ONE HEARTFUL THING #1
A gorgeous poem for when you can't find the answers
QUICK UPDATE:
In case you missed it last week: I announced the changes I decided to make in the frequency and focus of the newsletter for the next year. I will send out two free newsletters a month, and an additional third and more intimate newsletter to my paid subscribers. The next Heart’s Content newsletter will arrive next Tuesday, March 21.
When I stumble across something I want to share with you during the in-between times, I’ll send it off to you like this. It will be ONE HEARTFUL THING.
This poem offers comfort in praise of what we cannot know. A timely gift shared with me by my friend, Gina.
in praise of i don’t know
by Maya Stein
Mostly, what washes up at the beach isn’t whole, though our eyes are peeled
for the perfect form of, say, a perfume bottle, or an old coin, or a message from the dead.
Instead, what reveals itself as the tide pulls back is a sea of uncertainty, cryptic shards
with the vaguest clues whose answers are scattered
in places likely too far from here.
We will never retrieve them, not in the way our mind craves assembly.
But look how, against the late season light, a filmy beauty descends, nearly silencing
the clamor of what pulls at our sleeves to solve. What if we could let ourselves rest
for a little while in this halo of I don’t know, feel its soft touch against our urgent skin.
What if the thing in our hands, and every fractured remainder, is its own answer. What if
leaning into the wobbly shapes of our lives is another kind of sweetness and gold.
….with you in this halo of I don’t know,
xo Mary
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