Let's Be the Awake Ones

My mother has written a poem every morning for nearly twenty years. In April of 2012 she decided to lead a "poem a day challenge" for writers in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts where I grew up. The inspiration quickly spread and soon people across the country were joining in. Each morning mom would send out a poetry assignment, a starting prompt for our poem of the day. We then had to craft something with the only time we had that morning. Not trying to be perfect or polished, simply putting our pens to paper. I released my first book of poems, "The Morning I Was Born" as a result of that month. In the years since, mom's annual April challenge has grown international, with people as far away as Germany and even India writing with us. These new poems are a result of another month of mom's inspiration. They mark an early passage into mid-life... with its sorrows and its mysteries and its grief and its questions and its soul-stirring cry. If we're paying attention, it seems that mid-life arrives at our doorsteps with the perfect combination of memory and pain and openness and restlessness and longing for something to shift inside us. If we surrender to it, in good faith, it often does. In these years, as I trained to become an interfaith hospital chaplain, it became vital to me to know the dimensions of my own pain so that I would not bring it to the bedside of the dying people who I accompanied. I wanted to bring the space that the pain cleared in me, not the pain itself, to the bedside. I knew the only way to do this was to meet my own grief at my doorstep and to invite it in to teach me how to live. We are made not just by the love, but by the pain of the ones who come before us. Before you can lift up your edge of the universal pain quilt, it seems to me you have to get right with your own little family patch, and then with your very own thread. I'm still working on it. But it's good honest work. I've been gathered up into the astonishingly beautiful fray.