Monday Prompts: 'I tell you this to break your heart.'

August's theme: sharing our stories

Welcome to Monday Prompts, where I share a poem, a personal story and reflection, and offer journaling and creative writing prompts for your week.

Photo by Jan-Niclas Aberle

‘Lead’ by Mary Oliver

Here is a story
to break your heart.
Are you willing?
This winter
the loons came to our harbor
and died, one by one,
of nothing we could see.
A friend told me
of one on the shore
that lifted its head and opened
the elegant beak and cried out
in the long, sweet savoring of its life
which, if you have heard it,
you know is a sacred thing.,
and for which, if you have not heard it,
you had better hurry to where
they still sing.
And, believe me, tell no one
just where that is.
The next morning
this loon, speckled
and iridescent and with a plan
to fly home
to some hidden lake,
was dead on the shore.
I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.

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I’ve been returning (with clenched teeth) to my morning routine: working my way through ‘Devotions’ by Mary Oliver - a true practice of devotion: to self, to poetry, to committing and honouring slowness - and journaling a few pages by hand before I tend to anything else. I’ve been fighting this routine that I love for months, telling myself that I am TOO BUSY and other things are TOO IMPORTANT and MUST BE ATTENDED TO IMMEDIATELY, YESTERDAY EVEN!!!!!! (Why is my psyche YELLING?!) which is sooooo silly. Because, if I am not starting the day greeting my Self, checking in, reflecting, asking myself how I feel and how was my sleep and what do I need, then what am I even doing?

A few mornings ago, this beloved poem by Mary Oliver was the morning’s devotion, a reminder of how our stories break each other’s hearts, and necessarily so.

On Saturday, I was at my friend Tim’s Dad-rock concert that he put on for his 60th birthday. Tim, along with being the tenderest-hearted human possibly on the planet, happens to have the vocal chops of an 80s rocker superstar. He’s been playing music with his friends since 1979, and he put on a a big show to raise money for the non-profit he’s worked at for 40 years, and he invited a few of his musical-ish friends to sing with him; he dragged me out of musical retirement to sing a Stones’ song with him (my nervous system still hasn’t recovered from it - more to unpack there later… but…)