Alexandersmap

    Tag: Naomi Shihab Nye

    • Simply Do

      “I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous, or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular, but because it never forgot what it could do.” — Naomi Shihab Nye (with a nod to @MayaCPopa for showing the way)

      Fame is overrated, contribution is where it’s at. We are utilitarian at the root of it, here to be productive in our time, whatever our calling, lighting the way until we pass the torch.

      We tend to lean into complicated. This is a distraction from the beautiful truth, a collective turn away from the briefness of being, a wish before the song fades and we blow out the candles. It’s contribution that lives beyond wishes.

      Poetry stares the truth in the eye, wanting nothing more than to face it. I wished somedays I was a better poet, a better writer. I’d forgotten what I could do. Now I simply do.

    • What to Do With Our Time

      you will never catch up.
      Walk around feeling like a leaf
      know you could tumble at any second.
      Then decide what to do with your time.
      ― Naomi Shihab Nye, The Art of Disappearing

      I’ve fallen in love with the bullet journal again. It’s not so much because of a love of organization, it’s more a need for organization that draws me deep into the pages of a blank notebook. Each X drawn through a bullet is uniquely satisfying, each habit represented as a filled in square that designates a day when I did what I told myself I was going to do fuels a desire to keep the streak alive one more day. As lines grow on paper day-after-day like a sideways bar graph, lies we tell ourselves become as apparent as the promises kept. How we reconcile each line tells us who we really are.

      If there’s one fatal flaw in the life of a busy soul, it’s following through on all that we want for ourselves. There’s only so many things we can say yes to, and endless things we must dismiss with a no. The yes’s seem so trivial stacked next to the no’s, but we forget that the collection of no’s is ours too. No’s matter a great deal in keeping us from tumbling. We aren’t leaves in the wind, to borrow Nye’s lovely analogy, we’re purposeful humans finding our way in the world.

      We must decide what we won’t be good at in this lifetime. We must see the path through the wilderness that carries us to a place where we might thrive. Breaking up is hard to do because we don’t want to let others down, but when we don’t break from things that don’t matter to us we’re letting ourselves down. Just who are we breaking up with? We must choose identity over misguided altruism. The world will ask for everything we’ve got. The best response in such moments is “Thank you, but that’s not for me”.

      Decide what to be and go be it. No isn’t fun, but it’s not ours to hold onto. The trade-off, becoming, is where the real fun is, for this is where we set our sights on big yes’s and watch them grow.

    • The Ones That Got Away

      Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
      Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
      transparent scarlet paper,
      sizzle like moth wings,
      marry the air.

      We’re into the long days now in New England. Days of early light and lingering twilight well into the evening. I wake to the sound of fishermen racing to seize their moment, wondering at the urgency of a favorite fishing spot when the entire bay is full of fish. They fish with purpose. Purpose brings intensity and competition. I know these things, even if I don’t share their commitment to fishing before the sun rises. I use that time for other things.

      So much of any year is flammable,
      lists of vegetables, partial poems.
      Orange swirling flame of days,
      so little is a stone.

      I don’t understand the lure of fishing but I understand the pull of the open water. I know the call of the early morning air. I imagine the Striper are running just below the surface as I watch the water. The lilacs are out and so they must be too. Lilacs come and go so quickly, don’t they? So, it seems, do the Striper.

      Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
      an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
      I begin again with the smallest numbers.

      Every year we go through this, these fishermen and women out on the water and me watching from shore. The boats change and so do the characters in them, but still the fish run with the tides. This year feels more optimistic than last year. We’ve all come through something together, even if we aren’t quite there yet. But the Striper don’t care a lick what we’ve been through.

      Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,
      only the things I didn’t do
      crackle after the blazing dies.
      -Naomi Shihab Nye, Burning the Old Year

      So many of these moments disappear like sparks into the night sky. We burn through days like firewood, and make the most of so few of them. So much of our time burns away, and we’re left holding on to scraps of memorable. While contemplating the ones that got away.