Let me, too, be Earth-Mothered.

A new poem for the closing of your year.

CONTENTS || End-of-Year Greetings | Poem: A Becoming

Hello, dear friends and readers. It seems December is coming to a close. It’s my favorite month, so I’m always sad to see it go—there is something about endings that I find moving, connective, enrooting. They seem to grab me by the hem to say, pay attention, this is finite, and it clicks in a way the wisdom of beginnings and middles do not. Perhaps this says more about me than I mean it to.

This year was hard for our family. We struggled most days for one reason or the next, and I struggled to make peace with that. But for the last couple months, I’ve found myself returning over and over again to Jane Hirshfield’s poem “The Bowl,” which exhorts its reader to accept what is given. I return too to the lyrics of a (soon-to-be-released) song written by my wife

Alex Blue

and our dear friend

Courtney Ariel

: Whatever you learn / may it change you. I’ve been trying, yes. What comes, whatever comes, may we be changed. May we stop resisting its teachings. May we embrace our own evolution, whatever that means. (I hope to god that doesn’t sound trite.)

I’ve held this idea in my chest like a candle through the season’s changing light, so when a good friend of mine commissioned a poem on remothering, the words that must be written were already aglow. I wrote “A Becoming” with this spark at its center—a blessing that, whatever we wander into or is placed before us, we might be changed by it; that we might learn to accept our places in the world as all the people we are throughout a lifetime; the ways we too are agents of transformation, for better or worse, our own and others’. This is a bitter and wonderful lesson.

We are heading into a new year, many of us as different people than we were when this one started. May this poem give you something to hold onto through these closing days. And whatever you learn / may it change you.

A Becoming

If we are not taught the world
we must learn it for ourselves.
So today when I woke to a morning
so foggy, damp and sullen, I threw
the windows open, an invitation.

Oh, how long I swallowed the myth
to resist being changed is a virtue,
as though a rock in river current
can resist its own reformation.

The tumble and wear, as it happens, green
growth thickening; the shimmering
bodies of fish with open, hungry mouths
in the rippling river moss that
lengthens in the sunlight.
Let me, too, be Earth-Mothered.

Let the morning brume settle on my windowsill,
stain the floors, transfigure the space where
I have built myself, am building still.
Let the sun fade my belongings,
the heat warp my doors 'til they
can be closed to nothing the world would offer.

If we are not taught, let us teach
ourselves—made of atoms and 
memories, thirst and years. We too are
Earth, Mothering.