I was converted to myself. It was an insight born of nothing in particular, it just ... happened. I realised my instincts were sound, were very often right and needed to be paid attention to. Now that my sound odd to some but if, as a child and then as an adult, you learned to do what others wanted, say what others wanted to hear and swallowed their opinions about you, then such a revelation is a marvel. A quiet certainty, not dogmatic and not to be forced on others, but just a deeper inner, solidity that's arrived. I welcome it and wonder how life would have been if I'd been able to recognise and honour it earlier.
Pip and Padraig, what a gift to awaken to both of your thoughts this morning (and Padraig, your words about something not technically ‘forensically being true’ made me chuckle this morning!) - about two years ago, I placed Denton Welch’s words around “I vow to never squander me again” on my phone as a continuous reminder - Pip, your words are NOT odd, and we would be wise to sit with them - as a gay man, I have, since I was thirteen years old, either hid from my truth, or lived in apology for it - only in the past couple years, after getting sober and doing the work, am I able to even begin to sit with my vibrancy - thank you for reminding me to trust my conversion toward myself. This walk is quite extraordinary, eh…
I had seen the quote, screenshotted it, and added it as wallpaper as a constant reminder - I have years of practicing the opposite, so need the regular reminder!
Pip, this is quite beautiful... this conversion. It brings to mind Derek Walcott's poem, Love After Love... especially this bit: "Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart." Thank you so much for sharing!
I love this. Thank you for sharing. What you said about how you wonder what your life would have been like if you'd recognized it sooner made me think about all the necessary things we aren't taught in school or in church or in our families--life lessons like this one that can change our lives in big, yet quiet peaceful ways.
Doesn't sound odd at all. In fact, thank you for some resonance into myself. I'm not sure what would have been if you recognized and honored it earlier, but you certainly wouldn't have had this conversion, nor written this post. :)
yes, Pip! I have had the same experience, my friend. What a wonder to have finally arrived at this place, huh. I lament the time lost as well, but remind myself that too shaped me in meaningful ways. The conversion is felt stronger for all the time spend doing life, and being in my body the other way. Contrast is often where we feel things the strongest.
Pip wonders what if their appreciation of self and honoring their self had come earlier . . . but maybe all the experiences that led to the revelation were needed. None of those experiences wasted. All of them part of who Pip is today. All to be valued.
Hello and happiest Sunday all! Thank you, Pádraig, and for your poem too. I'm very much looking forward to the book.
Your description of Mary in her pale blue housecoat, her benediction offered to bishop and parishioner alike, is so vivid.
This is the first prompt that has given me pause. Usually I have a very quick response. Today I find myself returning to my earliest memories, to being rehomed at eight years old, and to that first, fragile turning toward a new family, open-hearted, uncertain, and yet, somewhat miraculously, willing. Perhaps the conversion I am struggling to express is an opening to trust...
Thank you for reminding me of that description of Mary. Yes! It was so vivid, so full. I worried that she wouldn't say the same words to the bishop that she did to everyone else and was relieved when she did. I wanted so badly for her to remain true to herself regardless of who she was talking with. She reminded me of Jesus.
My conversion took place in the predawn hours in a children’s hospital in Washington DC on the 7th morning waking up to machines beeping in my son’s room, waking up on the 7th morning of my son’s diagnosis of a terminal lung disease, waking up on the 7th morning of a new world that I needed to guide us—him, me, our family--through.
I knew on that 7th morning that *I* had to change. My conversion was led by a poem by Joy Harjo, For Calling the Spirit Back from Wandering the Earth in Its Human Feet, one that I was studying, so innocently, in the days before his diagnosis.
Suddenly, every word of that poem had meaning, had an echo, carried a wisdom that would guide my life. I woke up that morning, again crying, by also accepting that my life was forever changed and that I had to work with the change and not fight it. I had to find my place in the wind and rain and fury of the storm instead of fighting against it.
A line from Harjo’s poem sprang up in my mind repeatedly over those 7 days. That morning, I swiftly scribbled it down on a half sheet of scrap paper and taped it to the hospital window: “Watch your mind. Without training it might run away and leave your heart for the immense human feast set by the thieves of time.” That scrap remained for a month, during the rest of the hospital stay, and it followed us through subsequent hospital stays from Virginia, DC, to Pennsylvania.
When people asked about it, I shared its meaning for me. I had to live in this moment, the good, the bad, the beauty, and the horror of it. Nurses, doctors, hospice staff, they would write it down or take a picture of it. One doctor later told me that the line inspired her to leave her job in DC and move her family back home to the West coast to live near her parents. For me, it inspired me to let go of baggage from the past I was carrying, let go of this ideal life I was picturing for us in the future, and live each day to the fullest, to live like my son was dying, but living every day of it.
My son did not die. He received a double lung transplant. We’re living in the 5th year of his transplant, the 5th year which we were told repeatedly is the average life expectancy after a double lung transplant, but I am still living my converted life that keeps away the thieves of time.
Thank you for asking this question. I needed the reminder to write this down and further fortify my conversion. Even trying my best, living in the moment, those thieves can still grow loud.
PS: I'm so happy about your new book. I'm preordering it today.
Thank you Jackie. The poem is beautiful and how you have taken it to heart and allowed it to convert you is also beautiful. May you and your son continue to live with open hearts.
Your story reminded me of my moment of conversion. It was several months after my son died-- very suddenly, like a stroke of lightening that ended his life, shattered the rest of us. One afternoon while waiting for unwanted visitors to arrive I felt like I just couldn't go on, that I couldn't stay inside my skin. I heard a voice in my head that I swear was not my voice. It said, "Just sit down and breathe." It said that three times. I sat down. I breathed. I found I could continue to take the next breath. I could survive. I could even, eventually, learn to live again, learn to watch and train my mind and live more from my heart.
Kathryn, your story is a gift to me. Thank you for sharing it. Thank you for all of it, including the reminder that you could live again, train your mind and live more from the heart. What you shared so graciously here is from your heart, and I feel it. Some days are hard for me, when an uncertain future tries to call to me, where fear and ego try to take root. But it's stories like yours that always bring me back to the present, to this moment with my son very much here. I'm part of a support group for families with kids who have the same disease my son had before his double lung transplant. In the 7 years I've been a member, we've lost so many children to the diesease. Some of the parents leave the group, staying is too painful, and I understand that. Some of the parents stay, and they share their seasons of grief with us. That's a gift, a heartbreaking, selfless, never can say thank you enough, gift. Just like your comment. Sending you HUGS. I'm sorry you lost your son. I wish I had better words.
Your words moved through me like weather -- one of those sudden shifts in the sky where the light changes and you realize you're witnessing a truth that has been quietly gathering for years. Thank you for sharing the story of your conversion with such clarity, ferocity, and tenderness.
The way you describe those seven mornings -- each one a deeper descent into a world you never asked to enter, yet stepped into with a mother's unflinching devotion -- feels like its own kind of scripture. Not the kind written in books (though I DO love Harjo's, in particular), but the kind lived in hospital rooms, in the hum of machines, in the ache of breath, in the fierce love that refuses to look away.
Your encounter with Joy Harjo's poem is extraordinary. How a line can become a lifeline. How language can rise up exactly when the world is falling apart. The scrap of paper taped to the window -- what a holy image. A small square of truth holding back the thieves of time. And how it traveled with you, room to room, state to state, becoming a companion not just to you but to everyone who saw it. That doctor carrying it all the way to the West Coast -- that's the quiet power of a poem doing its work in the world.
I'm so grateful your son lived. And I'm deeply moved by the way you've continued living your converted life -- not as a reaction to crisis, but as a chosen practice of presence. A way of honoring the storm without letting it claim your mind or your heart. It reminds me of a quote that I have saved on my phone: "Making grief look like sunshine when it feels like thunder." I don't know who wrote it, but it struck me in the last year.
Thank you for writing this down. Thank you for letting us witness the way lightning struck your life and turned your leaves toward the source of light. Sending love. XO
Oh, my heavens, Danielle, thank you, your words mean so much to me. I carry that scrap of paper and its meaning inside me all the time, and sometimes it feels so weathered and ratty that I don't know how it can still exist and how it can still have the power to ward off the past and keep the future at bay, but then a space opens up for me to share Joy Harjo's words again with more people, and it fortifies me, reminds me that I'm not alone in the power of words and the power of poetry, and the positive energy that expands when we share them with one another. Thank you for this: "making grief look like sunshine when it feels like thunder." Wow. So powerful.
It doesn't matter how weathered or tattered that scrap of paper ever gets. It only gains more Beauty and depth. It is your companion in these times. And that is the quiet power of words. May it be a container for you all your life! XO
I saw her at The National Book Festival, and she signed my book. I gave her a note that thanked her for her poem and explained that it changed my life.
I don't really have anything valuable to add, yet I find it difficult to say nothing...because this is one of the most beautiful and powerfully moving things I've read in a long while. Thank you for sharing your experience. I will carry your story forward in my work helping others in the oncology world.
Angel, thank you for your comment. I read that you're a death midwife, and I have to tell you that the people who helped guide us the most in the hospital were the members of the palliative and hospice care team. I told them that they nurtured our spirits, the part of the body that is most overlooked during hospital stays. That nurturing proved to be the most valuable for living with terminal disease. Learning how to administer meds, clean picc lines, give injections, advocate with doctors, etc. was daunting and time consuming--at first, I thought they were the most important skills I could learn for my son. But learning to continue to live a life, truly live it, within the reality of death proved to be the hardest skill to learn, and also the most valuable. Thank you for what you do!
Jackie, the way you describe how a poem worked its way into your knowing. Words, you lived by, words that trained your mind, is so powerful. I’ve had poems that i also go over and over in my mind, reminding me of a deep truths.
Joy, I'm glad I'm not alone in that. When I'm struggling in life, I always reach for poems. My aunt gave me a book of poems for one of my birthdays when I was in grade school. Changed my life forever.
Thank you for the sharing of the poem. I will read it later. What a beautiful and horrible experience to go through. I’m so glad you have your son with you for longer.
I will never forget my first week of college internship at a woman's homeless shelter. It was truly an eye opener and a conversion of my attitude along with my heart. Our one client was leaving and going to Philadelphia for treatment. She sat there sobbing to her brother. That this time she was going to beat her addiction and turning to her brother, "I will be a changed person, this I promise you." I had to hold back my tears, for at that moment I stopped being a judgmental person about human beings who continously fall short struggling with their demons. I thought to myself, dear Jesus we all fall short no matter what demons we try staff off of our backs. Conversion is a daily event, especially when we change our hearts and mind towards each other in a positive light.
"Conversion is a daily event." Thank you for this reminder. So true. It's a statement of how conversion is continuing, but also how we are given the grace to begin anew.
I’ve been converted to kindness. I don’t come from particularly kind people. Not people who see that all are made in the image of God and are of value and worth. They can be kind but it isn’t consistent and growing up I witnessed certain people being treated poorly because they weren’t deemed important or good enough or of having the right status. And I have suffered. Thank God for my suffering. Because of it I discovered a new family (in recovery) to love well and treat me kindly when I didn’t deserve it. And somehow it got in. And somehow I have become kind. God’s grace.
For whatever reason, I was reading "conversation about conversation" and "I pray for your conversation". Maybe a Freudian slip or just the absence of my specs. I started thinking about conversations that, after having read the prompt well, converted me. Too many came to mind but one that stood out was one that I needed to have with my father in which I had to tell him the impact that being his daughter had on me. It was the hardest conversation I ever needed to have and it took years of preparation. In that moment I converted to a type of vulnerability that now allows me to move more bravely in the world.
Conversion and convers(at)ion seem like Irish twins. Conversions at their root require a certain level of conversation and synchronicity in tune with our inner voices to be genuine. Your journey was quite moving.
Thank you for sharing this with me, Sarah. I love how language encrypts and reveals human experience. I think about most things as a type of conversation, a dialogue: honest, open, and more than anything vulnerable.
It was a rusty water fountain in a gas station just below the Mason-Dixon line, marked "Colored." I was 14, and my family was on a motor trip to Florida. I drank from the clean porcelain fountain ("Whites Only") next to it, and when I got back in the car, I asked my father The Question. "Just the way it is down here," he muttered, and changed the subject. I'm approaching 90 now, and I'm still looking for an answer. It's been my life's obsession.
All of my adult life I have been unable to give 100% to my partners. When they wanted to be closer I stepped back and wondered why and wished for more, but I could only give 80%. Several months ago I experienced a flood of love from the top of my head to the tips of my toes. It was overwhelming and it was beautiful. It came from nowhere. I finally felt free of the restraint which haunted me. My husband received the benefits of this "conversion". In reality, I believe this was a letting go of past trauma I experienced as a teenager. The trauma didn't allow me trust fully, hindered intimacy and love. It took 71 years to let go and love.
I love this, Padraig. As I was reading about Mary it helped me realize that I’ve had no single “conversion”, but instead, many changes that add up to the sum total of being… A lifelong act of composition.
For all of the hate that workplace personality type testing gets, in my early 20s I did one that changed me. As I read through all of the possible descriptions of people, I was horrified: people who clearly valued the wrong things, focused on the wrong things, and approached things in the wrong way. I felt real disgust. Then, as I read the last box, I breathed a sigh of relief. I'd received "the only good one". (Stay with me). It took a few heartbeats and looking around the circle to realize everyone could be having the same experience. I was someone else's "bad one". But they were all ways of being in the world. That lightning strike of self-awareness, humility, vocabulary and curiosity about other people's values has served me very, very well.
I had a moment when I was in my 20s just sitting in the early morning after a long night out, gazing out over a bay, and something shifted ... this is part of what I wrote some time later ...
“Continual conversion, perhaps, turning and turning towards the source of life,” you wrote. A continual conversion, I love that! Perhaps made up of a stream of conversions throughout one’s life, like being repeatedly struck by lightening – in the friendliest manner possible – ushering us in towards that source of life.
My latest moment of conversion was the realization that I’m not an outside observer when it comes to the natural world. I’m a member.
‘…Once you turned toward it, you realize what the gaze is for’ That phrase so well describes what happened to me with poetry. My husband had just turned 46, and was diagnosed with terminal cancer. I was 42. We had three children. Poetry appeared and it was like a conversion to myself. It has been my companion ever since. Thank you for the words that describe the great gift of my life.
She's throwing something across the room in her tiny rage that's too big for her, again. I just want it to stop. Wait - (after the 20th time...) - I wonder, what does she need, and what is my own relationship to anger? Oh! I am carrying my own fury, reliving ancient harms. So, I turn and step towards her pain, scoop her up, be with her in it. She softens. One of the many strikes of lightning with these beings, in the space between us, since they were born. Iluminating a bit more of the path, and of what is mine, and what is not mine to hold. I am eternally grateful.
"Continual conversion, turning and turning towards the source of life." That says it all, Padraig... and Lisa Marie, and Michael. Lifelong turning towards what shows up, with curiosity.
My moment of conversion was simple but profound to me. It was when something shifted in me that said there wasn’t anything fundamentally wrong or unlovable about me, there was something wrong or missing or that they themselves were so hurt that they (my mother) could not love me. I was seeing a therapist and it was like a light went on. So obvious but not at the time. But I have since fallen back on that learning to look at people and see that their behavior is rarely about me but their own insecurities or feelings or hurt.
I was converted to myself. It was an insight born of nothing in particular, it just ... happened. I realised my instincts were sound, were very often right and needed to be paid attention to. Now that my sound odd to some but if, as a child and then as an adult, you learned to do what others wanted, say what others wanted to hear and swallowed their opinions about you, then such a revelation is a marvel. A quiet certainty, not dogmatic and not to be forced on others, but just a deeper inner, solidity that's arrived. I welcome it and wonder how life would have been if I'd been able to recognise and honour it earlier.
Pip and Padraig, what a gift to awaken to both of your thoughts this morning (and Padraig, your words about something not technically ‘forensically being true’ made me chuckle this morning!) - about two years ago, I placed Denton Welch’s words around “I vow to never squander me again” on my phone as a continuous reminder - Pip, your words are NOT odd, and we would be wise to sit with them - as a gay man, I have, since I was thirteen years old, either hid from my truth, or lived in apology for it - only in the past couple years, after getting sober and doing the work, am I able to even begin to sit with my vibrancy - thank you for reminding me to trust my conversion toward myself. This walk is quite extraordinary, eh…
Thank you for sharing your vow.
How did you get those words on your phone?
I had seen the quote, screenshotted it, and added it as wallpaper as a constant reminder - I have years of practicing the opposite, so need the regular reminder!
Thanks, I love that quote too!
Thanks. Will do the same!
Pip, this is quite beautiful... this conversion. It brings to mind Derek Walcott's poem, Love After Love... especially this bit: "Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart." Thank you so much for sharing!
YESSS! I thought of the same thing!
It is such an amazing poem.
Walcott’s entreaty, the wise music itself compels me to reclaim that good stranger.
I love this. Thank you for sharing. What you said about how you wonder what your life would have been like if you'd recognized it sooner made me think about all the necessary things we aren't taught in school or in church or in our families--life lessons like this one that can change our lives in big, yet quiet peaceful ways.
Doesn't sound odd at all. In fact, thank you for some resonance into myself. I'm not sure what would have been if you recognized and honored it earlier, but you certainly wouldn't have had this conversion, nor written this post. :)
I love this, Pip, and I thank for sharing your powerful conversion to something so very essential. It deeply inspires me.
yes, Pip! I have had the same experience, my friend. What a wonder to have finally arrived at this place, huh. I lament the time lost as well, but remind myself that too shaped me in meaningful ways. The conversion is felt stronger for all the time spend doing life, and being in my body the other way. Contrast is often where we feel things the strongest.
I am so glad that it arrived for you, Pip.
So resonant with my own experience. "A quiet certainty, not dogmatic and not to be forced on others. . . ."
Thank you.
Pip wonders what if their appreciation of self and honoring their self had come earlier . . . but maybe all the experiences that led to the revelation were needed. None of those experiences wasted. All of them part of who Pip is today. All to be valued.
Hello and happiest Sunday all! Thank you, Pádraig, and for your poem too. I'm very much looking forward to the book.
Your description of Mary in her pale blue housecoat, her benediction offered to bishop and parishioner alike, is so vivid.
This is the first prompt that has given me pause. Usually I have a very quick response. Today I find myself returning to my earliest memories, to being rehomed at eight years old, and to that first, fragile turning toward a new family, open-hearted, uncertain, and yet, somewhat miraculously, willing. Perhaps the conversion I am struggling to express is an opening to trust...
“an opening to trust…”. Perfect. A conversion that gets to happen again and again in my life. Thank you, All.
I can’t get the link to work - blessings on your thoughts.
Thank you for reminding me of that description of Mary. Yes! It was so vivid, so full. I worried that she wouldn't say the same words to the bishop that she did to everyone else and was relieved when she did. I wanted so badly for her to remain true to herself regardless of who she was talking with. She reminded me of Jesus.
Morning, Flower. I'm praying for you. For your conversion.
Thank you, Mary. Thank you, Padraig. Thank you, Lisa Marie.
I will be saying what Mary said once or twice today.
Lisa Marie Simmons...lovely.
Thank you!
Lisa Marie, how beautifully you grew, that eight year old heart…..into now! What a dangerous knowledge.
Patty! Thank you.
My conversion took place in the predawn hours in a children’s hospital in Washington DC on the 7th morning waking up to machines beeping in my son’s room, waking up on the 7th morning of my son’s diagnosis of a terminal lung disease, waking up on the 7th morning of a new world that I needed to guide us—him, me, our family--through.
I knew on that 7th morning that *I* had to change. My conversion was led by a poem by Joy Harjo, For Calling the Spirit Back from Wandering the Earth in Its Human Feet, one that I was studying, so innocently, in the days before his diagnosis.
Suddenly, every word of that poem had meaning, had an echo, carried a wisdom that would guide my life. I woke up that morning, again crying, by also accepting that my life was forever changed and that I had to work with the change and not fight it. I had to find my place in the wind and rain and fury of the storm instead of fighting against it.
A line from Harjo’s poem sprang up in my mind repeatedly over those 7 days. That morning, I swiftly scribbled it down on a half sheet of scrap paper and taped it to the hospital window: “Watch your mind. Without training it might run away and leave your heart for the immense human feast set by the thieves of time.” That scrap remained for a month, during the rest of the hospital stay, and it followed us through subsequent hospital stays from Virginia, DC, to Pennsylvania.
When people asked about it, I shared its meaning for me. I had to live in this moment, the good, the bad, the beauty, and the horror of it. Nurses, doctors, hospice staff, they would write it down or take a picture of it. One doctor later told me that the line inspired her to leave her job in DC and move her family back home to the West coast to live near her parents. For me, it inspired me to let go of baggage from the past I was carrying, let go of this ideal life I was picturing for us in the future, and live each day to the fullest, to live like my son was dying, but living every day of it.
My son did not die. He received a double lung transplant. We’re living in the 5th year of his transplant, the 5th year which we were told repeatedly is the average life expectancy after a double lung transplant, but I am still living my converted life that keeps away the thieves of time.
Thank you for asking this question. I needed the reminder to write this down and further fortify my conversion. Even trying my best, living in the moment, those thieves can still grow loud.
PS: I'm so happy about your new book. I'm preordering it today.
Thank you Jackie. The poem is beautiful and how you have taken it to heart and allowed it to convert you is also beautiful. May you and your son continue to live with open hearts.
Your story reminded me of my moment of conversion. It was several months after my son died-- very suddenly, like a stroke of lightening that ended his life, shattered the rest of us. One afternoon while waiting for unwanted visitors to arrive I felt like I just couldn't go on, that I couldn't stay inside my skin. I heard a voice in my head that I swear was not my voice. It said, "Just sit down and breathe." It said that three times. I sat down. I breathed. I found I could continue to take the next breath. I could survive. I could even, eventually, learn to live again, learn to watch and train my mind and live more from my heart.
Kathryn, your story is a gift to me. Thank you for sharing it. Thank you for all of it, including the reminder that you could live again, train your mind and live more from the heart. What you shared so graciously here is from your heart, and I feel it. Some days are hard for me, when an uncertain future tries to call to me, where fear and ego try to take root. But it's stories like yours that always bring me back to the present, to this moment with my son very much here. I'm part of a support group for families with kids who have the same disease my son had before his double lung transplant. In the 7 years I've been a member, we've lost so many children to the diesease. Some of the parents leave the group, staying is too painful, and I understand that. Some of the parents stay, and they share their seasons of grief with us. That's a gift, a heartbreaking, selfless, never can say thank you enough, gift. Just like your comment. Sending you HUGS. I'm sorry you lost your son. I wish I had better words.
Jackie, your words are eloquent, moving, heartfelt, more than enough. Thank you for taking the time to reply. I will keep you and Eli in my prayers.
Dear Jackie,
Your words moved through me like weather -- one of those sudden shifts in the sky where the light changes and you realize you're witnessing a truth that has been quietly gathering for years. Thank you for sharing the story of your conversion with such clarity, ferocity, and tenderness.
The way you describe those seven mornings -- each one a deeper descent into a world you never asked to enter, yet stepped into with a mother's unflinching devotion -- feels like its own kind of scripture. Not the kind written in books (though I DO love Harjo's, in particular), but the kind lived in hospital rooms, in the hum of machines, in the ache of breath, in the fierce love that refuses to look away.
Your encounter with Joy Harjo's poem is extraordinary. How a line can become a lifeline. How language can rise up exactly when the world is falling apart. The scrap of paper taped to the window -- what a holy image. A small square of truth holding back the thieves of time. And how it traveled with you, room to room, state to state, becoming a companion not just to you but to everyone who saw it. That doctor carrying it all the way to the West Coast -- that's the quiet power of a poem doing its work in the world.
I'm so grateful your son lived. And I'm deeply moved by the way you've continued living your converted life -- not as a reaction to crisis, but as a chosen practice of presence. A way of honoring the storm without letting it claim your mind or your heart. It reminds me of a quote that I have saved on my phone: "Making grief look like sunshine when it feels like thunder." I don't know who wrote it, but it struck me in the last year.
Thank you for writing this down. Thank you for letting us witness the way lightning struck your life and turned your leaves toward the source of light. Sending love. XO
Oh, my heavens, Danielle, thank you, your words mean so much to me. I carry that scrap of paper and its meaning inside me all the time, and sometimes it feels so weathered and ratty that I don't know how it can still exist and how it can still have the power to ward off the past and keep the future at bay, but then a space opens up for me to share Joy Harjo's words again with more people, and it fortifies me, reminds me that I'm not alone in the power of words and the power of poetry, and the positive energy that expands when we share them with one another. Thank you for this: "making grief look like sunshine when it feels like thunder." Wow. So powerful.
Jackie,
It doesn't matter how weathered or tattered that scrap of paper ever gets. It only gains more Beauty and depth. It is your companion in these times. And that is the quiet power of words. May it be a container for you all your life! XO
Thank you! I have her Poet Warrior beside me and just returned to the poem you mentioned.
I saw her at The National Book Festival, and she signed my book. I gave her a note that thanked her for her poem and explained that it changed my life.
That poem is powerful! Thank you for sharing!
You're welcome. I'm so glad you enjoyed it.
I don't really have anything valuable to add, yet I find it difficult to say nothing...because this is one of the most beautiful and powerfully moving things I've read in a long while. Thank you for sharing your experience. I will carry your story forward in my work helping others in the oncology world.
Angel, thank you for your comment. I read that you're a death midwife, and I have to tell you that the people who helped guide us the most in the hospital were the members of the palliative and hospice care team. I told them that they nurtured our spirits, the part of the body that is most overlooked during hospital stays. That nurturing proved to be the most valuable for living with terminal disease. Learning how to administer meds, clean picc lines, give injections, advocate with doctors, etc. was daunting and time consuming--at first, I thought they were the most important skills I could learn for my son. But learning to continue to live a life, truly live it, within the reality of death proved to be the hardest skill to learn, and also the most valuable. Thank you for what you do!
Jackie, the way you describe how a poem worked its way into your knowing. Words, you lived by, words that trained your mind, is so powerful. I’ve had poems that i also go over and over in my mind, reminding me of a deep truths.
Joy, I'm glad I'm not alone in that. When I'm struggling in life, I always reach for poems. My aunt gave me a book of poems for one of my birthdays when I was in grade school. Changed my life forever.
What book was it?
Lighting a candle for you and your son. xo
Oh, Linda, what a gift. Thank you for that. I'll tell my son. His name is Eli.
Thank you for the sharing of the poem. I will read it later. What a beautiful and horrible experience to go through. I’m so glad you have your son with you for longer.
Thank you, Elaine! He is a gift every day.
Jackie, what an incredible gift poetry has been for you, and through you to others. May you continue your journey living every moment in peace.
Thank you, Patty. I appreciate that. I'm so grateful to the poets!
I will never forget my first week of college internship at a woman's homeless shelter. It was truly an eye opener and a conversion of my attitude along with my heart. Our one client was leaving and going to Philadelphia for treatment. She sat there sobbing to her brother. That this time she was going to beat her addiction and turning to her brother, "I will be a changed person, this I promise you." I had to hold back my tears, for at that moment I stopped being a judgmental person about human beings who continously fall short struggling with their demons. I thought to myself, dear Jesus we all fall short no matter what demons we try staff off of our backs. Conversion is a daily event, especially when we change our hearts and mind towards each other in a positive light.
"Conversion is a daily event." Thank you for this reminder. So true. It's a statement of how conversion is continuing, but also how we are given the grace to begin anew.
I’ve been converted to kindness. I don’t come from particularly kind people. Not people who see that all are made in the image of God and are of value and worth. They can be kind but it isn’t consistent and growing up I witnessed certain people being treated poorly because they weren’t deemed important or good enough or of having the right status. And I have suffered. Thank God for my suffering. Because of it I discovered a new family (in recovery) to love well and treat me kindly when I didn’t deserve it. And somehow it got in. And somehow I have become kind. God’s grace.
For whatever reason, I was reading "conversation about conversation" and "I pray for your conversation". Maybe a Freudian slip or just the absence of my specs. I started thinking about conversations that, after having read the prompt well, converted me. Too many came to mind but one that stood out was one that I needed to have with my father in which I had to tell him the impact that being his daughter had on me. It was the hardest conversation I ever needed to have and it took years of preparation. In that moment I converted to a type of vulnerability that now allows me to move more bravely in the world.
Conversion and convers(at)ion seem like Irish twins. Conversions at their root require a certain level of conversation and synchronicity in tune with our inner voices to be genuine. Your journey was quite moving.
Thank you for sharing this with me, Sarah. I love how language encrypts and reveals human experience. I think about most things as a type of conversation, a dialogue: honest, open, and more than anything vulnerable.
It was a rusty water fountain in a gas station just below the Mason-Dixon line, marked "Colored." I was 14, and my family was on a motor trip to Florida. I drank from the clean porcelain fountain ("Whites Only") next to it, and when I got back in the car, I asked my father The Question. "Just the way it is down here," he muttered, and changed the subject. I'm approaching 90 now, and I'm still looking for an answer. It's been my life's obsession.
You have so much faith in humanity, Bonnie. I just turned 80 and have lost all hope. I wish I could convert to your "never-give-up" attitude.
All of my adult life I have been unable to give 100% to my partners. When they wanted to be closer I stepped back and wondered why and wished for more, but I could only give 80%. Several months ago I experienced a flood of love from the top of my head to the tips of my toes. It was overwhelming and it was beautiful. It came from nowhere. I finally felt free of the restraint which haunted me. My husband received the benefits of this "conversion". In reality, I believe this was a letting go of past trauma I experienced as a teenager. The trauma didn't allow me trust fully, hindered intimacy and love. It took 71 years to let go and love.
I love this, Padraig. As I was reading about Mary it helped me realize that I’ve had no single “conversion”, but instead, many changes that add up to the sum total of being… A lifelong act of composition.
I can relate to the "lifelong act of composition."
For all of the hate that workplace personality type testing gets, in my early 20s I did one that changed me. As I read through all of the possible descriptions of people, I was horrified: people who clearly valued the wrong things, focused on the wrong things, and approached things in the wrong way. I felt real disgust. Then, as I read the last box, I breathed a sigh of relief. I'd received "the only good one". (Stay with me). It took a few heartbeats and looking around the circle to realize everyone could be having the same experience. I was someone else's "bad one". But they were all ways of being in the world. That lightning strike of self-awareness, humility, vocabulary and curiosity about other people's values has served me very, very well.
I had a moment when I was in my 20s just sitting in the early morning after a long night out, gazing out over a bay, and something shifted ... this is part of what I wrote some time later ...
as sun crested the day and
I gazed out on a yawning bay still
bleary from a night’s slumber
this hearing was humbler
incidental
words emptied of trace or sound
yet somehow still able to
sear the soul
like a balm awakening a wound
to its healing that’s
how I heard
“Continual conversion, perhaps, turning and turning towards the source of life,” you wrote. A continual conversion, I love that! Perhaps made up of a stream of conversions throughout one’s life, like being repeatedly struck by lightening – in the friendliest manner possible – ushering us in towards that source of life.
My latest moment of conversion was the realization that I’m not an outside observer when it comes to the natural world. I’m a member.
‘…Once you turned toward it, you realize what the gaze is for’ That phrase so well describes what happened to me with poetry. My husband had just turned 46, and was diagnosed with terminal cancer. I was 42. We had three children. Poetry appeared and it was like a conversion to myself. It has been my companion ever since. Thank you for the words that describe the great gift of my life.
She's throwing something across the room in her tiny rage that's too big for her, again. I just want it to stop. Wait - (after the 20th time...) - I wonder, what does she need, and what is my own relationship to anger? Oh! I am carrying my own fury, reliving ancient harms. So, I turn and step towards her pain, scoop her up, be with her in it. She softens. One of the many strikes of lightning with these beings, in the space between us, since they were born. Iluminating a bit more of the path, and of what is mine, and what is not mine to hold. I am eternally grateful.
"Continual conversion, turning and turning towards the source of life." That says it all, Padraig... and Lisa Marie, and Michael. Lifelong turning towards what shows up, with curiosity.
What was a moment of conversion for you?
My moment of conversion was simple but profound to me. It was when something shifted in me that said there wasn’t anything fundamentally wrong or unlovable about me, there was something wrong or missing or that they themselves were so hurt that they (my mother) could not love me. I was seeing a therapist and it was like a light went on. So obvious but not at the time. But I have since fallen back on that learning to look at people and see that their behavior is rarely about me but their own insecurities or feelings or hurt.
Ah, Elaine. I think we lived the same life! All is well now.