NPR Tiny Desk Contest 2023 - Andrea Gibson - MAGA HAT IN THE CHEMO ROOM

 

 

Andrea Gibson's brilliant force has departed their body. They were a beacon of courage and compassion communicated through poetry. I mourn our loss. May their brilliance and love manifest forever. 

 

Andrea Gibson's website.

 

Andrea Gibson's Substack.

The Surface of Life

 "Work keeps you on the surface of life. Without work you will sink down into your mind: ‘I don’t like this, I don’t want this, I can’t do this.’ You will drown there. So you must work. Nothing to make you rich, but enough to stay on the surface."

-Humans of New York

Recognition

Recognition

Playing truth or dare an hour before daylight
among the bean trees, I encounter a stranger at the gate.
When I ask what she is doing, she replies,
"Composing a life." She seeks to answer the question,
"Is there no place on earth for me?"

I ask how she will know the answer, and she says
she will track her progress in the stone diaries.
She has an amazing grace, this girl with a pearl earring
wearing borrowed finery, and I want to know more.
I ask with an open heart, open mind, what it is she seeks.

She wants to understand the savage inequalities,
to have a reckoning with the fact that she lives
in a world where the poisonwood bible increasingly
becomes the rule of law. She wants to help people
to stop running with scissors and enjoy the perfection
of the morning.

We are surrounded by landscapes of wonder, if we
would only make the effort to see differently.

She in turn asks what I seek. I reply that I want
the courage to be, to cast a slender thread
of hope into the sea, the sea of humanity.
I want to plant new seeds of contemplation,
embrace the grace in dying. I want to
know the mystery of tying rocks to clouds.

From her angle of repose under oleander,
jacaranda, the magnificent spinster listens.
I tell her she has a beautiful mind, that
I can see the molecules of emotion swirling in her.
She tells me that I am a succulent wild woman,
that I have zen under a wing. She reminds me
that art is a way of knowing and solitude
a return to the self.

Then we part, blessing each other with traveling
mercies, with a promise to meet again
at the healing circle in Gilead.

                                               -Kathryn Harper

She Said Hello

                                    She Said Hello

                                    She said 'Hello, I’m digging

                                    sand nests' and handed

                                    out shovels.

                                    Seagulls lurked nearby

                                    shouting manic laughter

                                    keeping an eye open

                                    for unattended food.

                                    Farther along the beach,

                                    six shrieking dervishes

                                    flirt with the water’s edge.

                                    And the kelp garlands

                                    strewn across rocks

                                    host a caucus of starlings.

                                                        -Kathryn Harper

62!

 "The great thing about getting older is that you don't lose all the other ages you've been." 

--Madeleine L'Engle

This birthday I decided to pull three cards from the Sufi Wisdom Oracle deck. I held the deck for a few moments and breathed, while listening to meditative music. I felt into Presence, touching the stillness, and relaxed. Remember Stereograms? This is a spiritual equivalent. Then I pulled three cards. They are lovely, especially because the three of them speak to the same theme: trusting love and life; releasing defenses and yielding; the assumption that the universe is mostly benevolent.

Happy Solstice

I was born a few days after summer solstice, and I have always thrived on light.

Very soon I will visit a place where the sun shines about 23 hours a day this time of year. Alaska!

This summer I ease into trusting potential. I embrace the new and stretch into awareness. I celebrate this experience. 

All Kinds of Things for Love

[A Debt]
in a dream, i saw my mother
before she was made mine. her
life still unburdened by the weight
of raising someone. no one has left her
to be in a grave & she is yet to know
where the nearest cemetery is. 
when she runs across the field, no tiny footprints 
gather next to her steps. her 
hunger simply hers alone. 
we do all kinds of things for love. look at me. 
look at me returning her life to her. 
even in a dream.
--noor unnahar

Moving to Hope from Hopelessness (3 ways)

Desert People

 "I think there are desert people and then there is everyone else. It takes something specific to flourish in the desert, to find its beauty obvious, to take root and weather the dry heat, the epic and swift flash floods. Only certain people figure out how to blossom in a landscape that wears its bones on the outside, where scorpions wander in the front door and tarantulas have migrating seasons." - E.A. Hanks

AMORIRI (Official Video)

Shamanic, animistic, primal, intense, and gorgeous. Discovered while at Ecstatic Dance. A shorter version is in rotation on my music service.

 

To All Those Seniors Soon to Graduate

 

Music Meditation

These are links to songs that, listened to in sequence, are a form of meditation. I'm providing Youtube links because I don't know if you use Spotify, Tidal, Apple Music, etc. Youtube inserts ads in the middle of songs (unless you pay), so I recommend using your favorite service that won't impede listening. 

They have been on rotation on my song list this year.

Inspiration Drive: https://youtu.be/qq_V4NY9K24 

Gajumaru: https://youtu.be/qTse2hkPxYU 

Stillness is Waiting: https://youtu.be/KsiQmZWq2j0 

Total time: 12 minutes 24 seconds

True Joy

 “This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one. Being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it what I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.” — George Bernard Shaw

Go Outside and Play

Perilous Dark Path

"We seldom go freely into the belly of the beast. Unless we face a major disaster like the death of a friend or spouse or loss of a marriage or job, we usually will not go there. As a culture, we have to be taught the language of descent. That is the great language of religion. It teaches us to enter willingly, trustingly into the dark periods of life. These dark periods are good teachers. Religious energy is in the dark questions, seldom in the answers. Answers are the way out, but that is not what we are here for. But when we look at the questions, we look for the opening to transformation. Fixing something doesn't usually transform us. We try to change events in order to avoid changing ourselves. We must learn to stay with the pain of life, without answers, without conclusions, and some days without meaning. That is the path, the perilous dark path of true prayer."

---Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer

Wishes

 "If wishes were fishes, we'd all cast nets." 

 - Scottish Proverb 

The Anti-Social Century

"When Epley and his lab asked Chicagoans to overcome their preference for solitude and talk with strangers on a train, the experiment probably didn’t change anyone’s life. All it did was marginally improve the experience of one 15-minute block of time. But life is just a long set of 15-minute blocks, one after another. The way we spend our minutes is the way we spend our decades. “No amount of research that I’ve done has changed my life more than this,” Epley told me. “It’s not that I’m never lonely. It’s that my moment-to-moment experience of life is better, because I’ve learned to take the dead space of life and make friends in it."

-Derek Thompson, The Anti-Social Century (gift link)

The Right Reasons

"The pursuit of happiness is a toxic value that has long defined our culture. It is self-defeating and misleading. Living well does not mean avoiding suffering; it means suffering for the right reasons. Because if we’re going to be forced to suffer by simply existing, we might as well learn how to suffer well."

― Mark Manson, Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope