If you’d prefer to listen to these words, you can find a recording here.
In the collapse,
at the end of everything,
I grieve and I love
with a fierceness
I’ve been saving
since the day I was born.
I write poetry when I drive, past the cows in the fields and through the shadows of the forested slopes that tumble down to meet the winding dirt road. And when I slowly slouch in the bath until my head is fully underwater, the refracted sounds of the house small and distant. And when I wash the dishes, standing at the sink, staring at the hillside and its multitudes. Little words bubble into my brain, quietly commanding. Little words calling for attention, soft like a tired ray of sunlight tossed through dirty glass to fall in a dusty corner.
I tumble into uncertainty,
trusting the darkness and the light
and the stories that made the world
‘In the beginning was the word…’?
No, not quite.
There never was; there only is.
Hello, words. It’s been awhile.
Like so many of us, much of my time and attention these past few years has been consumed by surviving — and by the radical acts of loving and grieving. Lately, as I’ve leaned into inconvenience and embraced challenges in the day-to-day in ways I haven’t for ages, I’m discovering unexpected space. And in that space comes an awareness of things that were there all along but that I’d somehow forgotten. Like these little words. They sure are quiet.
It’s funny how we forget to notice things. And it’s funny how we remember, too — in a flood.
I never met Wa’xaid Cecil Paul in person, but by circumstance I found myself writing about his life and legacy shortly after he passed in 2020. I was given a gift in that process, one that I carry with me every day.
Wa’xaid gave me the gift of quiet listening.
A Xenaksiala Elder, chief and inspiration to many, he spoke posthumously to my heart, mind, spirit and body when his sister and friends told me stories about his life. I felt his presence so strongly when his sister said to me:
“He’s always saying, ‘Listen, listen. Watch the leaves when the wind blows through the leaves. See how they dance. Listen and you can hear their music.’ ”
I felt that wind — and I feel it still.
Listening. It’s a quiet act of resistance. It’s so hard these days, when there is so much noise — and that makes it more important than ever. I’m reminded of the late Toni Morrison’s devastating 2015 essay, No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear.
“This is precisely the time when artists go to work,” she wrote in the 150th anniversary issue of The Nation. “There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language.”
“I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge — even wisdom. Like art.”
Sometimes, when my waking mind is awash with fear (and there is so much to be afraid of right now) I freeze, forgetting everything. To find movement, to release myself from the fear, I remember Wa’xaid and I listen. Inevitably, I return — to myself and to nature, where I remember I’m welcome. I walk softly. And little words walk with me, whispering in the winds that toss the leaves ahead of my feet along the driveway.
in my dreams
i am torn apart and remade
and in the waking i am suspicious —
until I sit in the meadow in the tall grass
with the crickets
and the little blue butterflies
and the fox,
who hides in the tangle of brown
under the aspens,
where I wheel with the birds
and drift with the seeds
and on the silky trail of a spider
sailing the skies.
— Matt Simmons
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