Song - "It’s Only Love" by Crys Matthews

 

Words & Music by Crys Matthews

https://crysmatthews.com

Used by permission

Poem - Savior Machine - Tracy K. Smith

I spent two years not looking
Into the mirror in his office.
Talking, instead, into my hands
Or a pillow in my lap. Glancing up
Occasionally to let out a laugh.
Gradually it felt like a date with a friend,
Which meant it was time to end.

Two years later, I saw him walking
Up Jay Street into the sun. No jacket,
His face a little chapped from wind.
He looked like an ordinary man carrying
Shirts home from the laundry, smiling
About something his daughter had said
Earlier that morning. Back before

You existed to me, you were a theory.
Now I know everything: the words you hate.
Where you itch at night. In our hallway,
There are five photos of your dead wife.
This is what we mean by sharing a life. Still,
From time to time, I think of him watching me
From over the top of his glasses, or eating candy

From a jar. I remember thanking him each time
The session was done. But mostly what I see
Is a human hand reaching down to lift
A pebble from my tongue.

Prayer for 2/28/2021 - The Rev. Bob LaVallee

 
In this time of transition from anger, despair, and loneliness to one of hope and possibility, we pause to consider the ways that we have been hurt in the past year, the ways we were injured by witnessing things that we know to be wrong. As we consider what we have lost, may we acknowledge our wounds and take the time needed to heal. May we honor that process of becoming whole again, and from that return to our commitments to build a world of love and kindness.

May we pause to notice the ways that the world is beautiful. May we breathe in the possibilities of life and growth and laughter.

We give thanks for the gifts that we receive, large and small. Let us not consider whether we deserve them or not but simply bask in the grace of being here, being on earth, being together. 

Poem & Prayer: "There are lots of ways to stay alive" by Rev. Theresa Soto

There are lots of ways to stay alive.
You can wear soft clothes and focus on brushing your teeth and hydrating.
You can ask yourself what you need and not be mad when you don’t have an answer, only a shrug. You can breathe in.
And then, with care, you can also breathe out.
Taking the thing one single breath at a time.

You can give yourself a chance. Remember not only your mistakes, but also all the ways that you matter. From eyelash to shoelace, you matter. You matter when you are sad, when the world is heavy like wet laundry, dragging from your arms. You matter when you are angry and you use your teeth like welded prison bars to keep the words that might cause harm from escaping past your lips.

There are many ways to stay alive.

You can come, heart wrapped in several layers of foil, mashed into a plastic box with an ill-fitting lid, to a place where people say your name like it is good news.

You can fight your way toward freedom.

I recommend that you decline the option of struggling by yourself. The point is to get your life. There was this wise ruler who said once that by ourselves we are unprotected, but two people together can face the worst: [the failure, the heartbreak, the upending of worlds we hold in our hearts, and the secret shame that we will shed like the skin of a smooth snake, though it will take some time.] And with three people, you being one of them, you may find that eventually, all will be well.

Poem - "When the world was ten years old he fell deep in love with Egypt" - Patricia Lockwood

Just as he fell in love with the dinosaurs,
just as he would fall in love with the moon—
no women in the world yet, he was only ten years old.
A ten-year-old is made of time,
the world had forever to learn about Egypt.
He entered encyclopedias and looted every fact of
them and when he had finished looting
there he broke into the Bible. He snuck
into his mother’s room and drew thick lines
around his eyes and those were the borders of Egypt.
He carefully wrote in stiff small birds,
he carefully wrote in coiled snakes,
he carefully wrote in flatfooted humans.
The ten-year-old world needed so much
privacy, he learned to draw the door-bolt
glyph and learned to make the sound
it made. I am an old white British man,
decided the ten-year-old world, I wear a round
lens on my right eye, the Day, and see only a blur
with my left eye, the Night. When the sun shone
on him it shone on Egypt, all the dark for a while
was the dark in the Pyramids, the left lung
of his body was the shape of Africa
and one single square breath in it Egypt.
They never found all the tombs, he knew.
Anyone might be buried in Egypt, thought the ten-year-old
world in love with it, I will send my wind down
into my valley, and my wind will uncover the doors
to the tombs, and I will go down myself inside them,
and shine light on all the faces, and light on the rooms
full of gold, and light on even the littlest pets, on the mice
and the beetles of the ten-year-old kings, and shine light
on even their littlest names.

Letter from the Porch - Wendi Moore Oneal

 

1:21 "I am manifesting protection..." Michaela Harrison

I am manifesting protection

There's a forcefield all around keeping me safe and whole

I am manifesting protection

There's a love inside that fortifies my soul

We are...

Ze is...

He is...

She is...

I am...

4:37 "By the water of Babylon..."

By the water of Babylon

Where we sat down

And where we wept

When we remember Zion

When they carried us away to captivity

And they required of us a song

How can we sing our holy songs

In a Strange land

So let the words the words of my mouth

And meditations of my heart

Be acceptable in thy sight

Oh v'ry

6:38 I am solid like a rock

I am solid like a rock

I am rooted like a tree

I am here

Standing tall

In my rightful place

9:00 "I sing to charge the air with my belief..."

10:40 "Let your little light shine, shine, shine"

Let your little light shine, shine, shine (x 2)

Because there may be somebody down in the valley trying to get home

So let your little light shine, shine, shine (x2)

13:34 I got a right to the tree of life (Call and response)

"Loude, Loude, I got a right, I got a right to the tree of life"

I done told you...

I got a right

I told you

I got a right

I told you

I got a right

I got a right to the tree of life

My mama said...

If they got...

When we got...

If we got...

The ground know...

Them birds say...

16:03 Amen

Amen

Freedom

18:50 "Spirituals come from times during enslavement. Freedom songs come from time after enslavement."

19:35 "Freedom over Me"

Oh Freedom

Oh Freedom

Oh Freedom over me

And before I'll be a slave

I'll be buried in my grave

And I'll fight for my right

To be free

21:41 We have been burned

We have been burned

Burned by the fire

And we are ashes

Ashes and smoke

But we will rise

Higher and higher

On the wings of compassion

Justice and hope

23:37 We are the children

We are the children

of the ones who would not die

We are the children

of the people who can fly

We are the children

of the ones who persevere

We are fearless

We are strong

And we're ready to carry on

Ira Glass quote - "all writing is mediocrity"

"The natural state of all writing is mediocrity. It's all tending toward mediocrity in the same way that all atoms are sort of dissipating out toward the expanse of the universe. Everything wants to be mediocre, so what it takes to make anything more than mediocre is such a fucking act of will."

http://www.avclub.com/articles/ira-glass,13841/

November 5, 2003

Ross Gay - Book of Flowers - Harvard talk

 

March 9, 2016

(12:37)

"I want to say and re-say to anyone who ask me, I do believe in gratitude ("flowers") as  a kind of discipline, an energizing and catalyzing, and potential collectivizing discipline. What I mean is that, when I'm thinking of gratitude, or the gratitude I'm thinking of, is the ways we make each other possible. And that gratitude makes me more interested in making people possible, myself included.

...

(14:28)

If there's anything that's interesting to me about the poems, it's that they are motivated by precisely the desire to reach across, which is exactly what metaphor means, after all. Have you seen the moving trucks in Greece emblazoned with the word metaphores? My poems would be stupid little things to me, if they didn't reach your way. Who has the time?

...

(24:39)

I'm resisting your question about resistance, looks like. But I'm not really resisting; truth is, I'm making an argument. I'm making my argument with my body and the ground, about our bodies and the ground. 

...

(28:30)

How you see or what you see depends on the ground. You cannot engrave, in other words, you cannot cannot dig, in other words, you cannot prepare the earth for your body, without a proper and true ground. Maybe this book of flowers is a preparation for the ground I wish to enter.

...

(28:55)

... I'm talking about the ground, what holds us, what we walk on, what we fall onto, what we leap from, what holds us, the ground.

Or in a painting that against which the marks are made in a Franz Kline painting, the big industrial swipes of black arguing with or emerging from or even resisting the creamy surfaces, gestures legible because of the ground, dependent upon the ground, or better yet a Glen Ligon painting, the Zora Neale Hurston quote ad black text on a white surface: "I feel most colored when I'm thrown against a sharp white background."

...

(28:34)

I'm really curious about the ground of our imaginations and the ground that it is implied or assumed by the word resistance in the context of your question... about this book. "What are you resisting in your book about flowers, black man?"

...

(30:00)

What I hope I'm doing actually is imagining a ground different than the one the question presumes. Because the ground that question presumes is something I refuse to abide. On that ground, which is simply descriptive of an America, which is for the record, like everything fleeting. Let's call it an American ground, in which, for which, upon which black people are not actually people.  And sometimes it feels that if an America grants that if we are people, that it also imagines that our natural condition is pain, is suffering, is turmoil, is indignity, is death. It's big business, our suffering, our death. 

... 

(30:55)

Sometimes it seems to me that a black person becomes more legible in this particular American ground the closer they are to being dead. ... 

(31:09)

That is the ground. I hear myself say it among friends, so I'll say it to you right now, that they would like us to believe it. They would like us to believe, I sometimes believe, watching Walter Scott being shot again and again on the news, when any child can see... watching Tamir Rice be murdered again and again that our natural state, our natural condition, our ground is pain, if not death. ... 

(31:54)

Let's call that an American imaginative ground. ... A foundational American imaginative ground. ... I don't believe in it as a ground. And consequently I don't believe in it as something to be resisted. I just believe it's a persistent and abhorrent disruption to the actual ground, the actual ground being what I hope my book, a black man's book of flowers might look at. ... 

(32:36)

I'm a flower in your garden being planted around your garden, a fervent and raucous mint. 

So what's the ground? Our necessary lives or our lives necessary. And in our lives are so many things -- loss, sorrow, violence, pain, yes, but also delight, silliness, raucous laughter, care, care, as I see it, above all. Love, as I see it, above all. A thousand, thousand undocumented instances in my life alone of how I've been loved and cared for, lives that have seen my life and thereby made it possible. Lives, life, which has made our lives possible. 

(33:18)

[Reads "A Small Needful Fact"]

(34:00)

Celebration, exultation, praise, gratitude, and the rigorous practice, the rigorous public practice of those things is one of the ways we remind ourselves that our lives are the ground, that living is the ground. Those things remind us that being murdered and fucked over and terrorized is an aberration and to announce to the state or our shared consciousness or a broken American imagination by hollering with the light at our utterly necessary lives, our beautiful, beautiful necessary lives, that we are in fact meant to live. 

So ... this book about flowers by a black man ... was both utterly conscious -- I knew what I was and wasn't saying -- and what, perhaps, I'm expected to be saying -- and it was just me minding my business, talking about my life, my life."

(35:32)

[Reads "A Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude"]

Which ends..

I want so badly to rub the sponge of gratitude

over every last thing, including you, which, yes, awkward,

the suds in your ear and armpit, the little sparkling gems

slipping into your eye. Soon it will be over,

which is precisely what the child in my dream said,

holding my hand, pointing at the roiling sea and the sky

hurtling our way like so many buffalo,

who said it’s much worse than we think,

and sooner; to whom I said

no duh child in my dreams, what do you think

this singing and shuddering is,

what this screaming and reaching and dancing

and crying is, other than loving

what every second goes away?

Goodbye, I mean to say.

And thank you. Every day.

TedEx Talk: Mark Charles - "The Truth Behind We the People - the most misunderstood words in U.S. history"