Dear friends,
I’m sorry today’s post is so late. I had it queued up and ready last night, but …. I live in Minneapolis, where a shooting took place at Annunciation School early this morning,. I couldn’t stomach sending out what I’d prepared. I had to put that post on pause and just take time to absorb this horrific news.
I learned about the shooting, the two kids who lost their lives so senselesssly, the seventeen others who were injured, while on a plane with Jon, headed for San Francisco, where we now are. Jon planned this trip secretly, while I was at CAMP, because today is our 20th wedding anniversary.
Some other time, I’ll write about long marriage. Not today. Some other time, I’ll post what I had queued up last night. Not today.
Today, I’m speechless. At the same time, I’m so tired of saying there are no words. So many of us are so tired of saying there are no words. Jon and I sat on the plane seeing the story unfold on television and, as we mourned, we also asked ourselves, what if that was Z’s school, or one of the elementary schools where our other grandchildren go? My friend Brianna went to Annunciation School as a child. It’s impossible not to break open inside in the face of this kind of horror. These children, our children, all our children.
And now, outside my hotel window, the San Francisco Bay Bridge, ships coming and going, rolling hills in the background. My husband next to me. The incongruity is disorienting. How do we reconcile all this tragedy with daily life and its small beauties?
I think of this powerful poem, “Adrift,” by Marc Nepo:
Inspired by Nepo’s poem, I offer this simple writing exercise of duality, which is open for everyone, no paywall. Use it if it helps you, leave it if it does not.
Writing Exercise: The Vessel of Two Elements
Choose two things that don’t feel like they belong together.
Pick one concrete image that feels melancholy or sorrowful (e.g., a black river stone, a closed door, a fallen tree).
Then pick one image that carries brightness or tenderness or hope (e.g., a child’s mitten, a bowl of cherries, the sound of a loon).Hold them in the same space.
Write three to five short fragments where these two images coexist without canceling each other out. Let them rub against one another. Don’t resolve their tension.For example:
The closed door—still, silent. A bowl of peaches ripening on the windowsill.Shift toward the aperture.
Let one of the light-carrying details slip open wider. Imagine it as an aperture—a crack, a door slightly ajar, a sudden shimmer. Write two or three more fragments that widen toward and into this brightness. Keep going until you sense some “holiness that exists inside everything.”Repeat if you wish.
And share in the comments if you like. This exercise is more of a meditation than an attempt to make or finish something. This exercise is mostly a simple leaning of language toward the light.
Love,
Jeannie
PS The usual reminders of upcoming offerings:
We start our subversive gratitude practice based on Melody Beattie’s Make Miracles in Forty Days next Wednesday. It feels so necessary right now. If you aren’t a paid member and want to join in the miracle fest, you can upgrade your membership here. This practice will be powerful for us all.
We have five spots (of 10) still open for RADICAL REVISION | A 3-Day Manuscript Intensive Workshop (maximum 10 participants, live, in person in Minneapolis) October 23 - 26, Thursday - Sunday
This kind of revision is deep, transformative work for both for the writing and the writer. Your manuscript will change, and so will your understanding of your writing and yourself as a writer and person. This small (10 max) in-person workshop is for writers who have or want to have a prose manuscript in progress (essay or short story, memoir or novel) and are ready to workshop it using Writing in the Dark’s signature methods of deep attention, deep curiosity, and active search for opportunity and possibility.
Please see the full description here and don’t hesitate to email me with any questions large or small (writing@writinginthedark.org, subject line: Radical Revision).
I saw that news and was thinking of you and your community. So awful. I just read this poem by Li-Young Lee and cried, being so struck by the fleetingness and fragility of life, beauty, joy, love. In the spirit of embracing everything, enjoy your time away!
From Blossoms
BY LI-YOUNG LEE
From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.
From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.
O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.
There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.
I heard of this shooting this afternoon as I was peeling off my gloves, needing a break from scrubbing my mother's oven for the last time. I'd peeled off those gloves and reached for a blackberry I'd picked, unusually small this year. As I popped the blackberry into my mouth I thought about those children, seated, in prayer on the first day of school. How they'll never again eat a blackberry or ever get the chance to clean their late mother's stove. And I thought of their parents, how sweetness will disappear for them.