Then I Lost my Job, and Everything was Beautiful.

The waves, and the sound of the highway, 
and the newish moon. And the seven ducks 
wing-whistling past her, out late. 
I'm out here too, because I don't have work tomorrow.
And the night smells good: artemisia, coyotebush.
Faint thread of water in the August creek.
I am told I could not possibly scent the stars. 
Nor the shadows north, where the hills go quiet,
pooled from ancient bronze. This morning, I had 
a dollar sign flashing steady beneath my name.
Tonight, the stars are throwing us a party.
And my pale blue dress — which I threw on fast 
when I saw the moon from my window and I wanted her—
is only a little bit, pleasantly, too thin.
There is no knowing, any more than there ever was, 
what will happen. There is the moon. The moon! 
The beautiful orangegold moon, setting into the sea.

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Poems are always a true story. This one is also a factual story.

I write poems all the time, but there’s a particular quality to the process for one like this.

There’s a background sense in my life of abiding…something. I hesitate to call it gratitude, because that word gets thrown about for the most saccharine of purposes. Maybe: Trust? Joy? I don’t always feel those things, but they’re always ambient. So let’s cut the ellipses off: there’s a background sense in my life of just abiding.

And that, coupled with a Sudden Big Event, often produces a short, intense period of deep, immersive gratitude (the word is right this time) oriented to whatever is beautiful and true in my physical surrounds. Which in itself produces a poem: quickly, and with a sort of additional strength.

Some artists talk about feeling like a channel for some outside power, and that is not what I feel. But there is a sense of a specific force at work, which remains Mysterious.

Anyway. I’m not at all sanguine about not having an income right now. Rent prices are wild (we might say feral), and my income was supporting not just my place of residence but also part of my house-family’s. Now I get to remember with my body that I’m a citizen of a nation that believes (with its policies) that a person is worthless unless they individually have money. (A phrase that comes to mind here: “net worth.” Semantics matter.)

For most of us regular folks, a job is the only available path to money. Also for most regular folks, money has been pretty tough for years now to hold on to, let alone to invest, or to substantially save, in any way that allows us to make more from that money. Ain’t no capital in the capitalism.

Also, I like work. I wouldn’t say that I loved the job I just got laid off from. But I was learning things, talking with people every day who have different skills than I do, figuring out the shapes together of projects and problems and possible solutions. I like doing that. I need to do it. I’ve got a metric ton of energy, and a lot of skills, and a lot of—I’ll just say it—love. Whatever I’m doing, I care about doing it right. I don’t think I can help that. “How you play is what you win,”* and it’s energy and love and rightness (in the moral and aesthetic senses) that I want.

And you know: I’d like to harness that to the service of something fundamentally good. Not just building whatever new product some tech company thinks they can make a profit on by overworking their too-few employees and doing the absolute minimum for that product’s users.

Is it time to change fields again? Maybe. Tech money is good; that’s a real consideration. Plus, I’m a sucker for the idea that this time maybe we’re building something right, for the right reasons.

I’m also open to exploring where else I can serve. I do mean serve, not only bring home the beans and eggs and kale. (I’m vegetarian. Sorry if that ruined the idiom.)

What would that look like in practice? I know something about that, actually, but I’ve never been paid for it. I kind of hate thinking about money in connection with service. With humans at all, really. But that’s a systemic choice, and not up to me. So far, what I’ve been able to choose for myself is to work for enough money that I can afford to also do creative and service work in unpaid capacities. I’d still like to have that option, frankly. And I’d like to know what my other options are. I’m a little anxious, absolutely. Also curious.

Also deep in love with the beauty and Mystery of this world. I’m almost surprised to watch how that doesn’t change, in spite of my sudden lack of professional identity. I knew, of course, that it should not. But I hadn’t needed to find out. There’s knowing, and there’s knowing.

Poetry doesn’t pay much, in the money sense. (Definitely not the way to make rent). But even a small, occasional portion can refocus the mind. When I’m really lucky—and it helps the luck along to practice regularly—poems get the heart and the body involved too, in just attending. Or the way I put it earlier: abiding.

Reading good poems does this. Reciting them on an empty beach, or with a friend. Remembering a line when I’m overwhelmed at the grocery store, and choosing to be comforted by it. Writing poems does this too, if that’s your thing.

Living them, I guess is what I’m talking about — something my poet-friend (and fellow Bored Wolf) Allie Rigby has been exploring lately in her newsletter. Poetry is one way we attend to what is deep and abiding and utterly outside forces like capitalism or policy (however we feel about them). It’s a spiritual practice. I’m fortunate to have several wise friends and teachers who remind me of this. I need the reminding.

I’ve bent a lot of effort over the years on learning how to pray. I learned one way as a child: liturgical prayers, already written—many of which I memorized, and they still come to my aid today. I learned the “just talking to God” kind, too, but for many reasons, that kind doesn’t live well in adult-me. Still, I feel the pull, and I’ve tried a lot of methods. I’ve mostly felt I’m not doing it “right,” because I can’t stick to a particular method, or I don’t feel anything, or whatever. Which—it turns out the practice is the point. Having a reason, and then just doing the thing. That, not a feeling or a result, is the outcome.

And here’s one of those wise-teacher sayings that won’t leave me alone. What if I “befriend my practice the way it is?”** What if I let poetry be my response and my comfort and my contemplation and my gift? My prayer, in other words. Also my work, or some of it. Either way, deeper than a dollar sign flashing steady beneath my name.

I do still need that last, to live in this present version of the world we have collectively made. It’s hard to argue that money is not, also, a crucial foundation—without which a life, however beautiful and true, will falter. That’s because of circumstance, though. It doesn’t have to be that way. We, as a society, can make it otherwise.

Poetry is different. It’s universal. It’s always a crucial foundation, in whatever (better?) world we are trying to build. I’ll clarify. Poetry is my way; yours might be music or painting or conversation, or cooking for loved ones or fixing their cars, or some traditional form of prayer or walking on the beach or something else entirely.

I get that these aren’t all the same type of thing. What I’m trying to get at here is more the why of doing something, and the how, and the practice of it. The immersion, the abiding.

Which is something I hope I remain—the word is right again—deeply grateful for. And just: present. I’m glad to be present to this moment, for example, of trying to make some modest sense of the Mystery.

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*That’s Ursula K. LeGuin, worth attending for her philosophy as much as her excellent world-building.
**And that’s Holly Wren Spaulding, a generous soul, a poet of spare and affecting lines, and a gently inspiring teacher of poetry.