Dani & Ilse's long distance poem (Rwanda----Minnesota)
One of my dear friends, Dani, just moved abroad to Rwanda. Below is a co-written poem that has crossed and re-crossed oceans and continents and time zones in an attempt to continue the intentional co-evolution that is friendship.
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Is friendship like a song we both sing, sometimes together, weaving harmonies, sometimes apart, holding our notes?
Is it a basket we weave, needle darting through time, back and forth, here and there and in between?
Where are you, dear one? I look around for you here and actually, I see you everywhere, in the snow-white sky that will someday blue, in the mid-day-ache around 2pm (would that be 10pm for you?). I think you are still here, and I know that you are now there; I leave a space for you in my thoughts.
I see you looking from just up ahead (yes, from where the angle of the hour hand becomes obtuse) from where the sky is so blue you need to squint your eyes to catch sight of me. When the wishing hour comes around, I perch gratefully in that space you've carved out for me.
Some days I don’t see anything that’s beautiful; other days, I get oversaturated with awe by 8:00am. Today is a blur of activity and not much listening, and the week ahead looks much the same. What have you seen today, my friend? Can you remind me where or how to look?
I am your mirror! Let’s look together. Is that a fissure of distress on our forehead? Does it have a flavor? Cherry anger, citrus envy, mustard regret, wintergreen jealousy, saffron resentment?
It is the pulse of cherry anger mixed with the astringent pinch of a massive grief crouching just out of sight, the realization that the fissures on my forehead don’t (only) originate from some internal flaw in my being but are carved by the collective frenetic firing of our neurons for more more --the very heartbeat of our culture---the chase for dopamine, connection, the next, the next, the next. What mirrors my mirror this day?
The mirror is worldwide in every way, in that case. How many hours in a day does the heart need so that it may follow its yearnings to grow and not just sustain itself on the same stale blood? This is part of the question that sent me here- searching for alternatives to America’s slow poison of borrowed time to live on. But the poison has moved Southward downstream too, pumped in the name of efficiency and maximum profit. I resort to making friends on the bus because that is the time I am granted for socializing. My heart breaks to explain to the harried local how insidiously similar the pressures and constraints are in the land of the free when I’ve found both alternatives lacking.
Yes, this is how I picture you: your sweet face turned to the person next to you, wide-open, responsive. I want your hours to be your own, yours to slowly parcel out, to dream away. Making friends is possibly the opposite of the slow (or fast?) poison of which we write. I dream of hacking away at the hours that demand my productivity
I dream of proper marooning myself- abandoning the ships of safety clustered in fleets. Making friends with the unknown, making a friend of myself is like a siren song I've learned to fear even as it seduces sweetly (is it dangerous to those who answer the call, or only to those who resist and fall anyway?). It walks me backwards off the plank, the dive long, slow and sweet. Zoom out and there is the fall, the bracing cold, the uncharted waters. Zoom out again and there is the island where I'll meet you. We can while away the hours of our new world as it becomes around us.
Our dreams speak to each other through the thin bath of endless sky that i’d have to fly through to reach you. Nonetheless, you reach me. Just yesterday, I listened to an indigenous elder sing to us at a house party, words from a poem etched onto paper in 1970; he told us to tuck safety, like a talisman, somewhere within our own folds, to walk down the heavily-policed street and not look away from the humans being pushed into paddy-wagons. Yes, if marooning means rejoining our whole, crashing into the highly specific rocks of our solitude, falling backwards into a sea of remembering, of seeing. Could it be our island? Could we walk down any street in the world together? I remember holding hands with you & creating our own safety; you made me brave. I don’t care about the ships clustered together, all the people banging on tinny gongs, summoning us to some stupid meeting while our stomachs rumble and hearts despair.
It's too easy to get stuck in the suffering, in the tinny gongs, in the eyes-darting-away of it all, isnt it? Without those who can help is to look at it head on, it can be easy to uphold the struggle as an art form instead of an obstacle. To water our own suffering instead of our safety. But I think that resistance to suffering is the art. I find you every day, and hold onto your safety, and it makes me brave, it waters my own safety. Let's grow what we carry within us big and strong and pour it into the ocean, somewhere under the sky where we can both alight. In this way, let's make it our island where in our dreaming, we can confer any time.
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