Two days in a row of good sleep and I find myself thinking about ultramarathons. Not anytime soon, but perhaps if I start running again now, it’ll feel less like an insane idea in a few years.
I’m feeling inspired to read Ada Limón. When I read the headline last month naming her as U.S. poet laureate, my instinct was to reach out and hug her, this woman I’ve never met but who I feel like I know because of the intimacy in her poetry.
Instead of a hug I did what we do these days and headed over to one of her social media accounts, and felt an even greater appreciation for her when I saw no comment, no announcement, no acknowledgement of the award. Instead she was offline, being a real human and hopefully celebrating with other real humans.
I fell in love with her work years ago, with “How to Triumph Like a Girl”, originally published in The Sun magazine in 2016. I loved it so much I painted it on a piece of cardboard and carried it on a rainy January night in protest of the 2016 election results.
That winter I was training to run a 50K, each day figuring out how to get my miles in, wanting to believe “that somewhere inside the delicate / skin of my body, there pumps / an 8-pound female horse heart, / giant with power, heavy with blood.” That poem nourished me through a hard, wet winter of change, from the 2016 election and a break-up through the ultramarathon and all the blooming goodness of spring and new love.
These days her book Bright Dead Things, sits on my bookshelf, a collection of poetry written after she left New York City for the pastures of Kentucky. I flip through the dog-eared pages and her warmth draws me in encouraging me to linger over each page. She writes about loss—sometimes unforeseeable, sometimes the outcome of a hard choice, such as choosing to stop trying to have a child that is deeply wanted.
What I admire most about her work is how, despite the hardness of life, she embraces it fully, and not in the optimistic Mary Oliver way that can sometimes feel naive or out of reach (if only we all could spend our days alone in nature!), but knowing that death and loss and failure part of life and accepting that. Fo example, from “Oh Please, Let it Be Lightning”:
Sometimes, you have to look around at the life you’ve made and sort of nod at it, like someone moving their head up and down to a tune they like.
Who needs a gratitude journal if you can just remember to nod your head once in a while? I can do that. But I am grateful for Ada, and that she’s receiving the support and recognition that she deserves. I’ll end with recommendation for this poem about motherhood, written by someone without children who understands it very well.
I'm especially loving this line: "Who needs a gratitude journal if you can just remember to nod your head once in a while?" (well, but, you can't go BUY a head nod, y'know?! Where's the fun in that? ;) ).
Also loving the image of you carrying a protest sign with a poem on it. God, remember the naivete of those days....? (not that a poem/sign is naive, just that....we had no idea, if if we basically did....)