Today’s offering is a little bit different than most of the others I’ve shared so far this month — because I’m sharing someone else’s words today, rather than writing my own. I subscribe to a weekly newsletter from the poet James Crews. Each Friday, he shares an original poem, a brief little essay about why he wrote the poem, and an invitation for reflection via journaling prompts. (You can subscribe, too, if you’d like.)

In his December 6 newsletter, he shared a poem and post that really resonated with me – and one I think will resonate with many of you, too. At first, I was planning to let his poem and his words just . . . inspire me to write something on my own. But when it came time for me to put pen to paper (so to speak), his words just seem so much more appropriate than anything I can say. So . . . I decided to just share his newsletter from November 6. I hope you will enjoy it as much as I did.

Be soft with yourself.
Enjoy this fallow period.

From The Weekly Pause, a weekly newsletter from James Crews

As we enter winter here in New England, it is hard not to feel that our world is also entering its own transitional period, that we are at a threshold moment in humanity. None of us knows what the future will hold, and some may feel too exhausted and drained even to consider what comes next. In my own several grief journeys, having lost my father at the age of twenty, and my mother more recently, I have learned to allow myself fallow periods when little can be accomplished, perhaps even nothing. I believe we need times like this in each day, month, and season of our life—short and long stretches of rest and recharge, so that we can return more nourished once more. This agreement not to do much, to let ourselves feel useless and even hopeless for a while, may be necessary, but it can feel like a kind of death to the life that was. With each new conscious breath we take, with each hour, day, or week given over to ourselves, free from outer distractions, we start to see the softness at the center of everything, and perhaps become softer with ourselves as well. We begin to trust that every small, kind thing we offer to the world contains the seed of so much beauty and strength, it can’t help but ripple out. These days, I often think of these lines from May Sarton’s poem, “A Thought”: “Brute power/is not superior/to a flower,” and maybe that’s true, especially when that flower has gone to seed, having agreed to embrace the rest that will help it spread and grow.

Everything That Is Divided
James Crews

Everything that is divided, split,
must eventually reveal the softness
at its center, like milkweed pods
that seem dead at the edge of winter,
the fluff of a seed still clinging
like hope—no, like faith to the stem
of a plant that knows it will go on,
this is not the end of the story,
even if those days of monarchs
and blossoms filled with nectar
and caterpillars feasting on leaves
are over for now. The plant has
learned to see the possibility in each
small thing we offer to the world.

Come.
Fill your cup.