my challenge to each of you

Times are hard for so many people right now. It's the economy. It's loneliness. It's the way that we don't get received in the ways we ache to be received. It's the way we're separated from the people we love. It's death. It's fire. It's so many things.

It's time to clean the spare room and dust off the tea set. It's time to overcome our fear of the phone. It's time to write the letters we've been waiting for months to write. It's time to get serious about encouraging each other.

Here is my challenge, to each of us: let us work hard on loving each other right now, on encouraging each other in extra and special ways. Bake cookies for someone. Give someone a hug. Do something small but extraordinary, even if it feels like it might put you out there just a little bit more than usual. Trust me, my friends, the people you know need this encouragement more than you think they do.

In honor of my challenge, I'm going to hold off posting on this blog for a little while. I want to use the extra time to do some things I need to do.

Here is a poem--I posted it just a few months ago--that I wrote. Keep going, beloved ones, keep going. You are beautiful and you are loved.


this one goes out

this one goes out to all my friends whose lives are messy,
who've got it all together, most of the time.
this one goes out to all the friends who've dipped one hand
in orange paint, and the other hand in purple, smeared it around, added some
speckled stones found stuck in crude oil--
and called it a life. those those who forget to wash their hair
for eight days straight and eat cheerios for supper; to those
who keep winging around the world like a remote-controlled airplane
with a two-year-old at the switch--because somewhere
some place it's got to be right, there has to be the
right slant of sunlight on the sea, with sailboats
decked and bobbing, peeling paint. someplace like that,
where we eat olives and cheese in long, drawn-out lunches,
there's got to be some peace.
this one is for the friends sleeping on basement library
floors, somehow not able to climb up the stairs;
for the ones who drown in nuance, who are trying to breathe
underneath the heavy water of birth,
heritage and tradition.
for those who forgot their passports at the border, forgot their crampons
for the snow, and can't peddle a bicycle to save their life.
we are all solitary, all hidden. it takes a lot of courage to sit down at the table,
wake up, listen. it takes courage to speak. this one goes out to my weary
friends, all my spider-like friends stringing webs from here to glory,
because that's what spiders do. the web gets ripped,
but look how the light snags on the threads, look how it glistens in the dark.