Some Days I Can’t Swallow the Sky

In honor of Andrea Gibson

Andrea Gibson died yesterday, and something in me went still. Their voice was the sound of someone holding a lamp beneath their own ribs to show the rest of us what breath could still do. They wrote poems like bandages that didn’t pretend you weren’t bleeding. They told us: grief is a form of praise.

And I believed them.

They asked themself, “Why did no one tell us that to die is to be reincarnated in those we love while they are still alive?"

And I believed that, too.

So today I put on one of their old recordings while rinsing dishes. My hands in the warm water, their voice in the air like birds startled from a field. I remember the line about loving harder when the world ends. I remember their face—tired and radiant—as they said we were made for this. I remember how they said the world needs those “who know the darkness contains truth that could bring light to its knees.”

These truths about darkness and light are what I will remind myself on mornings when I wake already broken—before coffee, before news—and then the world rushes in, too large, too fast, too loud, the way thunder enters a dog’s body: shaking the ribs, the legs, the soft meat of trust.

And when a stillness settles into my bones, a kind of stillness that isn’t peace, but overload, when I move through the day like someone underwater in a library—trying to read each ruin, absorb each sorrow, knowing I’ll drown before I finish—when I pass strangers and want to weep on their shoulders and whisper, How are we supposed to do this?, I’ll remind myself of how Andrea showed us over and over how tenderness is a kind of revolution.

And it is.

Yes, I will still wake some mornings unable to swallow the sky. But I’ll remind myself that tenderness is how we stay. It’s how we stitch. I’ll remind myself how Andrea said:

“I wish for a heart you can see straight through, for a voice that glows in the dark, and a few really good friends to say, ‘That’s the way to go.’”

So be it for all of us.

And so it is.

I’m glad now that just a couple of weeks ago I offered to facilitate a 40 day intensive to take up (and write through) a subversive gratitude practice based on Melodie Beatty’s book, Make Miracles in Forty Days.

This intensive is for paid subscribers, and we’ll be starting in August. If you’ve never participated in an intensive, they’re incredible.

I hope you’ll join us in this beautiful, transformative process. You do not need to register or sign up or anything extra—you need only to be a paid member and the intensive posts will come to you daily starting in August (exact date TBD).

You can upgrade here anytime. Our creative community is extraordinary and we’d love to welcome you.

Love,

Jeannie

And here’s some feedback on The Power of Place intensive we’re finishing this week:

The intensive we're doing right now has made me go back into sections of the novel I'm writing and infuse it with so much more emotion using place as a character instead of letting it just be a place I give a name to and little else. I'm starting to be more critical as a reader and noticing how some writers "set" their novels in a particular place, but then miss out on meaningful work that involves the place they have chosen. Work that would give so much more life to what they've written. ~Angela

This PLACE intensive has blown up all my longer essays, all written in the seventh months prior to WITD, and shorter (usually 400 word "shimmers and shards" of WITD and SCHOOL exercises.) All need to be revised. PLACE has brought me much closer to my core self. Imaging a series of concentric circles, core self being at the center. My feelings, at the time of those experiences, being in the ring just outside the core. ~Trisha

I don’t always join in the comments, but I’ve been reading and doing prompts in my own time, and it’s been akin to an MFA program for me. I am SO GRATEFUL. ~Kendall

When I first found WITD over a year ago, I remember Jeannine writing or saying something about how being part of this community would not only help me grow as a writer but also as a person. At that time, I inwardly laughed at the second part of that statement. "Yeah, right!" my cynical self said. In the time since that first impression, I can certainly say that I have grown as a writer. The big surprise to me is that I really have grown as a person as well. WITD, this glorious community of writers, has truly helped me be more complete. Thank you Jeannine. Thank you dear fellow WITDers. ~Craig Slater