It’s hard to weep when there is work to be done

a poem for the pain

I’ve been circling a sadness for the past few days. I’m positive I’m not alone in this… the heaviness of the world is thick and pervasive right now. I feel it in everything, everywhere. My body aching over what she cannot control or even completely understand.

I had already decided earlier this week to postpone my next Love Letter until next week, giving space and time to allow all of our bodies to breathe into the silence. Because right now, silence feels more purposeful, more intentional, more honoring. More True.

And then, this morning, in that silence, this poem came through. I don’t usually share poems immediately after I write them — they’re a lot more vulnerable for me than essays and letters. But this is my playground. I am not here to be perfect. I am here to tell the truth and enjoy the sensation of doing so. Especially in the hard seasons. After all, as Jack Gilbert once wrote, years ago, “We must risk delight… we must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world.”

It’s hard to have a body in a world like this — to remember yourself as a raw, exposed, vulnerable, aging, aching Being. Which is what the hard seasons and their accompanying emotions do. Reminding you that your body is the precise location of your surrender; your partner in awakening unto more sensation, more magnitude, more vitality. Even when it may not seem so.

I cannot lift the heavy things. I cannot lift them for you and I cannot lift them for me. And, honestly, I wouldn’t dare to, even if I could. The heavy things are what press us into substance and form. Or as I once wrote, years ago, “It’s the hard things that fill you and remind you how to overflow. It’s the tension that keeps you limber, the friction that softens your sharp, remember? And only disturbed ground allows anything to grow.”

And so, instead, I hope this poem helps you see through the illusion of aloneness in it.

I hope, through this, you can feel me hold your hand.

Because honestly I need to feel you hold mine, too.

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Tonight, I will commune.

I will sit with the sadness,

in the silence,

among the pain.

I will enter, again, into the enormous family of things.

Remember my place.

Hear the inconsolable cry of humanity.

Shoulder the weight of it

the way a prophet,

priest,

or poet

must.

Tonight, I will touch the electric, aching thing

that is aliveness.

That is frailty.

That is fear.

And I will feel

— even as I don’t believe

in very much of anything.

Even though I sense it may swallow me whole.

Hell or highwater, however,

I have decided

I will not run.

Because there is a heaviness I have not held.

Afraid for it to derail me, untie me, undo me.

Afraid to witness my own weakness within it —

Afraid.

Afraid.

Afraid.

Finally, I speak the truth:

I am afraid

of all that I cannot control.

Which is to say:

of everything.

Tonight, I cannot out-run, out-ask, or out-cling.

I cannot lie in the quiet.

It’s hard to have a body in a world like this.

It’s hard to weep when there is work to be done.

It’s hard to breathe when the grief chokes your chest.

It’s hard to dance in the midst of suffering.

It’s hard to remember how to sing.

It’s hard to love when the tenderness of it tears you open.

Exposes you like the raw and quivering thing

you are.

It’s hard to have a body in a world like this.

But I do.

And tonight, I refuse to forget

that she is here, always, with me.

Inviting me, deeper, always, into surrender.

Into understanding

that there is so much I will never understand.

So much to accept that I cannot change.

Cannot heal.

And yet,

in every breath,

every gasp and sob and grip and release

she is still here.

My body.

Begging me.

To remember.

To feel it all.

To feel a little more of everything.

Tonight, my body will speak to me of secret things.

That the way of Hope is always this:

More presence.

More sensation.

More humanity.

Tonight, I will commune.

I will listen.

I will stay.