93. Love Means You Breathe In Two Countries 🌍
NEW FRIENDS! Come hither:
Friends,
Happy Sunday!
Here’s five things you may find interesting and/or meaningful.
1. Reading 📒
I wrote about how Climate Emergency/Disaster is impacting my reading habits and how this guy is now about to be one of my fave authors:
2. A Poem 💌
Two Countries — Naomi Shihab Nye
Skin remembers how long the years grow
when skin is not touched, a gray tunnel
of singleness, feather lost from the tail
of a bird, swirling onto a step,
swept away by someone who never saw
it was a feather. Skin ate, walked,
slept by itself, knew how to raise a
see-you-later hand. But skin felt
it was never seen, never known as
a land on the map, nose like a city,
hip like a city, gleaming dome of the mosque
and the hundred corridors of cinnamon and rope.
Skin had hope, that's what skin does.
Heals over the scarred place, makes a road.
Love means you breathe in two countries.
And skin remembers--silk, spiny grass,
deep in the pocket that is skin's secret own.
Even now, when skin is not alone,
it remembers being alone and thanks something larger
that there are travelers, that people go places
larger than themselves.3. Watching 📽️
I love her more & more with every movie.
4. Namaste 🧘🏽♀️
Tell me about face yoga, you asked.
5. Pondering 🤔
I would ask her, "How do you treat the pain of loss? What do you do when someone has been devastated, and they can't breathe, or sleep, or eat and they feel like they have been totally evicted from their lives? How do we help them?" My very proud teacher, who knows everything about everything, who cracked a man’s neck just because she could, would always answer with absolute certainty:
“I know nothing about love. I know nothing about love."
But she would also say this: “Go to the ocean and watch the tide. The tide comes in and the tide goes out. Nothing is ours; nothing stays forever. It comes into our lives and then it fades away and that’s how it’s supposed to be. We don’t think to grab at it, and hold it, and make it a part of ourselves. And that’s why we don’t grieve it when it leaves us.”
Nothing belongs to us. Life does not belong to us. The pain is mistaking that our affection or attachment entitles us to possession. But it doesn’t. We don’t swallow the sunset just because we think it majestic, and that’s why we don’t shed a tear for the loss of light. It was never ours.
See you next Sunday.
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