Occasional

I recently read City of Thorns by Ben Rawlence and it made a huge impression on me. I have thought about it in some way each day for weeks.

Last night I listened to the first part of The Ted Radio Hour show about Tolerance and how we need diversity. Acceptance of the other isn’t just a thing people do to be thought of as good or kind or open-minded. It is something we do to survive.

Unless our needs aren’t getting met and then we get all tribal.

I submitted a new poem to a contest today. This is the first time I have submitted anything anywhere since Andrew died. It is an occasional poem.

They are so challenging to write because basically you are writing for a group of people who are uncomfortable with poetry. The eventual audience for the winner wants the work to be funny and poignant and approachable and understandable.

Billy Collins or Mary Oliver I am not.

So I wrote something that made sense to me. The exercise was useful.

A Fresh Start

It seems a good time to come back here and write a public facing blog.

I need to learn how to be comfortable talking broadly about things that matter to me and expressing opinions. I am quiet, watchful, unless I am teaching yoga or in a room with folks I feel very comfortable with (and then I babble on about all sorts of seemingly unrelated things endlessly).

When I am quiet, people watch my face. It is such an interesting thing us social animals do watching each other’s faces to look for clues. And maybe in the moment I am practicing being non-reactive in a spiritual sense but some fleeting opinion or thought or reaction passes across my face that can be interpreted as something in the end my better judgment or common sense tells me it would be prudent not to express. But someone thinks it is Resting Bitch Face.

So here I am to express what touches me, or moves me or makes me laugh or think.

Last night I watched The Big Short. It is in my wheelhouse as a former broker with a flaming social conscience and someone interested in how money works, a person who discovering that she wasn’t greedy enough to be particularly successful who turned to poetry, which I truly believe is an affliction not a gift.

A quote from the movie sums it up.

Overheard at a Washington, D.C. bar: "Truth is like poetry. And most people fucking hate poetry."

People do like pretty pictures of flowers though…