Wild gratitude

So I just want to say thank you, although those words are inadequate for how much your friendship means to me. Especially those of you who have sent me such warm fb messages of late, and keep coming out for readings no matter how cramped the venue :) 


The Hem's reading on Tuesday, I was expecting it to be sort of meh. I was definitely having an off day; stress / anger were eating me; I was totally scattered and cerebral and just not feeling it. 


[the ambient temperature of my work area here, off the living room, has got to be over 80 degrees, so forgive me if this starts to sound loopy]


But you know? Hem's turned out to feel sort of transcendent. I don't know if it was the act of reading these particular poems or the audience's reception --it was all new stuff and vulnerable material, most of it revised with no outside input) --but I'm still feeling buoyant. [Like maybe I'm okay just as I am.] Joan made a recording for me, which was fabulous... I'll share it as soon as I figure out how to chop it up into individual poems.


I love the end of this poem "Wild Gratitude" by Edward Hirsch. Here's a link to the whole thing. But these lines...

"...teach us how to praise—purring 
In their own language, 
Wreathing themselves in the living fire."

There was a person at that reading who asked me after, in tones that sort of implied he was pretty confident of the answer, "Are you a Christian?" I was like, "Nope." He said, "Are you sure?" I was like, "Pretty sure..." He seemed to want something so I shrugged and said, "I was raised Catholic but now I'm ..." "You're what?" "Severely lapsed." I was really hoping that he wasn't going to ask me to accept Jesus as my personal savior or anything, but the conversation did not go in that direction.


Bad things were done to me in the name of religion. And I'm pretty over it... sort of... but I get tense when people try to pin me down on what I believe. But praise as a kind of purr... I can feel that.

I think sometimes I get so wrapped up in my head that I forget how to praise. And by praise I mean give profound thanks. To readers of the blog who pop up out of the ether. To friends who buy me dessert for dinner. To Mike who "fixed" my text-to-speech problem by tweaking a deeply-buried setting. To a soon-to-be teaching colleague who did not make me feel hideous [or should I say confirm my already-in-place feeling of hideousness] when I asked for help. It feels good to be so grateful. Almost like purring.

To reiterate: 

I asked for help from a person I have not yet met [read: stranger], who doesn't know me, and I got acceptance instead of rejection. I'm writing it down here so that I can attempt to cement this lesson in my mind. I know it will fall out soon enough but maybe I can get a few more days of that interesting hopeful feeling.