Poetic Revelations: Uplift!
In Concert with Your Inner Sunbeam
“I feel the promise of spring, not as something fleeting, but an emerging solidness of things.” ~ Monisha Mittal
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Because Human-ing is harder than Adulting. This is a weekly publication for heart-centered warriors, swimming through this thing called Life.
Selected Readings:
A Wild and Precious Life: Remembering Andrea Gibson, Amber Tamblyn
At Last the New Arriving, by Gabrielle Calvocoressi
How the Worst Day of My Life Became the Best, Andrea Gibson
Dear Embodied Hearts and Dancing Souls,
The world is burning. My path of truth and peace still comes from a focus on my inner journey. Right now, I’m playing with an emerging inner radiance. Did you know there is a kind of trapdoor in our bodies, and if the lid is lifted, a beam of light shines through?
Listening and the world. As I continue to seek nourishment from their spirit, I read the memoriam Amber Tamblyn wrote about their friend and poet Andrea Gibson in Poetry Foundation. Found this gem. After the 2024 election, Andrea posted a letter in response to a friend’s despair by admitting they stared blankly at the wall for an hour. Sitting with it, they were reminded of the moment the oncologist told them that the medical system could no longer do anything for them. Amidst the “expected fear and grief”,” they said they also felt relief. It was the first time they felt “my life is in my hands.” And this is the phrase they shared:
Our lives are in our hands. They always were, but it’s clearer than ever now. ~ Andrea Gibson
I want to listen to this. I want to ask what I want from this life and give my hands over to it. Especially during these destructive times, I find it a powerful question affecting everything from my house cleaning schedule to the writing assignments I take on and when and why I might return to a job. How do I want to show up, where and why? Same for you:
How do you want to show up, where, for who and why?
Under this type of collective awakening is a shift in purpose, motivation, and assumptions. Because:
When the so-called leader of the free world abdicates caring for the lives of its citizens, everyone must find a way to stop following and start leading.
Denver’s mayor has now ordered its police force to detain any ICE officers who assault or shoot residents.
The Uplift. Today something returned. The lightness of a spring breeze—not just metaphorically, but in me too. Nearly a year’s worth of weight and stress and uncertainty fell away. I felt light, uplifted—buoyant even.
I have many muses; I trust you do too. The one I want to thank now is the one that guides my fingers, taps out something akin to the sense of my feelings, and finds the exact poem to match. This time I simply typed in “uplift” in my search.
This is the poem I want to share with you today.
At Last the New Arriving
by Gabrielle Calvocoressi
Like the horn you played in Catholic school
the city will open its mouth and cry
out. Don't worry 'bout nothing. Don't mean
no thing. It will leave you stunned
as a fighter with his eyes swelled shut
who's told he won the whole damn purse.
It will feel better than any floor
that's risen up to meet you. It will rise
like Easter bread, golden and familiar
in your grandmother's hands. She'll come back,
heaven having been too far from home
to hold her. O it will be beautiful.
Every girl will ask you to dance and the boys
won't kill you for it. Shake your head.
Dance until your bones clatter. What a prize
you are. What a lucky sack of starsDesert, Cauldron, Uncertainty. The lines about the fighter with his eyes swelled shut who’s told he won is when I knew this was right for me.
Remember about a year ago, when I entered some kind of vast desert and watched my underlying motivations dry up, one after the other? It wasn’t depression (not even close), more like a terrifying nothingness. I was lucky to find others who had hewn this road, including Martha Beck who compared it to Dante’s journey, just when you think you’ve given up enough, there’s more.
And there was! The desert was followed by the cauldron of my husband’s illness and our joint unemployment. Just like the trials of the world, my trials were about stripping away motivations and assumptions.
In times like these, Andrea counsels in their poem “Instead of Depression“:
from Instead of Depression by Andrea Gibson Hibernating animals don’t even dream. It’s okay if you can’t imagine Spring. Sleep through the alarm of the world.
The strange thing is that circumstances haven’t changed much. The uncertainty about not having a map in real life is still the same!
Yet, I am finally feeling lighter. I am more inclined to say No to most initiatives than I am to say Yes. When I do say “Yes”, it is much stronger. I can’t say much about what or how this happened—just that it did.
And today, the uplift was real. It was 82 degrees outside in March. An unexpected, expensive medical bill was waived in minutes. Our cat came through emergency dental surgery quite well. I designed a pre-launch for my husband’s book which created a real wave of support and purchases.
I feel the promise of spring, not as something fleeting, but an emerging solidness of things.
The Sunbeam and the Ring. For months now I’ve held a focus with daily discipline in a way I’ve never known before. With only twenty pages left in my book, I lifted my head up last week and took a break.
For a couple of days, I walked around a bit dazed. Then, I felt a familiar depression at my edge, even the faint chemical numbness began to appear. “Ah,” my awareness said, “this is me without intense purpose and focus. Who am I now?” I was so surprised to find myself so close to depression again!
Right next to it, I noticed my sorrow hovering, also on an edge. If I walked toward it, it had the same acute signature it always has: “No one wants me, no one sees me.”
This sorrow has history and depth so that’s just a fractal of it. This time, instead of succumbing to either emotion, I could walk up to these feelings and feel their intensity, or I could walk back and feel them soften.
When I turned to my guides, it wasn’t to fix any feeling, but simply to ask: what feeling would most serve me now? In an instant, a sunbeam energy emerged —steady, solid and easy to rest in. Interestingly, when I wrote about the trying times in The Dance of Confidence and Humility, I shared Mark Nepo’s quote from The Book of Soul:
Eventually, all the love, suffering, and humility we go through wear away our walls of resistance until Spirit shines from within us like an inner sun. ~ Mark Nepo
By midday, I could feel all these energies at once: the depression, the sorrow, the sunbeam—like points on a circle in my belly, like a ring! I could sense them all at once. I didn’t push any away, but chose to breathe into that sunbeam until it filled me.
The magic of the uplift is that it showed up on its own and that it felt solid enough to trust, even amidst the same uncertainty. Like the prize fighter, I felt a little stunned at first. Just like the prize fighter, the uplift isn’t about overcoming anything but being in concert with this inner sunbeam. Again, I share a fractal from Andrea Gibson:
from How the Worst Day of My Life Became the Best by Andrea Gibson By nighttime, I was intimate with the difference between tying my laces and tuning the string section of my shoes, made a symphony of walking away from everything that did not want my life to sing.
This energy of renewal pervades my body, heart and mind. I get to direct its focus.
Humility this Time. Sharing this with a friend she asks me with eyes of wonder, “But Monisha, how did you identify that question for your guides?”
I listened to her heart-felt question until I heard the answer. It’s true—my question required personal humility. Looking back at all of it, and consistent with Martha Beck’s summary of Dante, I have come to realize I never know what’s next, what I may be asked to give up, make room for or let in. All I know is I can stop acting or reacting out of fear.
Perhaps this is the true path of being “in concert with” your inner sunbeam. We can choose to be less scared and possibly, listen with more humility.
Then, allow that sunbeam to fill you up.
With so much love for your unfolding. Stay #heartwoke!
Monisha
When we belong to ourselves, we move freely. ~ Monisha Mittal
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