By Monica Schley
I was listening to Ada Limon, our nation’s former poet laureate, being interviewed on NPR’s Fresh Air. My ear caught a phrase she said, “sing back into the places you love.”
By chance, I have been reading her book, You Are Here, which is a culmination of a larger project, a collection of poems on picnic tables around the America’s treasured national parks. Limon said that she thinks these times we are living in could define humanity forever. She collected some 50 poet’s responses to that idea in, You Are Here, inviting readers to take a closer look at the present moment.
I love this phrase! Singing back into the things that bring us most joy, that we find most beautiful, will get us through these turbulent times. When the DMV, passport office, SNAP benefits, and air traffic control are not working as they once reliably did, remembering to hold space in the day for what we love can get us through.
The word “back,” singing back to, is not backwards. But rather, I think of remembering back to who we truly are, remembering what we love to do with our lives. I have been working hard at this, especially this year. It is a challenge borne not out of nostalgia, but out of remembering.
The great Sufi poet, Rumi wrote: “All beings stream at night / or during the day / into some absorptive work / into the loving nowhere.”
I have long been a fan of this verse because it’s the original streaming platform! What he is saying is that we can connect to the divine flow anytime we sleep, love, or work on the things we lose ourselves into with joy. (Getting into this streaming zone is a brain wave pattern.)* When we get there, time does not exist. It becomes expansive. After this experience, we feel happier and renewed. And the most beautiful thing of it all – it’s free! And it’s right inside of us!
This season, I sing back into the places I love by walking in the forest, listening to one of my children read to me, and improvising / playing music. I feel both renewed and relaxed (or as my son pronounced it when he was 4 years old, rah-wax), which makes me think of waxing like the moon, ebbing and flowing. Either way, so at peace, it hardly matters to speak.
If we were to all practice that which we most love, I think the world would feel more renewal than heartbreak. If we all could just tap into that which sings our heart awake just a little bit more, then I think we as a collective would be more unbothered by that which does not awaken us. And let’s be honest: there’s a lot of activity in the outer world of what can harm us.
By singing into the places we love – there isn’t anyone or anything that can take that experience away from us. It’s non-material. It doesn’t require a transaction. It is something that each individual and only each of us can create ourselves. It is not given. It is within.
Being given the idea to sing into a place you love unlocks the human spirit more than a news headline, more than what government legislature says it is or is not accomplishing. Or, in the words of William Carlos Williams:
it is difficult to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack of what is found there
As for me, one of the things that lights me up is poetry. What places would you like to sing into?
*See: https://monicaschley.com/how-to-make-practicing-music-a-healing-process/
Monica Schley is a musician and writer. She lives on Vashon Island with her family and can be reached at www.monicaschley.com. Let her know about the places you love to sing into at harppoet@gmail.com.
