Category: Tenneson Woolf Poetry

So, yes. Over the last five days I was able to go to New York City to meet my granddaughter for the first time. What a treat to hold her. To offer a bit of help to her parents, my daughter and son-in-law. What a treat to feel tenderness wash over and about. To feel my newly arrived grandfathering feet underneath me. What a treat to know life flowing in this way.

Prosed poetry is a goto form of reflection for me. So, on the plane from Newark, New Jersey to Salt Lake City, Utah, I found myself coaxed by a few words of sense-making and celebration.

At 18 days old
it isn’t words articulated that soothe.
Rather, a kind and gently offered hum carries it all.

At 18 days old
perhaps this little one is imprinting us as much as we are her.
To love, to kindness, and to inherent tenderness. 

At 18 days old
I’m guessing she wishes us to catch her arriving soul.
To give her the tiniest of guided starts. 

Yes. Grateful. Moved. In many of the stereotypical ways as a new grandparent. But I would also say, awakened beyond the poignancy of meeting a new granddaughter for the first time. Awakened to wishing loving, kind, and tender learning as human beings, in another kind of hum that also carries it all.

It is the part of me that celebrates what is most simple, and what is most meaningful, that writes in simple phrases.

So as to guide myself. And to go well with others, in streams of wisdom. And kindness. And helpfulness. And overall life-giving ways.

The words below, for inspiration that calls out even more of what flows so naturally in the inner.

Be with what flows.
Trust that the waters nourish
asdgand replenish.

Kindness and joy
asdgare currents.

Water knows.

I’m glad for this image of cattails from a weekend walk. I appreciate the beauty, the standing tall. I appreciate the mix among many other greens.

And then, in the spirit of appreciating beauty, both seeking it and welcoming it to continue to embrace, I reflected through a few words.

For simplicity and for inspiration of the stories that we humans live, and that live us.

We humans,
we seek joy.

Be it with friends,
or in endeavors of work,
or in evolution that is community.

That much I have learned.

We humans,
we seek learning.

Be it in the lettings go,
or in the lettings come,
or in the mysteries that live beneath it all.

That much I have learned.

We humans,
we seek contribution.

Be it in the small immediacies of now,
or in the long, slow-baked arcs,
or in the timeless ways that life unfolds.

That much I continue to learn.