With Thanks

and iridescent wonder

poem | letter | prompt

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For the New Year, 1981
by Denise Levertov

I have a small grain of hope—
one small crystal that gleams
clear colors out of transparency.

I need more.

I break off a fragment
to send you.

Please take
this grain of a grain of hope
so that mine won’t shrink.

Please share your fragment
so that yours will grow.

Only so, by division,
will hope increase,

like a clump of irises, which will cease to flower
unless you distribute
the clustered roots, unlikely source—
clumsy and earth-covered—
of grace.

from Making Peace, New Directions Publishing, 2006

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Dear Friends,

I am grateful for your presence here with me and your eyes, hearts and minds that open to poetry. Thank you for connecting and supporting my humble river of words. Thank you for sharing meaning. Thank you for opening my emails and gracing me with the gift of your attention. Thank you for living in our strange, shadowed times and finding ways to extend your abundance to others. Thank you to my paid subscribers, who give me a reason to get up and write ~ the best part of my life.

I found myself in silence in December: in retreat, to center. Thank you for granting me the space and time for existing in the quiet depth of the Breathing Field.

Please let me know if you’re interested in stories about now being a care partner for my charming 84 year old mother. It happened suddenly and stories abound. Are you interested in them, or would you like to keep this email coming as only poetry and writing prompts? Please weigh in; I value your opinion. (I will always include poetry.)

My goal is to make her life as full of wonder as she made mine as a child, without any of the fear that pervaded our house. I love to facilitate her flights of fancy. Worm composting in a cattle trough! Care of her 18-year old cantankerous blue point Siamese cat! Planting her a palo verde and a ginko tree! Continuous conversation on every topic under the moon. Slowly, we’ve gotten the use of her right arm back. Her right hand is now opening a few inches, with practice. She’d thought it was a lost cause, a blunt curled claw. Miracle! It now opens like a doodle bug uncurling from it’s ball.

In the morning, she waters every plant in the yard, even the weeds. She feeds her squirrels their sunflower seeds. They come in joyful leaps and hop along the fence to their array of food. She feeds the mourning doves and sparrows who have returned to the nest box on an 18-foot pole. She picks up all the sticks which have fallen from the pecan and magnolia trees in the night and adds them to the six-foot tall firefly incubation pile of brush near the live oak tree. We learned that fireflies need undisturbed leaves and brush to incubate their young for more than a year. She’ll arrange small altars of stones and icons and think about death and dying, a spiritual practice. She’ll come in with muddy hands to show me how fat her worms have gotten and how many babies they are having.

Daily, I cook our lunch and dinner, eat with her at the table with placemats and flowers; keep track of pills taken and day and night medicine schedules; do pain management (her 8 broken ribs are still fractured at odd angles). I’m helping sell her New Orleans home (at her request); helping her finish her divorce and property settlement (at her request); driving to her doctor’s appointments; making sure she puts in her hearing aids and wears her Apple watch that will call EMS if she falls again with her low bone density. On New Year’s Day, we will go on a polar bear plunge into the cold aquifer springs and take a boat ride through a tunnel of lights on Ladybird Lake.

I meet with writing coaching clients a few hours a day and sink deep into the bliss of my book editing work from ten p.m. to four a.m. while she sleeps and dreams in the next bedroom, her 18-year old cat’s head resting on her arm. I’m not good at time boundaries ~ I just want to make her life as happy as possible now, in her octagonal decade. It’s not always easy being the care partner 24/7 but those stories are at a lower volume than the wonder. This marvelous lady has her wit and her curious mind and is mobile, so she lives in service to Mother Earth.

(photo from our Christmas Day hike)

If you’re interested in this story in addition to poems and prompts, please let me know below. If you would like just to read the poems, art and prompts, please say so also. I won’t take offense; I would love the feedback. I am honored by your attention.

Happy New Year. The year ends but the moon is still growing fat and round on her own calendar. I hope you have ways to feel fresh air tomorrow, and leave behind anything that does not serve you well.

Blessings,

Abriel

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Top Art from Étienne-Louis Boullée’s design for Newton’s Cenotaph, 1784. Bottom art from Claude-Nicolas Ledoux’s book L’architecture considérée sous le rapport de l’art, des moeurs et de la législation (Architecture considered from the point of view of art, morals and legislation), 1804. Public domain.