My friends from The Way Back To Ourselves and I have worked together to create something really exciting and stunning: a poetry podcast called The Poetry Corner. The first episode is out, and it features 9 poets reading their original work. The whole thing is about 22 minutes, and it’s dazzling. Enjoy!
and p.s. if YOU would like to be featured in Episode 2—let me know! We’re compiling poets now.
If you’re anything like me, you’re toast by this time of the year.
You spend a lot of time being with it, and summer is summoning you like a beautiful siren. You want ice cream, whimsy, bare feet, gentleness.
My advice? Fall into it. Here are 5 Ways to Be Gentle with Yourself This Summer.
1. Remember that not everything needs to be explained.
A couple of weeks ago, I sat on the porch of a friend of mine and we spent the morning talking about faith things. As I sipped coffee and plucked strawberries from the bowl in my lap, I tried to explain what I’ve been sensing God saying to me lately. I talked about what I’ve seen in my mind’s eye while praying, what impressions have inundated my consciousness at unexpected times, and what dreams have come into my subconscious while I’ve tossed and turned at night.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It sounds crazy when I say it out loud. I guess, I guess—I guess I just can’t find the words to explain what I know…or actually even how I know it.”
As a meaning-maker by nature, not being able to find the right words to explain things feels odd, painful, confusing. I want to wrestle the mysteries of the world into submission. I want to know them, to iterate them, and to own them.
But my friend leaned in and said, “I’ll tell you what a friend told me long ago when I was new in my faith—he said, ‘Why do you feel the need to explain everything?’”
And since she said that, I’ve been asking myself the same thing. And let me tell you—it’s liberating to take a break from meaning-making for a while.
Just today, I got a text that someone in our church is going through something impossible, and I was asked to pray. I’m not usually a physical pray-er (as in, I just pray-on-the-go), but I got this sense that I should lay right down on the floor and wholeheartedly devote my brainpower and heart to that need.
And this time, instead of talking to God about silver-linings and asking him to help me understand how something so bad can happen to someone he loves so much (p.s. we’re ALL someone he loves so much), I recognized today that I didn’t have the energy, the soul, or the mental capacity to try to make sense of the senseless. So instead I just said, “I don’t GET IT, GOD.” Out loud.
And it felt like a giant confession, a huge exhale, a major relief.
Other things that seem to exist outside of words for me these days:
The way I feel when dappled light spreads across our white comforter in the morning, a shifting in my sense of self as a creative, why lilacs cause such a visceral reaction in me that I want to burst into song and cry all at once.
What’s existing outside of words for you these days? Can you allow yourself to let go of the desire to make meaning around it, and instead just accept that this, too, is truth—even without the language to explain it?
2. Find a way to be (reasonably) irresponsible.
On Saturday night we went to Portland for dinner and a concert for my husband’s birthday. We went all out: my sister and brother-in-law watched the kids, and by 4:30 PM, we had hit the town running. We listened to Margaritaville radio with the windows down, ate fried oysters with our fingers, and hung from each other like teenagers when Charley Crockett wooed us off our feet with $10 Cowboy.
For about 7 hours straight, I had the rare sensation of not being responsible for anybody. Auntie and Uncle had the kids, and I had on my high heels. I didn’t feel the need to answer calls, or create content, or even to make a plan.
I was liberated to just have fun (and I cannot tell you how rarely I ‘just have fun’ for the sake of fun). And something beautiful happened:
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