When a gunman took the lives of 10 people at a grocery store in Boulder, CO on March 22, I was in the middle of writing a newsletter article about the shootings of Asian Americans at a series of massage parlors in Atlanta when my phone started blowing up.
The Table Mesa King Sooper’s has been “my” store for the better part of two decades. I shop there. My friends shop there. It is where my kids first got to go somewhere unsupervised with their friends. Now that my parents also live in Colorado, it was where they shopped too.
Now, the store has been closed for months, first surrounded by a memorial fence and now a construction site with #BoulderStrong signs shielding the day-to-day activity from view.
In moments like this, logic inevitably fails us, but art can sometimes help…
This is the poem I was inspired to write in the wake of the unthinkable.
Hurt enough to heal
There are moments, sometimes,
When my mind is still and my heart open
When, I wonder
Whether any of it
Matters at all
After all.
If, moment to moment,
Any meaning
We might make
Of any of it
Isn’t just
Another hiding place
From feeling
All the feelings
That make us fully alive;
Less likely, maybe
To have to contend
With it all again, again.
But, then
Fuck if I don’t feel
That all this
Waiting, hiding, seeking, striving
Isn’t at odds with
The whole reason for any of it.
That in allowing it all to become familiar and
In numbing ourselves to the next one, and the next after that
We haven’t lost
The best of ourselves.
Haven’t forgotten how to find
That fullness of feeling
That transcends
And enlivens.
Have lost some of our ability to
Welcome warmth,
Share our glory,
Ask for help.
I sit inside
The gaping wound
Of my life
And marvel
At the weight of
All that brought me here;
The many old cuts,
Now, instead, scarred.
I remember the innocent glimmer
Of fresh feeling and know
I see you,
Because I allow myself to be seen.
I hurt alongside you,
Because your ache calls out for comfort.
I feel both the depths and the heights
Only when I welcome them as equals.
So maybe the point
Is that there is no point;
No sense to be made
Of senselessness.
Perhaps the only meaning
To recover
Is the remembering
Of our humanity
Maybe our job
Is just to feel it all
To stop
Praying and protesting
For a moment
So that we can be
All the way human again
Looking pain in the eye
And not armoring up;
Not turning away
But bearing witness to the awful truth of it
And letting ourselves hurt enough to heal.
You can find the original post on my medium page here.
