Category: poetry

The Downside of Being Over-Educated

One of the major disadvantages of getting a Ph.D. in Literature is that any pure love of reading that may have led you to make the ridiculous choice to enter a Ph.D. program in the first place has been leached out of you by the time you have crawled through the desert of writing a dissertation.  You give your life to the process for years, and then you come to your dissertation defense, shriveled up like a frightened little prune, and when they tell you that you have “passed,” you skitter away, obsequious and relieved, most likely jobless, and vaguely aware that you should feel happier but clearly don’t.

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Project ‘Spread Cheer @ Work:’ A Disappointing Start

One of the books that has been, to steal a phrase from Jennifer’s comment on yesterday’s post, an oxygen mask for me lately is The Artist in the Office: How to Creatively Survive and Thrive Seven Days a Week (or AITO for those in the know) by Summer Pierre.  AITO started out as a handmade ‘zine, motivated, as I understand it, partly by boredom and frustration, and partly by the desire to speak to everyone who feels like they are living two lives: their “wage slave” life and their creative life: “Day after day, this is how it goes: You get up, go to work–and save your ‘real’ self for the cracks and corners of your off time.  Your 9-5 work might pay the bills, but if it’s not giving you an outlet for your pent-up creativity, it’s time to make a change” (from the back cover).  The ‘zine was a hit, and is now a real live book, available on Amazon and other real live book selling places.   

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Halfway There & Filled With Gratitude

Yesterday marked the halfway point of my “Radical Lent: a Poetic Approach to 40 Days in the Wilderness” Project.  As it is a project, and as I often remind my students of the importance of “early deliverables” that give you a chance to step back and ask yourself how things are going, I’ve decided to do that today.

Actually, I began this blog, From the Heart, in earnest on February 15th.  It was already lurking in my private cyberspace closet for a little while before then, but on February 15th, I took what felt like an audacious and presumptuous step, and asked people to consider subscribing to my blog.  Then I texted my sister to say that I felt sick.

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The (Real) Secret to Being Happy

Sometimes complete strangers say things that can change your whole life.  That is not what this post is about, though.  This post is about something that happened to me several years ago on a flight from Newark to Chicago, where I was sitting next to an older Asian man who, out of nowhere, turned to me and asked, “Do you want to know the secret to being happy?”  As I happened to be wondering exactly that thing at exactly that moment, I said yes, I would indeed like to know the secret to being happy.  I can still see him, silhouetted by that white above-the-clouds light that comes through the windows on planes.  I turned my body towards him, he raised his index finger and said, “There are three things.”  And that, my friends, is all she wrote.  I don’t remember what he told me.  I FORGOT whatever it was he said. 

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Why Balance is an Unhelpful Ideal (Unless You Are a Gymnast or a Tightrope Walker)

Whenever I see a flyer for a workshop or talk on “Work/Life Balance,” I get a very bad feeling in my chest and my head starts to hurt.  Unless there will be someone at the workshop with a clipboard and a sign-up sheet for volunteers to come over and dust my floorboards, cook dinner for my family, buy the batteries at Walgreens that I keep forgetting, or clean out the box of stuff from when I moved my office last December, I can’t think of a single good reason to attend.  
My bottom line belief on work/life balance is this–it’s a hoax, and a dangerous one at that.  But you don’t have to take my word for it.  Here’s David Whyte in his most recent book, The Three Marriages: Reexamining Work, Self and Relationship: “People find it hard to balance work with family, family with self, because it might not be a question of balance.  Some other dynamic is in play, something to do with a very human attempt at happiness that does not quantify different parts of life and then set them against one another.  We are collectively exhausted because of our inability to hold competing parts of ourselves together in a more integrated way.” 

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Arguing: Fun for the Whole Family!

When our friends Markus and Almut had their third child, we asked Markus how it was to go from being a family of four to a family a five.  He’s a Classics Scholar—insightful, deliberate, a little quirky with a pleasing neurotic edge.  “Well, it’s less…monolithic,” he said, making the shape of a column with his hands.  “Four is just so tight.  With five, there’s more movement.  It’s more dynamic.”  Then a bewildered look crossed his face.  “Sometimes,” he said slowly, “I try to keep them all in my head at the same time and I can’t.”

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The Antidote to Exhaustion

“‘Tell me about exhaustion,’ I said.

 He looked at me with an acute, searching, compassionate ferocity for the briefest of moments, as if trying to sum up the entirety of the situation and without missing a beat, as if he had been waiting all along, to say a life-changing thing to me. 

‘You know that the antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest?’

 ‘What is it, then?’

‘The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness‘”
(David Whyte, Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity, 132).

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Your Worst Fears Come True/”Everything is Going to Be Alright”

Good writers seem to know a lot about neuroses.  Anne Lamott, for example, is so exactly right when she describes her students’ fears about being writers because she  is smart, observant, and has experienced them all herself: “[They] want to know why they feel so crazy when they sit down to work, why they have these wonderful ideas and then they sit down and write one sentence and see with horror that it is a bad one, and then every major form of mental illness from which they suffer surfaces, leaping out of the water like trout—the delusions, hypochondria, the grandiosity, the self-loathing, the inability to track one thought to completion, even the hand-washing fixation, the Howard Hughes germ phobias. And especially, the paranoia” (Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life).

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New Week, New Month, Same Two Choices

Last night on the phone my dad reminded me of a priest who used to serve at the church I grew up in.  His name was Fr. Reginald.  He often gave these short, succinct homilies, with one main point that stayed with you because it wasn’t weighed down with a lot of extraneous rhetoric.

Today’s poem is like that.  Today is the start of a new week and a new month (and only three more months of winter here in the midwest!).  Yet this poem reminds us that in every moment, we have the same two choices–love or fear.  Despite the poem’s repetition of the words “there are” in each line, despite the insistence that love and fear are the only two states of being, you always have a choice about which to claim, to see, to believe.  This is not to imply that’s it’s an easy choice, because God knows, it isn’t.  Nor is fear a “bad” thing.  Without fear, there is no need for courage.  And luckily for us, no matter what, it’s a choice we get the chance to make, over and over again.

Love and Fear

There are only two feelings, Love and fear:
There are only two languages, Love and fear:
There are only two activities, Love and fear:
There are only two motives, two procedures,
two frameworks, two results, Love and fear,
Love and fear.

Michael Leunig (contemporary Australian cartoonist, philosopher, poet and artist)

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“God Says Yes To Me”* (& other brazen beliefs)

God Says Yes To Me

I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic
and she said yes
I asked her if it was okay to be short
and she said it sure is
I asked her if I could wear nail polish
or not wear nail polish
and she said honey
she calls me that sometimes
she said you can do just exactly
what you want to
Thanks God I said
And is it even okay if I don’t paragraph
my letters
Sweetcakes God said
who knows where she picked that up
what I’m telling you is
Yes Yes Yes

*Kaylin Haught, The Palm of your Hand, Tilbury House Publishers, 1995

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