twelve.
This newsletter is here to connect you to your five senses and your grief at times when life and death make no sense. Consider it an imperfect “grounding exercise” for the month.
I never really thought about death as a gesture because I really couldn’t imagine death having a form or conscience. I wouldn’t allow it to be grace-giving. Wouldn’t find beauty or whimsy or magic or grace in a bringer of great pain.
Death, when I had the capacity to conceptualize it, was an idea, force, phenomena, clock, or breath’s end. An act of randomness, ill will, sickness, even evil.
Tuesday put that into question — a quiet film that makes death’s harbinger a frayed parrot. Neither majestic nor menacing, death the parrot alights from dying person to dying person, witnessing their remaining living moments before releasing them from life, and the pain of dying, with the passing of a wing. The parrot’s act is performed with gentleness and necessity. Taking dying beings’ fear, disdain, rejection with animal-like confusion, curiosity, acceptance, and forgiveness.
The parrot’s winged farewell is not so different from the closing of a person’s eyes after they’ve died — you know, the soul’s windows gone dark. But watching it performed again and again by the bird, I began seeing the grace such an act granted: remaining close but allowing privacy, saying nothing (not judging or criticizing or asking more of a person) but seeing plainly, validating a life with the faith it is lived past its end.
It made me reluctantly consider what form or face would I give death. A beloved animal? A hero or a god? Would I close my eyes and find myself underwater? Would I find myself climbing the limbs of a tree? Ideas didn’t come naturally. But slowly, creative ideas about dying, more beautiful ways to imagine what comes next, a new, softer definition for “end” came forward. Dreams I’ve had, but have overlooked. Wishes and hopes, too.
At a reading, poet, Li-Young Lee, remarked that poetry is spoken with outward breath. A dying breath. Meaning we make what we can of the life passing through us: art in all its forms.
I see with the help of friends that remind me to keep looking. I smell the reliable hug of coffee, a saving grace in uncertain times. I taste the dry, loose, dirt kicked up from the trails I love. I hear discord and despair, but I listen for the parts that remain hopeful, willing to fight. I feel compassion. I grieve and I remember it is never weak to hold a candle of faith.
SEE - Tuesday the movie
Not a perfect film. As a whole it meanders or plods. But its unique. Magical. And Julia Louis-Dreyfus. So, worth a try.
FEEL - Poetry Clinic
Ask a poet in resident a question or describe a situation. They’ll scribe an answer, a salve for pains, yearnings, troubles, wounds, life events, transitions, and celebrations. A sort of Miss lonely hearts for the poetry inclined. Just really special.
HEAR - Too Many Birds - Bill Callahan
This song has been a surprising constant through illnesses, losses, and grief. Sometimes sob inducing, sometimes peaceful, its simple observation always hits. Between fall and flight, heartbreak and hope, the song beats and fights to the last line.
TASTE - Langston Hughes
GRIEVE - For Comrades Who Ask What is To Be Done?
