Holding

Holding

Light a candle.
Draw the curtains.
Lift a stone, 
and press it to your heart.
Let the cool weight awaken
the stone of your heart.
Feel its walls
soften,
sprout holes,
spout space. 

Go porous and feel
grief pour in
and out
and in again.
Let the waves
rock you.

I know you are
holding too much—
we are all
holding too much,
holding back 
a tide of pain
as if we weren’t 
made to float, 

as if we’ve never seen
Moon turn her face
toward the salt,
hoist entire oceans, 

as if we’ve never felt
how scant
the distance
between holding
and being held.  

Photo by Ben Wicks on Unsplash

The Prompt

I’ve been sitting in a swirl of what reads to me as bad news. I’ve been asking myself what my tiny part is—what it means for me to show up in this world with love today. A few answers have come to me, but the first to arrive was the sense that I need to give myself daily space to simply hold grief—my own grief, ongoing grief for this planet, grief for the millions around the world who have been displaced and traumatized by violence, and a fresh onslaught of grief for trans folks and immigrants here in the US.

So I sat down and lit a candle. Reflexively, my hand reached out for one of the many stones that line my desk and windowsill. I took ten minutes to simply hold grief. By the end of that time, it felt more like I was being held. This poem was born from that experience.

If you would like a prompt for your own poetic journey, then I invite you to try out your own practice of holding whatever feelings inside you are asking to be held. Do you need five or ten or fifteen minutes to grieve? To feel the full force of your fear? To let your own happiness catch up to you? Is there a feeling that you’ve been pushing down or avoiding that you feel ready to sit with for just a few moments? A timer can be a great helper here.

If you try this holding practice, do your best to release any concern about a future poem during the actual experience. Just have your experience. Be in it. Notice your own thought patterns, the rising and falling of your emotions, the shifting of sensations. Notice your body’s longings. Do you reach for a rock to hold or a blanket to tuck into or a pillow to punch? All of this might help spark the poem to come, but again, don’t worry about that from the outset. I like to think that rich experiencing gives rise to rich poems—so don’t waste the experience hunting for pennies.

I want to point out that this is no walk-in-the-park prompt. Please honor your limits, whatever they are today. No prompt is right or helpful or generative for every person or every moment in a life. If you have significant unprocessed trauma, this exercise might not be right for you today, but there are 100+ other prompts in the archives to draw on.

Today’s prompt—and the experience of holding your feelings—is most likely to feel positive or healing or generative if you can wrap it in kindness. Can you be gentle with yourself? Do you have tools and skills and puppies or best friends to help you calm your nervous system as needed? Would it help to have a warm mug of tea or a phone call with a friend waiting for you at the end of your holding practice? Care for yourself, dear ones. It’s awfully hard to show up for one another if we don’t do that. And wow, do we ever need one another.

If this experience—or any other experience you’re having this week—gives rise to a poem, I would be honored to read it. Please share (along with any other reflections) in the comments thread. I am holding you in my heart, dear ones.