Last summer I went on a backpacking trip to Lake Eleanor with my daughter and friends. We hiked four miles in to where there were only occasional other humans - some boyscouts on a far shore whose campfire was kind of comforting to see at night, and a few folks who kayaked in to our inlet. I wrote a fragment of a poem about swimming there, heading out into the lake further than I was really comfortable going, across to a spit of sand. Halfway across I started having lots of thoughts about drowning. So it was a bit victorious to clamber up the shaly sand of the spit and look back over the water I had crossed. The fragment I wrote about that day lay dormant in my notebook for months. Something about striking out bravely. Something about pushing through fear.
As I reworked it the other night, I added a fire, and then the fire burned through all the driftwood I had amassed as a shelter. I thought about how we try to protect ourselves from the forces we fear, how fragile those 'protections' often turn out to be, and ultimately how liberating it can be to watch them fall or get consumed by the very forces we feared, and realize that we are still alive, still standing.
This winter in California was fairly brutal. After years of drought, record rainfall brought hillsides crashing down, destroyed homes, and forced many road closures. In concert with the weather, I was enduring a giant mudslide in my own life.
Spring has dawned, supremely welcome and, as though a special reward for all those storms, bringing with it the most fabulous wildflower season. I'm hardly an original pairing Spring with feelings of hope and rebirth, but that's what is happening in my house right now and when I finally reworked that fragment into a full poem between 3 and 5am the other night, these are the themes that emerged: not only facing adversity, but learning to embrace and learn from it; opening yourself out to optimism and possibility after a period of hunkering down; allowing light in after all the darkness.

Grace

"What will survive of us is love."
                          - Philip Larkin

I swam from the shore to the sandy spit

and on the way I dreamed of drowning

but I swam through the fear;

I walked up on the shaly sand

and my life was waiting for me there;

I lit a fire, violent at its heart,

it burned with ease through the driftwood

I had piled up as a shelter from the dark.

We came from desert,

moved through perpetual rain

that liquified the parched hills

and brought them tumbling down

with houses, trees, power lines;

as fast as everything fell apart

the good green world poured out

her liquid heart into the flood

and when the power went out

and the batteries ran down

I learned to wrap both arms

around the liferaft of the dark;

I learned that it’s about

not being swallowed by the night,

that it’s about letting the night storm

on and on, till out of a blue dawn, grace

a world washed clean and calm,

and look now! April comes sailing in,

creaming over the sandbars with her

wildflowers in jamjars and her sudden

fern forests taller than a man, no more

anguish in the night, she turns

cold love inside out till you

can scarcely bear the heat

and the doors that were being pushed shut,

the doors are opening now, each day

in its own way a preparation.

If what will survive of us is love

then I will open too, I will allow the white

froth of trees, the four falling notes

of the mourning dove and the high

white clouds to make me unafraid,

For we are round the brighter side

of the sun, every revolution takes us

further from the Fall chill, the Winter

wet and stripped. Space opens up,

there’s room for promise and for hope,

and though my fear was clean, and meant

something, I get up every morning now

and I laugh as I shrug the wings on.