Stranger things

On getting acquainted with our less familiar selves

So much tea this week!

Hello friend,

In last week’s post I mentioned how, here in Santa Fe, the March breeze signals the dreaded season of spring gusts, and just a day later—truly one day later!—the winds picked up so vehemently that the sky turned dense with dust, and every bit of untethered dried fauna seemed to blow across our patio. The wind also brought back a chill, so instead of daily walks with the dogs, this week Mark and I hunkered down inside with our cups of tea. Copious cups of tea. It was a kind of re-burrowing that I imagine Punxsutawney Phil resigns himself to after seeing his shadow. Six more weeks of bleakness—cue sad trombone.

Then I got a lovely invitation to join a “Writing into Wonder & Amazement” class, and I jumped at it. In the hour-long session, Sarah Kokernot, author of the Your Wild and Radiant Mind newsletter, led us through several writing exercises that got me paying attention to more than the shrieking wind. One of the exercises she described as a “poetry bath”—she read several poems and asked us to draw inspiration from them. I surprised myself when I wrote:

No one was watching the fireflies but me.

No one heard me calling, Come back! Come back!

No one could, my mouth was too small to release the prayer.

It stayed there, tickling my tongue, desperate to escape its prison of teeth and spit,

So I swallowed it, and the prayer became me.*