The Power in Choice and the Gift of Nuance

Choosing to live above the chaos in the world today

This week, I want to share two poems with you. Sometimes, good things come in pairs. This week, I want to share two different poems about two different themes but actually related when you read them together.

For me, reading and writing poems is a form of protest—a way of giving away my voice; my concern; my awareness and insight to the world. For several millenias, people have read poems and written them to bring comfort, understanding, companionship and voice to what stirs in us and around us. The longest book in the Christian Scriptures is a book of 150 poems. Half of them as sad and full of lament. Half of them are words of resolve and hope. It’s a mixture of life, people, and the events of our lives and the world around us.

Poems as a way of protest is a form of giving voice to what is concerning; what is disturbing and what is getting my attention these days. Some of my poems fit this category of protest and some of them are more easy expressions of how I’m viewing this beautiful, delicate and fragile home, we call “our world.

To protest is to dissent to the flow of culture I do not like. A poem is a rock I can stand on in these raging waters about me and speak into the current and call you to the side with me and sit in an eddy—that small protected space of still water we need to catch our breath amidst so much happening. A good poem can be like an eddy in the whitewate of our lives to give us pause; to give us space to breath; to find our inner compass for direction and perhaps above all, to give voice to what matters most in this life.

These two poems are like two eddys in the whitewater. The first poem or eddy is about making simple choices each and every day as to how we will negotiate the speed of life; the multi-facted changes happening in the world as we slept last night. There is just so much power in our choices of what we will give our attention to; how we will spend our hours today and how we seek to cultivate the harvest of peace inside our hearts admist the clanging sounds of gonging symbols of discord and anxiety.

I’m illustrating the poem, “The Choice” by one of Gwen’s watercolors. I am hoping to use her watercolors in my new book of poetry that I’ve shared with you. In the poem, I write about the little bird friend we have here in the mountains called the Chickadee.

We watch this particular Chickadee greet us in the morning as we sit with coffee in hand and the world around us in our hearts.

Now, here are the two poems…