and confusion of the private meaning-making we all engage in daily. Whether moments of inexplicable ecstasy, struggle, loneliness, joy, beauty—poetry encompasses it all. It makes room for the unpleasant, the ugly, the controversial, in forms that may feel more palatable for public consumption than everyday small talk.
By processing this loss through poetry, I’ve been able not only to go through it, but to connect more deeply with others who have experienced similar losses. I feel closer to the reality of being alive and being human, which entails moving through losses that can feel, at our lowest points, absolutely debilitating.
In retrospect, this was also the kind of fertile darkness that gave rise to the poems in my first collection, Ego Killers (available for order through Lulu.com). Written mostly in 2020 or 2021, they focus on the dissolution and rewriting of old concepts of identity or divinity through a spiritual awakening in isolation.
Which brings me to today’s poem. Even at those lowest points, we always have a choice. While we may be subject to the whims of our bodies and the systems we live in, we choose how we respond to them. We can choose to be grateful, to be kind, to seek meaning, to forgive, to be happy, to focus on the beauty that’s in front of us rather than the fear of what’s to come or the sorrow for what’s gone.
In the times we live in, there’s constant reason to worry. There’s constant reason to protest and take action against rampant prejudice and injustice. Though we’re surrounded by evidence of the harms humans can do, inundated by news of man’s inhumanity to man — worsening under the USA’s ongoing fascist takeover — I choose to seek the beauty around me every day, to feel kinship with the people I pass on the street or work alongside in coffee shops and libraries, to stop and smell the flowers or harvest and eat the weeds.
This is a poem about how in times of fear and uncertainty, that base level of kindness is not irrelevant, but more essential than ever. Thank you for following along and reading my poetry.
Being happy is a radical act; not just to all those who insist on seriousness, the seriousness of this time or that issue, without a shred of sacredness to separate it from the rest; or to all whose dourness justifies itself as a snake eating its own tail, but to yourself. To smile at a stranger who doesn't smile first? To say thank you or you're welcome like you mean it? To stop and smell the flowers by the side of the freeway? To answer how are you like you've never been asked? To aspire to love all when you’ve read the news about the greedy and miserable? Through all the dread and sadness and fear and anger and overwhelm and despair that's piled up over the years, that gains purchase in your heart in the interest of protection, could you still dare to conjure a safety for yourself in the arms or eyes of another? Do you dare to connect the old-fashioned way? To know the reasons for sadness, the needs to stay busy, but still stop for a moment and be happy?