An Incomplete Catalog of Recent Good

On giving the wonder as much space as the wounds

Last week, Ada Limón, the historic two-term U.S. Poet Laureate, held a reading at one of the local universities here in Milwaukee. It was an evening already made beautiful just by the nature of her art and presence, but her generous wisdom solidified it as a memorable one for months to come. Throughout the reading and Q&A, she spoke about writing, the role of art, and much more.

Before reading what she called a friendship poem, she briefly mentioned how poets don’t write enough poems about their friends. Instead, it’s much more typical for a poet to write on and on, through countless poems, about an ex than to write even one poem celebrating a friend. She told us to stop wasting our poems on terrible people, and we all laughed, but the sentiment held.

Later, during Q&A, she followed that thread of thinking further: ask a bunch of poets in a room to write a poem, and most of them will draw up the darkest, harshest thing that happened to them and write from that pain. She wasn’t wrong, and we laughed again. She said that it’s such a habit to write from and about our suffering that often those are the easiest poems to write. To remember the good and give it time in the light is almost always more difficult, even if only because most of us don’t do it nearly often enough.

I have been turning this over in my mind, and then over again, because I am guilty of it. I almost always reach toward the wounds when I sit to write. No matter how many times I write about them, I circle and circle and circle. While I do believe that writing can be a path toward processing and perhaps even healing, both of which I reach toward when I focus on the pain, I did not realize until that evening with Limón that the constant circling was coming at the cost of cataloguing the good.

And there is so much good.

Like the friend who dropped off a gorgeous, hand-picked bouquet that perfumes the kitchen all holiday weekend. Or another who sends me home with a jar of vanilla extract she has been tweaking for more than a year. Or yet another who shares her homemade ramp butter, foraged for by the river. The same river where, only days later, J and I greet the green heron, our first sighting of the year, a return I celebrate for a bird upon which I have heaped mounds of meaning.

The day before, the nephews and niece played at survival in the woods. They gathered materials and built a fire and cracked black walnuts with a brick on a makeshift outdoor kitchen. They were making soup with nuts and grass and water, bundled in a seriousness that reminded me of my own childhood, and I wanted to freeze them all in that play and delight and imagination.

My niece tells me, “We’re in the wild! We have to survive!” And immediately, I save her words because she is right, and I sense I will need her wisdom later.

Isn’t that what we’re all doing? Just trying to survive in this weird, ever-changing wild? It is hard and painful but it is also good. So good. Limón rings in my ears, and I am grateful to be alive in it all. It is time to give just as much space to the endless wonder that breathes and sustains me alongside the wounds.