piquantplay

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

we say, when someone’s
sensitive. So touchy. So
dangerous and delicate and
ready to tip. Touching,
though, is sweet. And we
are touched by the gift,
the thought. Moved
into knowledge of care
if not love. Touched, too,
means crazy. God-kissed.
The brain lit otherwise. I hope
we’ve all known someone
who has got the touch, able
to ease a knot, make any machine
hum true, tune a string. And
Touch me, says Kunitz
in the poem that always chokes
me up. As if the hand of a wife
would bring me back
to myself or to the selves
we both once were. Don’t
touch: first warning.
The stove, the open socket’s
shock, the body unknown
to you and all the bodies
it, in turn, has, willfully
or not, allowed such
intimacy. When I first
felt yearning for the skin
I always kept hidden
to touch another’s
hidden skin, it was
the early decade of a different
terrible virus. The danger
was known and unknown
both, and in some small
way, the risk of infection
was not unlike the risk
of intimacy. In touch, when
we know how someone
is faring. Touch and go,
when we’re not sure
how things will turn out.

Elizabeth Bradfield

Longing, we say, because desire is full / of endless distances.

—Robert Hass

Driving down a highway in August, saving for later

the right word for now,                        desire whittled me

a tool I'd never seen before

                        but knew how to use almost immediately.

Tornadoes yellowed, revised the river & bovine lands

for sale beside it.

Longing, I said, pushing distance

through a cage—

it's why the picture city must be snowed in.

The other words I couldn't think of at the time,

like many things that leave before

                                                    you've found a name for them.

"In the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf in Santa Monica, fittingly on one of those rare days when it rains in Los Angeles, I stirred my tea, bit my lip, and realised that I still knew who I was. Paul must have remembered Saul, dreamt of his last life, the weight of silver and the perfume of whores, even after the momentary darkness disorientated him so. Even if I didn’t like myself a lot of the time, even if this had been my pathetic attempt to make up for my wrongdoings by loving as much as I could and long after was healthy for either of us, that little voice was still there, louder now, and reminding me that I could die before a conversion that might never come, and that had in all probability taken place already. Furious, in the way you can only be with those you care for so deeply, I drove back to my hotel, and reminded myself that hell, like Damascus, is here, now, and it is other people’s hearts." 

Original link to Nerina's inspiration behind the song here

Things I am grateful for:

1. The faithful tropical sun that greets me every morning, and in kissing all the lush greenery around me with its glow, reminds me of all that is beautiful and well with the world. Despite everything that we're dealing with in the human realm, it's reassuring that nature just goes about her merry way.

2. My loving dogs — B, who constantly watches us as we go about our day, sitting in that awkward wide-legged posture that she's always preferred. Always loving, always affectionate, and sweet as can be. R, whose body may be betraying him in his later years, but his mind ever-sharp. His excited gallop when he knows we're about to go for a walk never fails to bring a smile to my face, and reminds me that I should never forget to cherish the little things.

3. The humidity, which while is pretty annoying combined with the heat for my bread-making endeavors, is great in so many others. It has nourished my skin, hair, given me moist air to fill my lungs with, air that I remind myself to breathe in, keep breathing in and out, as we get through this. 

https://hbr.org/2020/03/that-discomfort-youre-feeling-is-grief

Some of the HBR edit staff met virtually the other day — a screen full of faces in a scene becoming more common everywhere. We talked about the content we’re commissioning in this harrowing time of a pandemic and how we can help people. But we also talked about how we were feeling. One colleague mentioned that what she felt was grief. Heads nodded in all the panes.

If we can name it, perhaps we can manage it. We turned to David Kessler for ideas on how to do that. Kessler is the world’s foremost expert on grief. He co-wrote with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief through the Five Stages of Loss. His new book adds another stage to the process, Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief. Kessler also has worked for a decade in a three-hospital system in Los Angeles. He served on their biohazards team. His volunteer work includes being an LAPD Specialist Reserve for traumatic events as well as having served on the Red Cross’s disaster services team. He is the founder of www.grief.com, which has over 5 million visits yearly from 167 countries.

Kessler shared his thoughts on why it’s important to acknowledge the grief you may be feeling, how to manage it, and how he believes we will find meaning in it. The conversation is lightly edited for clarity.

HBR: People are feeling any number of things right now. Is it right to call some of what they’re feeling grief?