Elizabeth Maynard

Kafka

There are some things that one can only achieve by a deliberate leap in the opposite direction. One has to go abroad in order to find the home one has lost.
Franz Kafka

There is more than one
way to unearth your life.  Time has
gone before you to
mark out a way to go:
forward, inward, onward, abroad
to wander in fields and in
markets, creating an order
among the days. To
know the terrain, to find
the molten center within yourself, the
still point, a home
within your own breath, one
beat of your heart has
ensured you can never be lost

Enough

At some point in life, the world’s beauty becomes enough.
Toni Morrison

This is the moment
when I allow myself
to be overtaken
by this, all of this

Allow my heart to be broken
unmended and undone
call it friend
just as I find it

Alexandria

If you do not hope, you will not find what is beyond your hope.
St. Clement of Alexandria

What is hope, but imagination
lifted from the ordinary?
Pahts to lead us, one day
to something we might love

and the belief
that even our own
                 small
                      selves
might walk those ways
into those lives

Curve

I want to look at you
the curve of your lip

Feel the soft stubble of
your chin against my cheek

Hear you swallow
before you speak

My name a gentle rumbling
in your chest

Come Here

come sit with me here
while I unravel

come lie with me here
while it all unwinds

this clockwork universe
ticks on and on

beautiful in its precision
undeterred by our worries

so in the midst of this
great cosmic gyre

come sigh with me here
and let the world spin on

The Perfect is Often the Enemy of the Good

The only way to be
perfect is to breathe
is to put feet to the ground
often without knowing
the way.  Your only
enemy is the insistence
of some other voice
the argument you might be
good if only you were different

Finest Hour

Be in your finest hour
she said
quoting a man she knew
his wise words

Is this transformation
into a most miraculous
version of myself?

Or realization that every moment
whatever its character
is stunningly, simply, fine?

I may spend what is left
of my gentle days
learning what it is to
be in my finest hour

Grief

How many griefs can be hidden in one body
and still she rises up and greets the day?

Better

There is ever only this:
longing for the people
we might be
and the ones we hoped
would love us more
or better than they did

Listen

Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?
Mary Oliver

Listen:  it's time to face this thing you
are fearing.  Hiding can't protect
you in the end, but keep you from 
breathing in the midst of this

Just stop here for a minute

A life of being loved will be better
Little by little you will let yourself relax
and lean into others' strength
Calling yourself a coward is unkind
It is better to call yourself, your true self
a lover.  This is what you need, a 
life, a love, full to overflowing