you means so many things, of course. but in this moment, without thought, when you asked I thought of the last text I received from my brother before he died - it read: “lake like the ocean today”. I cherish it. I have taken numerable screen shots of it; so you know, it stays close by in my phone. There is no “you” in it and there is so much you in it. The you is absent in a unit of language but it’s presence is potent. In his 5-word text he said “I’m thinking of you as I look at the lake, it looks so much like the beauty of an ocean and I know you would love it so I took this photo to send to you.” It’s a treasure beyond measure, that text, those 5 words. It tells me he loves me. It is a buoyant bittersweet bridge: before with him here and after, without.
oh my word, Mary!! YOU have brought me to tears! I love this, all of it. I love that you keep it close to you in a picture. I often take pictures of words that are meaningful to me and carry them around with me for a while. Thank you for sharing! XO
oh wow, how moving, Mary. and I can imagine this, such a gift perhaps of lake-like, ocean-like tears, and of love vast and mysterious and visible and invisible, as the ocean. you sharing this all here, extends that treasure... thank you.
The question of you is really provoking! Like, how can I think about myself without you in it, or how I cannot be me without you!
And all of you, a beloved community of poets and thinkers have now come out to bask in the oneness of our communion when we ask - who is there? It is you😅
Yes - it's from The Gift, Poems by Hafiz the Great Sufi Master - translations by Daniel Ladinsky. It is a book that I read and again and again and again and each time I'm struck by how new the poems feel. As my 3-year niece says about chocolate, "I can't love it enough."
@Pádraig, this is partly inspired by your talk yesterday at Boston College. The idea of being in the fringes or in the center still means we are all together. We are never alone, which means there is always a you. Even if that means a *you* we cannot see. I meant to get a picture with you but lost my nerve, but glad I was able to get a book signed and to, most if all, hear your talk and share in community discussion. It was a great blessing in the midst of personal sorrow as my family buries a childhood friend this week.
Zina: the grief's we share. A beloved "you" that made him and me a we, my friend Ian, died by accidental drowning this past week. My beloved first love, Kathy, whom remained a life-long friend died a month or so ago. These "yous" who whom the "you" is me now grieve so deeply. And how our griefs make a we of us. Thank you for this wonderful reflection of yours. Richard from Vancouver Island, BC.
Thank you for your comment. I am so sorry for your heartbreaking losses. Yet griefs shared are divided and easier to manage. That is the joy of community. Wishing you healing and peace during this time.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the “you” in writing. How sometimes it’s the universal you, and sometimes it’s the deeper you inside yourself that you are having a dialogue with. I’ve been living and working remotely out of Florence Italy for the last couple of months. Some lovely thunder and rain storms the last couple of days and this is what I wrote about the “you” observing myself from within myself when I am writing, and how writing itself is a “you”:
Writing is incapable of lying. It's only purpose is to reveal what you don't even know you know yet. To yourself, about yourself, about the world.
It is an excavation. It is an exorcism. It is a miracle. I do not write when I write. Writing writes.
I think in poems. I process in prose. I bleed in ink. I wax nostalgic through bad poetry and red wine. I mourn in words on the page. I jubilate when I write.
Writing is a conversation with my own divinity in real time. It has saved me and held me and harmed me and rebuilt me and broken me and made me whole again and again and again.
What could be more mystic than myself revealing itself to myself through my own hand putting pen to paper? It is radical. It is devotional. It is pagan. It is proof that we are each other's immutable prayers.
Writing is a conversation with my own divinity in real time. Wow. Writing has been the lifeline for me in a treatment facility. It has energized me and gifted me back to myself. These are all beautiful and true lines. Thank you.
Tiffani, you are amazing! These reflections on writing are a gift, especially: "What could be more mystic than myself revealing itself to myself through my own hand putting pen to paper? It is radical. It is devotional. It is pagan. It is proof that we are each other's immutable prayers." If I can make my writing as rich a conversation as this everyday, I'd never question another moment of it. I'll keep this as a prayer to read to myself before writing each day. Thank you!
Lisa that might be the most glorious compliment I have ever received. Thank you for taking my words to heart and infusing them with such purpose-- as a long time actress and performer I am still a bit of a newbie in sharing my writing and my thoughts around writing for that matter. This group is such a wonderful sounding board and source of inspiration and connection.
Thank you for sharing your words here, Tiffani, what you wrote is truly inspiring! I wish you all the best as you shift your creative expression toward more writing. It's lovely to have your voice here!
@manuel I’m so glad this is resonating with people. I am in the beginning process of applying to fully funded MFA programs in creative writing and this just kind of poured out of me in my application essay as to why I write ✍️
I jubilate when I write! Thanks to the specific you of you Tiffani. I would ask for permission to use your words above in a handout for a poetry-as-prayer handout I am preparing for a retreat I am leading in December. "Wring is a conversation with my own divinity in real time." Yes.
@richard I would be honored if my words inspired other poets at your retreat. As a performer turned fledgling writer currently exploring grad schools in creative writing, this would be a treat. And perhaps I can use it’s inclusion in your writer’s retreat handout on my applications. Love that a published poet & teacher would use my words, so thank you 🙏🏾
My morning started with a burnt piece of toast. As I stood by the sink to scrape with the butter knife, I thought of my mother who disliked wasting food. The burnt crumbs made an amber tea as I washed them down the drain. I buttered and ate.
She used to write letters to us children on plain postcards with preprinted postage bought in bulk at the Post Office. Just-the-facts, cryptic messages, whether restricted by space or personality, often without pronouns: “Dad is better. Saw the doctor. Weather is cooler. Mom”
As I finish my coffee I say to her memory, “[I] Learned it [from you]. [I] Ate the burnt toast [like you taught me]. It was fine [just like you said]. Thanks [to you]. [I] Love [you].”
I love this sharing. I am finishing up 7 months in a treatment facility and it has been an amazing search for the community I belong to. I have had to welcome me back to myself before I can go back and live with the community I belong to. Thanks for such good work each week.
When a part of us breaks off for a moment or months, it becomes a "you" - at least that's what it has felt like when some part of me dissociates and I end up needing healing, in whatever form or place that can happen. I'm glad that your experience of healing whatever needed healing has been amazing, that you have found both yourself and your place in the community, or maybe communities, including this one.
Dear Kathleen: So grateful you shared this. I lead sessions in poetry therapy in treatment centers. And I watch again and again my clients come back to themselves through their poems. Often they have never written a poem outside school. I use so often the line, with its wonderful yous! by Jane Hirschfield: " I tell you. It is permitted. You can begin again the story of your life."
Yes, for me, poetry unleashes the unconscious you/me. Self-hypnosis, meditation, yoga do the same, but writing down the words and images brings things into a different focus. Returning to the words later, either just to read them or edit them, reveals more, and reading out loud is another good trick.
Thanks for the Jane Hirschfield line. I looked it up. Da Capo.
Oh, but now I'm embarking on a deep dive into your Recovering Words website. Am I ever going to get outside again today?
In the early hours this morning, my husband's voice whispered up the stairs, "I love you." He has been on the road for weeks at a time this fall - playing with the boys in the band. Then later, after he left to play this morning in church, bone weary and exhausted, I found a heart under my office door, his distinctive scrawl, 'I love you.' And here is a text between his morning services, "I love you."
I have been feeling decidedly unlovely this fall - angry, mean, petulant, resentful - now there's a crowd of bullies you don't want to hang with. . .
So, today, the You is Me. And I am going to be o.k. with that.
The word you seems bound up with relationship. We are separate creatures but we live in community, whether it be loose or tightly knit. What is my role in these relationships, what do I owe and is something owed to me? I know what and who I am in relation to my friends, my adult children, and my grandchildren. The question I ask myself now, redefining myself with the loss of the central relationship in my life, who are you when one of the we is gone.
“...who are you when one of the we is gone?” -- In moments when I struggle with the new normal, I wonder if the ancients, who hammered out the concept of a placeholder for ‘zero’ had a similar notation for this void.
Yes Elaine, I am currently experiencing the same thing. Part of a we for decades. A we that became an excruciating cage that I began to define myself within and against. I think of the Adrienne Rich line: “this is no place that you ever knew me.” And I am both the you and the me in that line right now.
I’m thinking of the weight of the You in Shakespeare. This is my favorite example.
QUEEN
Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended.
HAMLET
Mother, you have my father much offended.
Gertrude uses thou/thy, the informal form of you. She’s talking to her son. Even though she’s scolding him she softens it with a mother’s intimacy. But Hamlet comes back with the formal You, rejecting the intimacy. Spitting the You back at her. The parallel construction heightens the change where we also learn that “thy father” and “my father” are two different people.
This question and poem is beautiful and called up my last two weeks. Daily, the question “where are you?” has been heavy upon me. As I have spun in anxiety and anger, that question was directed to God. And, outside myself, it was also directed to myself. Then, to us all. Where are you? Why aren’t you here, fully embodied, aching for a restoried living here?
“The you seeks a home”. Something about that line from the prompt connected me to the you/self that exists across time. My birthday was on Friday and my mother sent me pictures. She uncovered pictures from when I was 15 or 16 – long hair, angsty, bulbous glasses, lanky limbs. And I wondered who I was looking at. Is that you, me, I? How would the 15 -year-old me address the you, the 42 year old me, now? How do I address the you, the 15 year old me, then? Are we, the you’s, the same? So many questions directed at you.
You bespeaks relationship. There is no you without a me. Having glanced at previous comments, “communion” is even better. The very sound -- as in the letter “U” -- communicates action/reaction, movement, vitality even -- as in U-turn, always a return to origins, the source, the Source perhaps.
oh, how I love this Zagajewski poem! thank you so much, Pádraig, for sharing it now... His last few lines:
craving one thing only:
lightning,
transformation,
you.
these lines offer me the very energy Zagajewski articulates he is craving. It's like they put into the cauldron the ingredients to create that very lightning, that very transformation, that very 'you.' Wow. I'm reminded of Rumi and the Sufi poets too, upon reading this....
Reading your beautiful reflections and inquiry this week, I am reminded of an exchange with my niece, now 11, then 3, that's etched in my memory thanks to a video recording of it, that I took at the time. Here is how it went:
I am laying on my back on the grass, the sun is shining. Avana (A), 3 years old, is laying on my belly and chest.
A: I love you.
Me: Aww, who do you love?
A: You
Me: Who is "you"?
A: You You You
Me: Who is "you you you"?
A: You means You You You
Me: You means "you you you"?
A: YOU! [getting visibly frustrated - I imagine her thinking, what's wrong with my massi? can she not understand the meaning of 'you'?!].
Me: Does the "you" have a name?
A: I have a name called Avana Grace Sharma.
Me: Yeeaaah.
[not the answer I wanted]
[pause]
[thinking. how do I get what I am seeking? craving?? And, WHAT exactly is it, that I am seeking, so desperately craving?]
Me: Who are you laying on top of?
A: Mona
We both laugh. The video clip ends.
-
This brief exchange captures so much. In this encounter, I am the "you," the you who is being told she is loved. Yet, that is evidently not enough for me. I am needing to be assured, reassured, is it really me who is loved, who you are declaring your love for? How can I know this for sure? I think this speaks to some of the material swirling through my psyche these days. I think about how there are times when I have felt - I am receiving love, very powerful, moving love, from so many precious human beings. And yet the one, the One, "the one" I want it from, feels like an absence... this is a "you" that I'm walking with these days too.
Mona! "I think about how there are times when I have felt - I am receiving love, very powerful, moving love, from so many precious human beings. And yet the one, the One, "the one" I want it from, feel like an absence..." Thank you for putting words to it for me. Gorgeous!!
such a lovely encounter you describe with your niece. It seemed so self-evident to me at first. But your reflection about this not being "enough" for you brought me up short. You've provoked me to think about how often the you i am to others, that I want to be for others (and, perhaps, one other) is not enough. And i'm dismayed to find that my answer to that question is "too often." Much to ponder here. My journal is thirsty for the words i am about to spill. Thank-you.
How beautiful, Anna! "I've held the translucense / with wholeness trembling," "I listen to the tired drawing of following / the next and the next for too many hours" and "the festival of shadow on my kitchen table"... thank you for your sharing!
you means so many things, of course. but in this moment, without thought, when you asked I thought of the last text I received from my brother before he died - it read: “lake like the ocean today”. I cherish it. I have taken numerable screen shots of it; so you know, it stays close by in my phone. There is no “you” in it and there is so much you in it. The you is absent in a unit of language but it’s presence is potent. In his 5-word text he said “I’m thinking of you as I look at the lake, it looks so much like the beauty of an ocean and I know you would love it so I took this photo to send to you.” It’s a treasure beyond measure, that text, those 5 words. It tells me he loves me. It is a buoyant bittersweet bridge: before with him here and after, without.
oh my word, Mary!! YOU have brought me to tears! I love this, all of it. I love that you keep it close to you in a picture. I often take pictures of words that are meaningful to me and carry them around with me for a while. Thank you for sharing! XO
oh wow, how moving, Mary. and I can imagine this, such a gift perhaps of lake-like, ocean-like tears, and of love vast and mysterious and visible and invisible, as the ocean. you sharing this all here, extends that treasure... thank you.
This is so touching, Mary❤️
You, u stands like two people
separate at the top, seemingly,
And joined as one below. U.
Ryokan’s poem:
When, when? I sighed.
The one I longed for
Has finally come.
With you now,
I have all that I need.
U. All that I need. The connection of unity at the base of U. How frequently I get lost in the upper reaches of separation, the I I
Of U. All that I need rests in this unity at the base of U. 🏮
The question of you is really provoking! Like, how can I think about myself without you in it, or how I cannot be me without you!
And all of you, a beloved community of poets and thinkers have now come out to bask in the oneness of our communion when we ask - who is there? It is you😅
Yes, the you for me at this moment is my beloved and that you includes me also
Sweet.
beautiful! and yet... maybe also, something dynamic emerges in that space between the "separate" parts... thank you for these reflections on the U!
Perhaps we need both, the separation and the joining together that makes the U work. The U joins in one but is separate. Wow what a great visual!
David, I love this!! "All that I need rests in this unity at the base of U." I will forever see "U" differently now. Thank you!!
I commit to not being afraid of YOU -
Hafiz -
Fear is the cheapest room in the house
I would like to see you living
In better conditions,
for your mother and my mother
Were friends.
I know the Innkeeper
In this part of the universe.
Get some rest tonight,
Come to my verse tomorrow.
We’ll go speak to the Friend together.
I should not make any promises right now,
But I know if you
Pray
Somewhere in this world-
Something good will happen.
God wants to see
More love and playfulness in your eyes
For that is your greatest witness to Him.
Your soul and my soul
Once sat together in the Beloved’s womb
Playing footsie.
Your heart and my heart
are very, very old
Friends.
Thank you Sarah, is this whole passage my Hafiz? i love that "your soul and my soul once sat together in the Beloved's womb playing footsie.'
Yes - it's from The Gift, Poems by Hafiz the Great Sufi Master - translations by Daniel Ladinsky. It is a book that I read and again and again and again and each time I'm struck by how new the poems feel. As my 3-year niece says about chocolate, "I can't love it enough."
Wow! Hafiz takes my breath away every time. Thanks so much for posting this, Sarah.
Gorgeous. Balm for me heart. Thank you, Sarah.
I think of this:
I/You/We
A trinity
No man an island
And I and you
Are we
A communion,
And we,
A community.
How often
Before I knew love
I only saw me?
When there’s you,
there’s we.
@Pádraig, this is partly inspired by your talk yesterday at Boston College. The idea of being in the fringes or in the center still means we are all together. We are never alone, which means there is always a you. Even if that means a *you* we cannot see. I meant to get a picture with you but lost my nerve, but glad I was able to get a book signed and to, most if all, hear your talk and share in community discussion. It was a great blessing in the midst of personal sorrow as my family buries a childhood friend this week.
Zina: the grief's we share. A beloved "you" that made him and me a we, my friend Ian, died by accidental drowning this past week. My beloved first love, Kathy, whom remained a life-long friend died a month or so ago. These "yous" who whom the "you" is me now grieve so deeply. And how our griefs make a we of us. Thank you for this wonderful reflection of yours. Richard from Vancouver Island, BC.
Thank you for your comment. I am so sorry for your heartbreaking losses. Yet griefs shared are divided and easier to manage. That is the joy of community. Wishing you healing and peace during this time.
"We are never alone, which means there is always a you." Thank you for this, Zina. And I'm so very sorry for the loss of your childhood friend.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the “you” in writing. How sometimes it’s the universal you, and sometimes it’s the deeper you inside yourself that you are having a dialogue with. I’ve been living and working remotely out of Florence Italy for the last couple of months. Some lovely thunder and rain storms the last couple of days and this is what I wrote about the “you” observing myself from within myself when I am writing, and how writing itself is a “you”:
Writing is incapable of lying. It's only purpose is to reveal what you don't even know you know yet. To yourself, about yourself, about the world.
It is an excavation. It is an exorcism. It is a miracle. I do not write when I write. Writing writes.
I think in poems. I process in prose. I bleed in ink. I wax nostalgic through bad poetry and red wine. I mourn in words on the page. I jubilate when I write.
Writing is a conversation with my own divinity in real time. It has saved me and held me and harmed me and rebuilt me and broken me and made me whole again and again and again.
What could be more mystic than myself revealing itself to myself through my own hand putting pen to paper? It is radical. It is devotional. It is pagan. It is proof that we are each other's immutable prayers.
Writing is a conversation with my own divinity in real time. Wow. Writing has been the lifeline for me in a treatment facility. It has energized me and gifted me back to myself. These are all beautiful and true lines. Thank you.
I'm so glad it resonated with you Kathleen and sending you lots of love on your treatment and recovery.
Tiffani, you are amazing! These reflections on writing are a gift, especially: "What could be more mystic than myself revealing itself to myself through my own hand putting pen to paper? It is radical. It is devotional. It is pagan. It is proof that we are each other's immutable prayers." If I can make my writing as rich a conversation as this everyday, I'd never question another moment of it. I'll keep this as a prayer to read to myself before writing each day. Thank you!
Lisa that might be the most glorious compliment I have ever received. Thank you for taking my words to heart and infusing them with such purpose-- as a long time actress and performer I am still a bit of a newbie in sharing my writing and my thoughts around writing for that matter. This group is such a wonderful sounding board and source of inspiration and connection.
Thank you for sharing your words here, Tiffani, what you wrote is truly inspiring! I wish you all the best as you shift your creative expression toward more writing. It's lovely to have your voice here!
Your description of writing is profound. ..."we are each other's immutable prayers" spun my head.
"Writing is incapable of lying. It's only purpose is to reveal what you don't even know you know yet. To yourself, about yourself, about the world.
It is an excavation. It is an exorcism. It is a miracle. I do not write when I write. Writing writes."— Tiffani Brooke Fest
Thanks, Tiffani
@manuel I’m so glad this is resonating with people. I am in the beginning process of applying to fully funded MFA programs in creative writing and this just kind of poured out of me in my application essay as to why I write ✍️
I wish you much success in your MFA. Have a great Sunday!
SO good! "It's only purpose is to reveal what you don't even know you know yet." I love this all! Thank you for sharing.
beautiful!
YES.
Love, writer me
I jubilate when I write! Thanks to the specific you of you Tiffani. I would ask for permission to use your words above in a handout for a poetry-as-prayer handout I am preparing for a retreat I am leading in December. "Wring is a conversation with my own divinity in real time." Yes.
@richard I would be honored if my words inspired other poets at your retreat. As a performer turned fledgling writer currently exploring grad schools in creative writing, this would be a treat. And perhaps I can use it’s inclusion in your writer’s retreat handout on my applications. Love that a published poet & teacher would use my words, so thank you 🙏🏾
My morning started with a burnt piece of toast. As I stood by the sink to scrape with the butter knife, I thought of my mother who disliked wasting food. The burnt crumbs made an amber tea as I washed them down the drain. I buttered and ate.
She used to write letters to us children on plain postcards with preprinted postage bought in bulk at the Post Office. Just-the-facts, cryptic messages, whether restricted by space or personality, often without pronouns: “Dad is better. Saw the doctor. Weather is cooler. Mom”
As I finish my coffee I say to her memory, “[I] Learned it [from you]. [I] Ate the burnt toast [like you taught me]. It was fine [just like you said]. Thanks [to you]. [I] Love [you].”
oh Kathleen - how beautiful. thanks for sharing.
Oh, thank you for this, Kathleen. I bless your tender holding of your mother. My mom often prefers burnt food, especially toast.
Oh - and Day is my mother’s mother’s maiden name.
My Day ancestors were Quakers that came through North Carolina.
P.S. Eating burnt toast did not give me curly hair.
So very beautiful... my eyes welled with tears...
I love this sharing. I am finishing up 7 months in a treatment facility and it has been an amazing search for the community I belong to. I have had to welcome me back to myself before I can go back and live with the community I belong to. Thanks for such good work each week.
When a part of us breaks off for a moment or months, it becomes a "you" - at least that's what it has felt like when some part of me dissociates and I end up needing healing, in whatever form or place that can happen. I'm glad that your experience of healing whatever needed healing has been amazing, that you have found both yourself and your place in the community, or maybe communities, including this one.
Dear Kathleen: So grateful you shared this. I lead sessions in poetry therapy in treatment centers. And I watch again and again my clients come back to themselves through their poems. Often they have never written a poem outside school. I use so often the line, with its wonderful yous! by Jane Hirschfield: " I tell you. It is permitted. You can begin again the story of your life."
Yes, for me, poetry unleashes the unconscious you/me. Self-hypnosis, meditation, yoga do the same, but writing down the words and images brings things into a different focus. Returning to the words later, either just to read them or edit them, reveals more, and reading out loud is another good trick.
Thanks for the Jane Hirschfield line. I looked it up. Da Capo.
Oh, but now I'm embarking on a deep dive into your Recovering Words website. Am I ever going to get outside again today?
Best best wishes to you as you reenter the place you truly belong. There is no other feeling so sweet and so enduring. Blessings.
In the early hours this morning, my husband's voice whispered up the stairs, "I love you." He has been on the road for weeks at a time this fall - playing with the boys in the band. Then later, after he left to play this morning in church, bone weary and exhausted, I found a heart under my office door, his distinctive scrawl, 'I love you.' And here is a text between his morning services, "I love you."
I have been feeling decidedly unlovely this fall - angry, mean, petulant, resentful - now there's a crowd of bullies you don't want to hang with. . .
So, today, the You is Me. And I am going to be o.k. with that.
Really, I am.
Yes - this. The You is Me. Sometimes we need to be that voice for ourselves.
The word you seems bound up with relationship. We are separate creatures but we live in community, whether it be loose or tightly knit. What is my role in these relationships, what do I owe and is something owed to me? I know what and who I am in relation to my friends, my adult children, and my grandchildren. The question I ask myself now, redefining myself with the loss of the central relationship in my life, who are you when one of the we is gone.
“...who are you when one of the we is gone?” -- In moments when I struggle with the new normal, I wonder if the ancients, who hammered out the concept of a placeholder for ‘zero’ had a similar notation for this void.
Yes Elaine, I am currently experiencing the same thing. Part of a we for decades. A we that became an excruciating cage that I began to define myself within and against. I think of the Adrienne Rich line: “this is no place that you ever knew me.” And I am both the you and the me in that line right now.
"who are you when one of the we is gone?"
Beautiful line, Elaine, thanks...
Elaine. I wish I could squeeze you! You tender, beautiful, you! XO
My mother has Alzheimer’s. My heart aches for the “you” I have lost in her, and from her.
Jill! Thank you for sharing that! So much feeling in that one sentence. XO
I so know this feeling!!
Me, too
I’m thinking of the weight of the You in Shakespeare. This is my favorite example.
QUEEN
Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended.
HAMLET
Mother, you have my father much offended.
Gertrude uses thou/thy, the informal form of you. She’s talking to her son. Even though she’s scolding him she softens it with a mother’s intimacy. But Hamlet comes back with the formal You, rejecting the intimacy. Spitting the You back at her. The parallel construction heightens the change where we also learn that “thy father” and “my father” are two different people.
This question and poem is beautiful and called up my last two weeks. Daily, the question “where are you?” has been heavy upon me. As I have spun in anxiety and anger, that question was directed to God. And, outside myself, it was also directed to myself. Then, to us all. Where are you? Why aren’t you here, fully embodied, aching for a restoried living here?
“The you seeks a home”. Something about that line from the prompt connected me to the you/self that exists across time. My birthday was on Friday and my mother sent me pictures. She uncovered pictures from when I was 15 or 16 – long hair, angsty, bulbous glasses, lanky limbs. And I wondered who I was looking at. Is that you, me, I? How would the 15 -year-old me address the you, the 42 year old me, now? How do I address the you, the 15 year old me, then? Are we, the you’s, the same? So many questions directed at you.
Thanks Jonathan. Eternal evolution...
You bespeaks relationship. There is no you without a me. Having glanced at previous comments, “communion” is even better. The very sound -- as in the letter “U” -- communicates action/reaction, movement, vitality even -- as in U-turn, always a return to origins, the source, the Source perhaps.
oh, how I love this Zagajewski poem! thank you so much, Pádraig, for sharing it now... His last few lines:
craving one thing only:
lightning,
transformation,
you.
these lines offer me the very energy Zagajewski articulates he is craving. It's like they put into the cauldron the ingredients to create that very lightning, that very transformation, that very 'you.' Wow. I'm reminded of Rumi and the Sufi poets too, upon reading this....
Reading your beautiful reflections and inquiry this week, I am reminded of an exchange with my niece, now 11, then 3, that's etched in my memory thanks to a video recording of it, that I took at the time. Here is how it went:
I am laying on my back on the grass, the sun is shining. Avana (A), 3 years old, is laying on my belly and chest.
A: I love you.
Me: Aww, who do you love?
A: You
Me: Who is "you"?
A: You You You
Me: Who is "you you you"?
A: You means You You You
Me: You means "you you you"?
A: YOU! [getting visibly frustrated - I imagine her thinking, what's wrong with my massi? can she not understand the meaning of 'you'?!].
Me: Does the "you" have a name?
A: I have a name called Avana Grace Sharma.
Me: Yeeaaah.
[not the answer I wanted]
[pause]
[thinking. how do I get what I am seeking? craving?? And, WHAT exactly is it, that I am seeking, so desperately craving?]
Me: Who are you laying on top of?
A: Mona
We both laugh. The video clip ends.
-
This brief exchange captures so much. In this encounter, I am the "you," the you who is being told she is loved. Yet, that is evidently not enough for me. I am needing to be assured, reassured, is it really me who is loved, who you are declaring your love for? How can I know this for sure? I think this speaks to some of the material swirling through my psyche these days. I think about how there are times when I have felt - I am receiving love, very powerful, moving love, from so many precious human beings. And yet the one, the One, "the one" I want it from, feels like an absence... this is a "you" that I'm walking with these days too.
Mona! "I think about how there are times when I have felt - I am receiving love, very powerful, moving love, from so many precious human beings. And yet the one, the One, "the one" I want it from, feel like an absence..." Thank you for putting words to it for me. Gorgeous!!
such a lovely encounter you describe with your niece. It seemed so self-evident to me at first. But your reflection about this not being "enough" for you brought me up short. You've provoked me to think about how often the you i am to others, that I want to be for others (and, perhaps, one other) is not enough. And i'm dismayed to find that my answer to that question is "too often." Much to ponder here. My journal is thirsty for the words i am about to spill. Thank-you.
not enough for who? for you? for the other? thank you for these prompts too...
Ahhh, yet more to ponder. Watching out for rabbit holes now ;-)
I've written a response to Adam Zagajewski’s poem, in conversation with it, to sense the quality of You.
But I see the world
with the eyes of a poem.
I hold translucence
with wholeness trembling,
still time before entering the double doors
for one last look and breath,
always with the battle, the losses
never knowing.
I know the tired drowning of following
the next and the next for too many hours.
There are reminders everywhere flickering:
the burning shrub,
the amber jubilee,
red's return and the cunning ivy in the foundation,
the festival of shadow on my kitchen table.
The dust on my windowsill is every good day's tally,
evening and morning.
And I remember the long walks,
the cordate, the spear-shaped green,
the sublime jetting,
transformation,
You.
How beautiful, Anna! "I've held the translucense / with wholeness trembling," "I listen to the tired drawing of following / the next and the next for too many hours" and "the festival of shadow on my kitchen table"... thank you for your sharing!