Tag: Naomi Shihab Nye

So Much Happiness

so much happiness…in a boat by the Amalfi Coast

SO MUCH HAPPINESS

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
A wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to
pick up,
Something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs
or change.

But happiness floats.
It doesn’t need you to hold it down.
It doesn’t need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
And disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
And now live over a quarry of noise and dust
Cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
It too could wake up filled with possibilities
Of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
And love even the floor which needs to be swept,
The soiled linens and scratched records….

Since there is no place large enough
To contain so much happiness,
You shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
Into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
For the moon, but continues to hold it, and to share it,
And in that way, be known.

~ Naomi Shihab Nye ~

I’ve been absent from this space for a few weeks. I’ve been preoccupied with walking in preparation for another long walk in Italy. This time, a section of the Via Francigena, one of the oldest of Europe’s many pilgrimages. In three weeks, I’ll be bound for Rome where, the Fairweather and Travel gods willing, I’ll land, secure my train ticket at the airport, and continue to one of Tuscany’s famous hill towns, San Miniato. There, I’ll stay in a bright, spacious apartment with a view onto vineyards and hills, to rest, recalibrate and meet my walking mates four days later.

This summer, I’ve walked close to four hundred kilometers in our river valley, rain or mostly shine, and mostly alone. When I’m not listening to podcasts or audio books, I’m aware of my shifting moods. Those uninvited guests – the sadness or irritation, self-doubt, and even anger – most often at the beginning of a walk when fatigue and loneliness weigh, when I’ve yet to find my stride, or my place within the nature that is surrounding me. When I stop to notice the beauty holding me, to breathe, to give myself a few words of encouragement for persevering, then happiness and gratitude arrive.

While this wasn’t the year for peaches here – cold froze the Okanagan orchards – we did have a bumper crop of raspberries with many eaten fresh and many more frozen for winter muffins, galettes, and smoothies. And that errant red currant seed dropped by a bird a couple of years ago bore just enough berries to make my first ever two small jars of glistening garnet-coloured jelly. So much happiness in a spoon, spread on sourdough seedy rye toast.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Standing Back

STANDING BACK

If this is the best you can do, citizens of the world,
I resolve to become summer shadow,
turtle adrift in a pool.
Today a frog waited in a patch of jasmine
for drizzles of wet before dawn.
The proud way he rose when water
touched his skin –
his simple joy at another morning –
compare this to bombing,
shooting, wrecking,
in more countries than we can count
and ask yourself – human or frog?

– Naomi Shihab Nye, Voices in the Air, 2018 –

Talk about prescience.
This poem was published in 2018, though most likely written months, if not years earlier. Given the poet’s Palestinian father, Naomi Shihab Nye has always had her eye on, and heart attuned to the chronic strife in her father’s homeland.

I wrote at the bottom of the poem’s page, after yesterday’s reading and in response to growing tensions and extended involvements, “Are we poised for WW3? And too, Ukraine and Russia since February 2022…” My question as reasonable as the poet’s, but I pray, not prescient.


I’ve been away for a several days, hence the pause. Writing, but not in this space. It’s nice to be back until I set off again in a few weeks. Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Cross the Sea

CROSS THE SEA

A girl in Gaza
speaks into a table microphone:
Do you believe in infinity?
If so, what does it look like to you?

Not like a wall
Not like a soldier with a gun
Not like a ruined house
bombed out of being
Not like concrete wreckage
of a school’s good hope
a clinic’s best dream

In fact not like anything
imposed upon you and your family
thus far
in your precious thirteen years.

My infinity would be
the never-ending light
you deserve
every road opening up in front of you.

Soberly she nods her head.

In our time voices cross the sea
easily
but sense is still difficult to come by.

Next girl’s question:
Were you ever shy?

– Naomi Shihab Nye, Voices in the Air, 2018

I’m sitting at a worktable in my public library typing this post for tomorrow’s drop. We’ve been without WIFI in our home office for nearly a week (hence why no Monday post). WOW! How dependent are we on this technology? It’s tax time. My husband does all our investing online. Bills to be paid by the month end. Waiting to print time sensitive return labels. Looming project deadlines. I’ve managed with my phone but wonder how much I’m over the data limit and how much the costs will be. My neck aches from being hunched over…texting and tapping what I can to stay in touch, be responsive. So, in this moment, I’m reminded how much I enjoy and appreciate my library, surrounded by stacks, students plugged in working at other tables, surrounded by full-length windows.

It’s quintessential springtime in Alberta. After several days of sun, warm weather, and melted snow – after getting off really easy with winter – the temperature dropped below freezing and snow fell for most of the day. I took a leisurely start to my day with a coffee date being canceled. Sipping my Americano, in the flat white light of the living room, quiet with snow gently falling outside, I began reading this volume of poetry, waiting on my shelf for just this moment. Needing some shoring up given another week of rejections and trepidation about the manuscript I’m revising, I was not disappointed, as even its epigraph began to set me straight:

“Stay humble, blend, belong to all directions.
Fly low, love a shadow. And sing, sing freely,
never let anything get in the way of your singing,
not darkness, not winter,
not the cries of flashier birds, not the silence
that finds you steadfast
pen ready…”

Naomi Shihab Nye

Then this, the first sentence of her introduction:

“Poet Galway Kinnell said, ‘To me, poetry is someone standing
up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible,
what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment.'”

And this, to open the first section, “Messages,”:

Broken pencil
Broken pen
Maybe today
I’ll write my best poem

Well maybe not a poem but a post. And maybe not my best, but enough. Enough to be thankful for Palestinian-American poet and educator, Naomi Shihab Nye who first came to my attention when I read her well known “Gate a4” and signature, “Kindness.” Enough to let her cultural perspective and experiences teach me, as she was taught when teaching a poetry workshop in an international high school in Japan, the word Yutori – “life space” – the place and space “in which to stand back to contemplate what we are living and experiencing. More spaciousness in being, more room in which to listen.” (Voices in the Air, xiii) And enough to remember a girl in Gaza, or Ukraine, or Israel, Afghanistan, Haiti, Ethopia, Yemen, Russia…asking profound questions, being deeply heard, and wishing her the infinity of the never-ending light she so deserves.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Please Forgive This Interruption

Berber woman on the Sahara fetching water

PLEASE FORGIVE THIS INTERRUPTION

Please forgive this interruption.
I am forging a career,
a delicate enterprise
of eyes. Yours included.
We will meet at the corner,
you with your sack lunch,
me with my guitar.
We will be wearing our famous street faces,
anonymous as trees.
Suddenly you will see me,
you will blink, hesitant,
then realize I have not looked away.
For one brave second
we will stare
openly
from borderless skins.
This is my salary.
There are no days off.

~ Naomi Shihab Nye ~

Monday’s post, Our First Panniversary, struck a chord for readers, resonating with their own growing pandemic impatience, frustration, grief and weariness. This week, again, reading of lockdowns in Italy, France and Germany; and another white man going on a shooting spree in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, aimed at Asian Americans prompted posting this poem. My reminder to pause, notice, see, and really take you in through my eyes into my heart.