Let’s Be The Awake Ones

Dear Friends,

In February of 2020 I was preparing to release this collection. I had just started my job as a palliative care chaplain at a large Boston hospital. In a matter of weeks the pandemic was upon us in the Northeast and all else came to a halt.

Time has moved so strangely in the eighteen months since. Sometimes it seems like many years have passed doesn’t it? Sometimes it feels fragmented, as if that all happened in a strange dream.

These new poems are a result of another month of my mom’s inspiration. Each April for national poetry month my mom leads a “poem a day challenge.” Every morning she sends out a poetry assignment, a starting prompt for our poem of the day. We then have to craft something with the only time we have that morning. Not trying to be perfect or polished, simply putting our pens to paper.

These poems mark an early passage into mid-life... with its sorrows and its mysteries and its grief and its questions and its soul-stirring cry.

If we’re paying attention, it seems that mid-life arrives at our doorsteps with the perfect combination of memory and pain and openness and restlessness and a longing for something to shift inside us. If we surrender to that longing, in good faith, it has the capacity to change us. 

In these years, as I trained to become an interfaith hospital chaplain, it became vital to me to know the dimensions of my own pain so that I would not bring it to the bedside of the people I accompanied. I wanted to bring the space that the pain cleared in me, not the pain itself to the bedside. I knew the only way to do this was to meet my own grief at my doorstep and to invite it in to teach me how to live. 

I also developed a keen lay-person’s enthusiasm for cosmology, which had everything to do with needing some sort of existential ballast. When I thought about string theory or cosmic microwave background radiation, or quantum entanglement, I felt the enormity of the Mystery wash over me.

Some of these poems speak to the grief of losing my first dog Osa years ago. They are reminders to me of the heart’s astonishing resilience. Reminders of our tremendous capacity to love. I needed them dearly this spring as I navigated the sudden loss of my beloved dog Austin to cancer.

The grief is profound. It has woven me into the grieving of the world in this year of unspeakable loss. We are none of us alone in our grief.

As I write this, the sunflowers are beaming at me against a blue sky. My vegetable garden is abundant after weeks of rain. My long swims at Walden Pond are restoring my spirit. My prayer is one of gratitude.

May these poems be gentle companions to you in this time of grief and healing.

Let’s go down to the river. Be gathered up into the grace of it all. Let’s be the awake ones.

With love,

Meg