Wednesday Wisdom #9: Affirm Life

I know this is a newsletter about flowers, but when despair comes knocking I find myself reading poetry.

Suheir Hammad’s extraordinary poem ‘First Writing Since’ was written in response to September 11th, 2001. I come back to its wisdom again and again whenever I am processing a turning point in my own life.

The video is below. For an early full text from In Motion Magazine click here.

The poem ends:

there is no poetry in this. there are causes and effects. there are
symbols and ideologies. mad conspiracy here, and information we will
never know. there is death here, and there are promises of more.

there is life here. anyone reading this is breathing, maybe hurting,
but breathing for sure. and if there is any light to come, it will
shine from the eyes of those who look for peace and justice after the
rubble and rhetoric are cleared and the phoenix has risen.

affirm life.
affirm life.
we got to carry each other now.
you are either with life, or against it.
affirm life.

***

I love the way she juxtaposes life and death in the final stanzas. As a student of Chinese medicine, I see the interplay of yin and yang. Often forces create and strengthen their opposite. We thus have a choice of what to see.

I join Hammad in her plea, for the coming days, weeks, months, and years, find a way to affirm life. In the midst of the 24-hour news cycle, affirm life. Instead of a never-ending outrage that activates your nervous system with a cascade of other health implications, affirm life. At a minimum, affirm your own life, your right to not be assaulted by false equivalences, hateful rhetoric, gaslighting. In Mary Oliver’s words, Save the only life you can save. Your own.