Voices from Where We Live

I'm sitting in my back patio, sun rising slowly behind towering pine trees. The birds are out, soft chirps in the distance. A curious one just landed in my raised garden bed, hoping to find something good in the soil. This is a nice change from the clang of roofers, the steady thwap-thwap-thwap of nail guns. 

Early this spring, we got hail the size of tennis balls. It seems like everyone in town was affected one way or another, and we swap insurance stories and contractor stories. Spring started out an unexpected whirlwind, then somehow kept spinning faster.

I kept traveling for work (something I normally don't do at all), my routine completely demolished. I was glad to travel to each time, but I'm also a creature of home and routine. Give me adventure, but in small measured doses that let me return back to myself easily by the end of the day. When do you thrive the most? What inspires you to breath a little easier? 

Poetry has always been a doorway for me. A way to steady the clamor thwap-thwap-thwap of thoughts running in my mind, each one always propelled and racing before I can finish thinking it. Before I got my ADHD diagnoses, I thought everyone's brain was a train yard. 

The first day I tried my new medication, I was shocked at how quiet everything was. How I could pick and hold one thought at a time. How everything seemed to slow, how I felt more present in my own bones. There are still days where I feel overwhelmed by my rolling to-do lists, where the noise turns up, and where I interrupt more than I listen. 

I haven't always known what I was thinking, competing thoughts and stressors never laying out a clear path to my emotions. I've always quieted the world by writing. I lay my thoughts out to see them. The half-formed feelings and quick ideas. I love the way that by writing, I can tie together understanding. Little disparate moments are woven together, simmering and flashing beneath the surface. I give it time, the science of being human still so full of unknown variables. And when I sit and write, I become a map maker. Sometimes, I become a weary traveler, setting down something heavy into paper so I don't have to carry it anymore. 

On Monday, my favorite poet in the world died. Andrea Gibson shifted my world in so many different ways. I first encountered their work in college. I don't remember who first introduced me -- except that I want to say: thank you, thank you, thank you. 

You can hear echoes of Andrea's influence in my cadence, in the way I string certain sounds together just to enjoy their taste. I used to worry that I sounded too much like my influences. Today, I'm so grateful for their presence that lingers. I welcome the haunting of their wisdom, the way they wove vulnerability like a spell to connect us across vast differences. 

In my early twenties, I travelled America with a backpack and a thumb. In San Franciso, I stayed with a slam poet who I'd met in Lincoln. I'd seen him perform at the crowded Meadowlark coffee shop, and wrote my first spoken word poem on my walk back home. I stand on a stage, surrounded by constellations. You never know what magical things you might set in motion just by shining your own light. 

I have so many small world stories about connection -- from that year of travel, and also the mundane traveling of my ordinary days since then. I want to get better at sharing them, of taking time to explore experience on paper.

I want to make more time to sit in my back patio and in crowded coffee shops. This winter, I went on an adventure to Curacao. Tucked in between the stress of luggage and flights, there was a submission deadline for creative work. I decided to be brave and just submit something. 

Sometimes, exciting things just happen by being brave and trying something. Two of the four poems I submitted were accepted, and the book launch happens next week. Driftless: an anthology of voices from where we live.

There are so many things that help me thrive, help me breathe a little easier. One of these is writing. Another is being in community. I'm so excited to stand in a room with other local authors, aspiring artists, curious hearts, and people finding pieces of their shared humanity reflected back through so many different types of stories. 

I think there's nothing more Andrea Gibson, my favorite poet, would have loved. Each of us, becoming little doorways to something bigger.