Option B

I just read an excerpt from Sheryl Sandberg’s new book Option B: Facing Adversity, BuildingResilience, and Finding Joy. In it she talks about how shocked she was by the number of friends who did not ask her how she was doing after the death of her husband: 

“I felt invisible, as if I were standing in front of them but they couldn’t see me. When someone shows up with a cast, we immediately inquire ‘What happened?’ If your life is shattered, we don’t.” 

She goes on to talk about the white elephant in the room that nobody wanted to touch. Isn’t it odd that folks – even our closest friends – are so uncomfortable in the presence of dramatic emotional pain and loss? Not knowing what to say, they say nothing, a fact that only leads to emotional distance, just what the person in pain does not need. Both sides need to reach out and lean in.

Billy Collins

I recently listened to a performance of Billy Collins reading a collection of his poems. Not all poets read their own poems well, but Collins's readings are superb, the cadence and tone of his voice a perfect vehicle for the poems on the page. Listening to his poems, it is no surprise to me that Collins is so wildly popular. His poems speak of the ordinary and the everyday in a new and often very ironic way that illicits laughter and delight. 

Humor is one of the most distinguishing characteristics of his poetry. He knows how to be both clear and mysterious, simple and profound. Whether he is spoofing love poems that pile on excessive metaphors on the beloved - as he does in "Litany," or describing the poignant vulnerability of a building ruined by an explosion - as he does in "Building With Its Face Blown Off," he is a master of his craft.

Clouds and Daffodils

I recently thought of Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" when I was watching all the cloud formations as I drove through New Mexico and Arizona. Of course, the poem is really about daffodils and memory, the clouds being simply a simile to describe the speaker's wandering: "lonely as a cloud." But I was glad to be reminded of daffodils, too, especially as winter gives way to spring this April. The daffodils in the poem are "sprightly" and "jocund'" as they "flutter in the breeze." 

As the speaker watches them, he has no idea how much joy they will bring him later, when he conjures them up in his memory and "dances with the daffodils."  So powerful is memory that it can reproduce a vivid scene from our past as though it were with us in the present: we experience not only the visual vista but also the emotional experience. 

Thirst

^{Thirst takes many forms, such as the physical thirst for water or the emotional thirst for love. There are also spiritual thirsts, which long to be quenched, as Mary Oliver reminds us in her poem.}

Thirst by Mary Oliver

Another morning and I wake with thirst


for the goodness I do not have.

I walk
out to the pond and all the way God has


given us such beautiful lessons.

Oh Lord,
I was never a quick scholar but sulked

and hunched over my books past the
hour

and the bell; grant me, in your
mercy, a little more time.

Love for the
earth and love for you are having such a
long conversation in my heart.

Who
knows what will finally happen or
where I will be sent, yet already I have
given a great many things

away, expecting to be told to pack nothing,

except the
prayers which, with this thirst,

I am
slowly learning.