IT’S JUST A PHASE
a fresh poem, from a painful season
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And now, a fresh poem—the words that are getting me through yet another hard stretch:
IT’S JUST A PHASE
When I’m too sick to think clearly or even leave my bed I call my life empty pain turns days to dread my self seems a shadow the light within me wanes I fear I am fading vanishing in vain but the shadow is just a sliver the tides within us tell we are moon more than candle never snuffed nor quelled don’t call your sick self empty this ache is just a clue when we can’t see the moon that’s when we call her new.
Gathering perspective is harder than gathering beauty.
When everything is too hard for too long, my vision gets obscured by overwhelm. I wonder if my life will ever get better. I wonder if I will get to have “a life.”
I’ve been in a bad flare of Lupus and Ankylosing Spondylitis for a month and what started as harder mornings and nights turned into all-out debilitating joint pain and fatigue two + weeks ago. I’ve been living in bed and too sick to think clearly enough for simple things like emailing my editor back and editing descriptive copy for my next book.
Before my medical crisis two years ago, I would forage as often as I could, mind and spirit grounded in the soil that holds mushrooms and their mycelium, beetles and bugs, wild onion and wildflowers. I’d gather specimens both to learn their names and to love their existence. It became a practice of prayer to gather the color and life I could find on any given day and to arrange that beauty into a whole. A walk in the woods never holds exactly what we want, but it always holds something worth our attention and amazement.
Two days before being bed-bound yet again, I felt the urge to forage.
I love the impermanence of the practice of foraged collages. I like that I can only use what I find. I like the challenge of looking at the base of trees and across stretches of meadows to see what good is hiding in plain sight. I love the surprise of finding a mushroom after stretches of seeing none. I love how that surprise shapes my soul in acceptance and accedence, a tidal dance of desire to seek goodness but also accept the goodness that is found. I gather and then arrange. At the end, I swipe away the scraps into a heap in the soil of my own yard and all that remains is an image, like the one above that I made before this flare put me back in bed. An impermanent icon.
The act of gathering goodness, of arranging found color and texture, teaches me how to see.
Perhaps even in the dark.
The poem above came to me a few days ago, soul-weary from sickness. No matter how many flares of disease I have endured, when I am in the shadow, it is hard to trust there will be more light.
Sometimes the simplest thoughts can give us something solid on which to rest.
No one talks enough about the practical reality of being so sick you cannot string together sentences nor read them, of being in a body in such pain that nothing is possible for your day except enduring it.
When I heard my heart sorrowing, shriveling, I struggled to listen with kindness until one thought became the scimitar of shame, letting in just enough light to see myself more clearly.
When we cannot see the moon, we call her a New Moon.
New.
When her light looks like it is gone, she is new.
What if this is also true of you?
The forest is not the only place I can forage.
Today, I gathered things I never would have sought for myself, except out of need and desperation to live as long and as fully as I can. I emptied a sharps container and arranged what I found—an expired Epi pen, a ghostlike Huber needle from the port days that nearly killed me, a pile of biologic injections for Lupus and Ankylosing Spondylitis.
I pointed the arrow of my physical needs upward, a visual sentence of my spirit’s direction.
There is beauty, found not simply in flowers but in our fragility, ready to be gathered in grief as much as glory. Our hands still hold the power to arrange both the wild and discarded pieces of our world into patterns that shape strength and peace.
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