darken and brighten: some thoughts and a poem

i will open my hands...

Everything feels shaky and strange in the world. In the conflict? Argument? between the country of my birth and the country where half of my family is.

And I am in the woods, helping to prepare for a Japanese music festival in Thailand. I am sleeping in a tent, helping artists from China and Turkey and Japan gather materials and paint, decorating spaces with fabric and flowers, and making “save water” signs.

I was here in 2020, too, when we thought the COVID-19 virus was something in China.

I was here last year, singing peace songs in Arabic and Hebrew and all the languages.

Maybe I should have been louder around the time of the election. Would it have made a difference? A drop in a bucket. A voice in a storm. I don’t know. I know that I find that man, the bully in charge, to be detestable. He lies and his lies hurt people.

There is something about being among people from around the world. I see them with new eyes this year. The Turkish girl on my decoration team tells me about how Turkey has changed. “It wants to be Iran,” she says. To control women. To control people. It wasn’t that way before.

The man from Bashkortostan in Central Asia, tells me about traveling over land to get here but needing to fly to Malaysia from India because he couldn’t pass through Myanmar.

We are all very connected. And so many of the people I am working with now have endured trouble in their countries. Have struggled with governments that don’t care for them. My husband’s family and their ancestors have lived with governments that don’t care for them.

The people resist. The people continue to make art and sing songs and live good lives.

I am not doom-saying. I think we have great possibilities to make the structures of our countries right. But so much that seemed impossible happened in a few weeks. And it hit me doubly—two countries that have been my home. Friends still?

I simply see that I have taken a lot for granted. And as much as I have always listened to the stories of people from around the world, I somehow saw myself as removed from them.

I wake up and pray. I whisper Psalm 23.

I read the words of Psalm 73: Therefore pride is their necklace; violence covers them as a garment…They set their mouths against the heavens, and their tongue struts through the earth….Like a dream when one awakes, O Lord, when you rouse yourself, you despite them as phantoms…

We make things. We gather. We think about the bigness of the world: both the people in it and nature itself. We give and feed and dance.

We write poetry.

darken and brighten

how can the days continue to darken and brighten?
and the birds in the fields swoop, rise and fall
one nearly over my shoulder, a drongo, flitting past
we turn on the sphere, the grass dries again
missing the rain in the hottest season, we walk
and water, walk and water, i feel everything
crunching underfoot. my longing rises up inside me
and i turn back toward my family again
we are here now, we turn with the seasons
i will open my hands, soften my heart, again.

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