Coming Alive When No Day Is Given
I’ve always been fascinated by the differences in cultural expectations around expressions of emotion, especially around things like grief. I remember watching the nightly news as a boy and seeing the public mourning and grief that people expressed in far off places as typically white-bodied, emotionally-flat interpreters translated the words of the bereaved into English over images of tremendous anguish. I had very few in-person encounters with such raw displays of grief due to the cultural norms of the places I grew up. But I never doubted that the same sadness could live inside all of us. Grief, although mysterious and hidden from so much of view, was real, powerful, inevitable.
Becuase of the peculiarities of my work, I’ve had the privilege of working intimately with people from 12 or so countries since the start of the pandemic, living in two continents and regularly working with folks from two or three more. There have been tremendous differences in the lived experiences of the pandemic, sometimes due to longstanding inequitable social and economics systems; sometimes due to sheer luck, good and bad.
One of the similarities I see in our species these past few years, is the way in which so many of us have had to put our mourning into deferrment. Whether our baseline suffering was high or low, whether we were already navigating unjust realities related to our identities, whether our bodies already held egregious levels of unmetabolized trauma, we have been encouraged by the forces of our time to put off the grieving until some unspecificed time. A time that it is becoming clearer we have no shared mechanism to claim and no agreed upon “after” for which we all wait.
In the meantime, there are sometimes moments that move us individually. We may hear a story, watch a drama, cheer on a performance, or respond to a call for action that touches that under-touched place in us. The one that longs to be caught up in something shared, something meaningful, something emotional, something that reconnects us to the sense we had before the sense we lost something became so much more commonplace. I know I’ve felt it. I’ve watched others feeling it apologize for their feelings.
We feel both the sense that we’re losing out on life, and that the sadness and grief that are so integral to being alive are things to be ashamed of participating in. We sometimes mourn our lack of room to mourn. Grief upon grief.
But there is something to the practice of lament. To naming publicly that which we have lost and our experiences of loss. In the following poem, I wanted to name for myself what was going on in my body as I listened to a speaker recently. She opened and closed her remarks with the language of our mortality, discussing the factors like race and gender that figure so unjustly into the shape of our expectations to go on living, and calling those gathered to a robust engagement in the work of enlivening love. I was deeply moved, and felt in my body the desire to wail with grief and lamentation. But I didn’t.
Maybe you have felt these tensions. Maybe you have carried the energy of bereavement, waiting unconsciously for some appointed time to let loose the deep moans of sorrow and loss you try to forget still fill your extremeties.
To you and I, this reminder - no day is a given. And with as much shouting as needed, and with as little shame as possible, we must live life on the day we have it.
(listen to this poem for free on Patreon)
Not The Shouting
No day is a given, she said.
Every word chosen after set me to shaking.
One loose breath away from
gasping, but not this one.
I measured each inhale
so as not to billow my face on release.
Tears, but not streams.
Not the shouting.
Not the convulsing, not the reservoir
that waited these years to escape.
There were too many
strangers in that room.
But there always are.
And I fear the shape of the puddle
I long to become.
So the morning waits
and she repeats.
No day is a given.
- Bjørn Peterson
(Read more poetry for free or become a patron at patreon.com/bjornpeterson.)
What does this poem mean to you? What phrases or images stand out? What grief have you deferred? What are the physical, mental, emotional, spiritual and other consequences of unmetabolized grief or trauma in your life?
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When you close your eyes and picture yourself, what do you see? Can you remember your face, the shape of your body? What are you doing in the vision? What emotion, if any, do you see? Are you alone? Where are you in the world, if anywhere? Read More ->
There is an understanding of courage that dominates the perception of society. It is the image of the athlete and the soldier. It assumes that the heights of courage are reached when physical comfort is traded for some form of glory through pain. When the body is uncompromised by its adversary and perseveres toward its end goal. Through repetition and discipline, the objects of veneration for physical courage train their bodies for automation and precision. We call it toughness. We call it strength. We call it courage. Read More ->
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