constellations #27: not the same
Hi again.
I hope you are doing okay. I found last week to be hard and weird, so here is a poem from Ada Limón, which I saw in another newsletter, which I found to be a nice space to relax my brain into:
Instructions on Not Giving Up
More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.
Other things I have been thinking about this week: disagreeing with the particulars of someone’s argument, disagreeing with the merits of someone’s argument, how those things are not the same; the way individual perspectives tell individual stories, the way individual perspectives combine to create larger narratives, how those things are not the same; what it means to hear a perspective from the margin, what it means to center the margin, how those things are not the same; what it means to be on the margins, what it means to feel like you’re on the margins, what it means to be decentered, how those things are not the same; how it feels to be unsure, how it feels to be unprepared, how those things are not the same; and, if I can be a little bit snarky (mostly to myself): what it means to do the work, what it means to say you are doing the work, how those things are not the same.
Other things I have been thinking about this week: bleaching my hair; saying the wrong thing; the new moon; not saying anything; Alex Trebek’s final Jeopardy episodes; Luxardo cherries; this Life Without Buildings song.
(If you are (still) looking for news about the nation’s capital I cannot help plugging WAMU, our local public radio station. If you are interested in donating to a fund for Black mental health here is one option.)
This week, I hope we can tell the difference.
xo,
M