What if you could hold a stranger's story

in your heart?

Mornings lately have started early. We rise in the dark and move more quickly than we’d really like to move at 6am, but when the school bus pulls up at 7, 6am wake up call it is. It’s pitch black out at 6, but by about 6:35 the lake is just starting to take on a silver glow as this portion of earth creeps toward dawn. I like to think of the silver glow as tiny luminescent beings in the depths of the lake stirring, greeting their own morning, doing whatever luminescent beings do as they rise into a new day. Anyway, mornings lately have been way too early, but they hold beauty inside them, too.

Of course, getting up earlier than I’d find ideal is a minor annoyance in the grand scheme: conflict— old and new, dormant and recently heightened in tragic ways— is continuing to churn all over the world. A neighbor of mine told me he put up a peace sign in his yard in 1991 when the United States entered the Gulf war. It’s still there. He said there’s been no reason to take it down since–peace isn’t something the world as a collective knows.¹

Do you ever feel like if you were to fully consider everything you could think of that’s wrong in the world, you’d have no time or energy left for anything else? Many of the words that describe what’s happening on Planet Earth right now don’t make a person want to jump for joy or sigh in relief. The Amazon burns, while floods swallow sea-level neighborhoods. Planned power outages become business as usual to prevent wildfire, while incredible amounts of energy are used to keep indoor ski resorts going in deserts. People in high office in too many countries seem to have missed the history lessons about the horrors that result from unchecked, systematic racism and the dangers in acting from fear and entitlement. Constant economic growth remains the goal, while finite resources vanish. Work hours are long, jobs are lost, people are sick, loved ones are hurting, the dog is getting old.²

In a course I’m involved in right now, Writing the Wild, one of our prompts this month is to name what beauty exists that we can’t see, the beauty that’s invisible. Usually this sort of exercise comes easily to me³, and I found myself writing things like:

Soft breezes, the scent of woodsmoke and apples baking, sandhill cranes crooning, the warmth of the sun and the crisp cool of dusk, frog song and pileated woodpeckers thrumming.

and then I started thinking, okay, but that’s just using your other senses. What else?

A beloved thinking of me and my own thoughts about them, holding a stranger’s story in my heart and letting it break me open, feeling things fully, sharing my own story with someone else, the time between dreams and waking, understanding something new or being okay with not knowing, accepting what is but working on building something different, not surrendering to anything that isn’t based in love.

As war rages across the world, the one that sticks out to me right now is ‘holding a stranger’s story in my heart and letting it break me open’— so often the humanity of those on the opposing side gets buried. How can we keep it in the light?

I don’t know the answer. I could come up with something that sounds good, but I don’t really, truly know.

There are many things to lament and grieve. There is, of course, goodness and that which is worthy of gratitude alongside the parts that make you want to scream in frustration or shake someone. Yet sometimes (oftentimes) it’s hard to notice the good stuff.

Sadness permeates so much of the world, sometimes it feels like sorrow will just swallow you up. Life is lost in unthinkable ways all over the globe every day, and humans are capable of treating one another in horrendous ways. Yet somehow there is still beauty to be found despite all the tragic losses and mountains toward change that feel too foreboding to climb.

It can be tempting in the face of loss to look for silver linings or to say, “Just focus on what you still have.” But as Megan Devine, author of It’s Okay That You’re Not Okay, says, “Gratitude is not the Tylenol of life.” Practicing gratitude doesn’t change what’s wrong. Practicing gratitude doesn’t mean burying unwanted feelings or looking for the silver lining in a bad situation—it means acknowledging what is still good alongside the mess.⁴

Somehow we wake up each day to take steps toward a summit that we might not reach in our lifetime. We might not see the view from the top, but perhaps we can mine for the beauty that’s present along the way, even when the conditions are terrible. I can give thanks for the beauty that greets me just after dawn lifts, after the darkest hours of night, and still not want to be awake to see it. But I am awake to see it. I can pause as day breaks and imagine a world where luminescent beings fill the lake with light.

The world may be both incredibly beautiful and terribly sad, but our work in it continues. I can only hope that by fully grieving the unbelievably sad and allowing ourselves the stillness necessary to do so, we add another layer of depth to the impossibly beautiful.

In my writing class, this month our core text is Gold, by Rumi as translated by Haleh Liza Gafori. Last night I read these words:

The war is over. The band is singing. Come and dance.

What if the war was over? Would we know what to do? Would we go and dance?

A rainbow over the lake the other day. Beauty easily seen, but only if the rain falls first.

Stranger

I wonder sometimes

if we were brothers

in another life

or doctor and patient, maybe even lovers

you caring for me, or me for you

us for each other

lives intimately intertwined

as time stretches out

in a trajectory

we’ll never know, at least

not in this life.

And I ask myself

if wondering about that other life

could be enough

to heal the wounds

of this one.⁵

1. Right now, anyway. I clearly can’t speak for what the world knew, or how a different era of life interpreted what peace could look and feel like, thousands of years ago.

2. All of these blocked quotes are excerpts from Collisions of Earth and Sky.

3. “Nature poets can't walk across the backyard without tripping over an epiphany.” — Christian Wiman

4. It’s easy for me to say this as a person who is not trying to survive in a war zone.

5. This poem is included in my forthcoming collection called Just Wild Enough which is still in the editing phase. It’ll probably be available next April.