Almost October

on letting go

It is almost October and the leaves are turning here, bright reds and yellows, just in the time for the High Holy Days.

On Rosh Hashanah we made altars and ate apples dipped in honey, saw the sunrise, listed things to let go of.

With the letting go, there is emptiness. There is more space. There is more room for wonder, awe, delight. There is more spaciousness for grief to be simple: grief.

“Grief expressed out loud for someone we have lost, or a country or home we have lost, is in itself the greatest praise we could ever give them. Grief is praise, because it is the natural way love honors what it misses.”
― Martin Prechtel, The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise

A question I’ve been spending time with this week is: how do I trust the emptiness completely? I feel a pivot coming, but I don’t know what that pivot is. I’ve watched myself predict and plan next steps, trying to justify the emptiness by investigating its contents. I’ve worried over resources and finances, created long elaborate plans, talked and talked and talked about what I want to offer the world.

When I sit in simplicity, all I want to do is write people poems— poems that work like prayers do. I want poem as hearth. Poem as warmth. As earth. As salt. As mirror, path, spell, return to self.

I want to sit with my typewriter in parks and at weddings and in libraries. I would travel miles to write you a poem in person.

This year, I am letting go of poem as riddle. Poem as difficult to parse. Poem as far-away clever. Poem as bravado.

I want poems I can hand to my cab-driver. Poems that track the complex journey of the heart.

When I do the work to get out of my own way, the (my) poems move in magical ways. I learn from them. I am humbled by them. Something happens closer to dictation, especially when the poem is in service to something bigger— pain or love or celebration.

My partner and I have been going through some tough family things, and I was amazed and fascinated when I read through poems I wrote just weeks earlier— they seemed to predict everything that would occur with such precision, all the loss and grief and freedom.

I’m thinking now of Toni Morrison who said, “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”

Language as measure, yes. And dance as measure, sunrise as measure, bread as measure.

There has to be spaciousness for poems like these to arrive. I have to trust their worth, which is beyond me. I have to clear, let go, trust the emptiness, trust even the fear of emptiness.

So here I am, saying “I don’t know” about so much. I want that phrase to be a prayer. Maybe it makes some space for something that does know. Call it universe, or love, or god.

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I'm so grateful to each one of you who read and respond and write to me. Each note or text reminds me why I started this newsletter in the first place, and I treasure them, and you.

If you need a poem, as always, request them here:

.There is no topic or question too small or too big. And I promise I’ll do my best to get out of way for them as they arrive.

With much love and many spoonfuls of honey,

Raisa