Haikus from the Summer Mud

bad poems from some good runs through a hard season

Hello friends,

Today is the fall equinox and the last day of summer. Welcome to another ending and another beginning.

Looking back to the beginning of summer, I was entering one of my all-time lows. On the heals of bringing our second kid into the world, sleep deprived, trying to keep up with our toddler and keep house (aka, crushing impossibilities), going back to work and getting slapped by those stresses and challenges, my wife’s ongoing post-pregnancy health challenges and limitations, painfully out of shape, and a universe of things swirling in my own soul and head … y’all, I struggled.

I’m not going to dwell on all of that too much, but I do want to be open about it. Life is hard sometimes. Most of the time, maybe. And as most of my age/stage-cohort has confirmed, having little kids in this era of COVID/post-COVID, beneath capitalism’s relentless productivity demands, scrambling to meet soaring expenses for housing and childcare, shorn of support from social safety nets that neoliberalism when scorched earth on, and wandering a culture of mounting isolation for individuals and “nuclear families” — it’s not a formula for wellbeing friends. Pardon my gross understatement.

I don’t want to tell a simple story. This is not a “I felt this way back then, then I did ____, and now I’m 💯” message.

I’m … lots of things. It depends on the day. And, also, things have been a little better lately. All this is true.

When I sent out my first “Live the Seasons” newsletter back in March, the first colors of spring lifting through the grey Boston crust, I did not expect that summer — theoretically a season of light, growth and play — would be what it was.

Live the Seasons

But summer was what it was. I have been reflecting on what that means. I don’t have many conclusions other than this: to live the seasons doesn’t mean living an abstract version of seasons as we think they are supposed to be. It means being present as fully as possible to what actually is and what actually comes. Summer’s not just sunshine. It has its storms too. And sometimes things break and get hurt in those storms.

Gigi Ross calls “turning toward what is” the fundamental spiritual practice. This way of learning to become present to reality, whether interior or exterior, is a thread that weaves through every contemplative act. This is yet another intersection where spirituality and fighting for social meet and, even, merge. Being present to things as they actually are leads us to face the unjust sources of suffering in our own lives and others. Such encounters not only beckons us into a deeper meditative silence, they simultaneously moves us to actions of community formation, compassion, and solidarity.

I lamented to my Dad back in August that, since about 2020, I’ve never put so much effort into doing all the “practices” (spiritual, physical, relational, etc, etc) you’re supposed to do in order to be “healthy” and seen so little results. I think a younger me would be mad at God about that. Current me doesn’t think God really works like that anyways. Nonetheless, I think we have to talk about this stuff. I’m as committed to the resurgent movements around embodied spiritual practices and healing justice work as just about anyone. But they aren’t magic. Contemplation and yoga and gardening and community dinners aren’t fairy dust for happiness. Life, and bodies, and all the human, social, and more-than-human systems we’re embedded in are too complex and nonlinear for any of that. Let us not bring our sublimated American prosperity gospel expectations to mysticism or movements. That’s not what liberation looks like. We need to be careful not to set up unhealthy expectations even as we celebrate, lift up, and support one another in developing deeper grounding practices. Read any mystic or prophet and you can’t ignore what a harrowing dark night experience turning toward the real will inevitably be. This too is what it must mean to live the seasons.

So, this is not a linear or simple story. And. Particular to me — alongside of therapy, and the baby starting to sleep (mostly) through the night, and just time passing — there was one practice that began to create some space and healing in my mind and body this summer more than any other. And it wasn’t what I would have expected. It was running.

I’m no quintessential “runner” people. I was a band and theater nerd in high school, to no one’s surprise. But as I got out on more and more runs this summer, and as the runs got a little longer, my mind started finding the space to ruminate. As my mind turned life over and around, an old creative practice I used to enjoy came back to life for me. When I was on my longer runs, I would start to roll out the lines and count out the syllables of a haiku.

I’m unbelievably fortunate to live in a neighborhood ringed by the best parks in one of the best cities for great parks in America. We also spent a lot of time at my in-laws place in rural Maine. So the New England scenery certainly helped.

What follows is a bit of a poetic photo journal of my summer running haiku practice. It’s a record of those physical and spiritual places that took me into the deep mud of this long hard beautiful summer, helped me grow present there, and begin to move through.

Evening Run 6/13

No I want daddy! 
Sun sets twice round the pond
And which way goes love?

- - -

Lunch Run 6/16

Fear not thy brackish backwater
The edge becomes the reed's center
From which birds take flight

- - -

Charles River Run 6/19

The well lived life
Is a river through these here
domestic wilds

- - -

Deering Pond Loop 7/1

Silence. And foot falls.
The body moves among creatures,
Creature, ah! as it must.

- - -

Stroller Run 7/9

Look at that, daddy!
Daddy, oh! watch this, daddy!
Attend oh my soul

- - -

Lunch Run 7/30

I found a new trail
It runs by a river which
bends, crashes, grows still

- - -

Afternoon Run 8/6

Gentle, love, gentle...
Stroke creations cheek as she you
Attention birthing intention

- - -

Morning Run 8/19

I got lost, doubled
Back, stumbled smiling into
This luminous black

- - -

Bauneg Beg & Back Labor Day Classic

Daily consistency 
I do not know,
but there are seasons enough
in which to grow.

- - -

Afternoon Run 9/10

Evergreen ever
Yellowing descent encased
Calmward drifts her slanting gaze

---

A few reads I’ve been enjoying

• Jason England’s essay in the Defector on the death of hip hop at the hands of capitalism and whiteness:

  • “Culture can’t evolve, or even be sustained, under these conditions. Culture is about collective communion, uplift, and rescue; culture is not about the solitary production of an approximation of itself for consumption…. Biggie is on Old Navy and Gap t-shirts. American Capitalism, like the reaper, is always lurking. It will consume your culture, no matter how subversive, and sell it back to you at a higher cost, as a box containing nothing.”

• The new online magazine Hammer & Hope is raining Black Liberation fire out of the gate. The second issue “Uprisings are Just the Beginning” has so much wisdom to share on how we make radical change.

• The Boston Review’s latest issue “On Solidarity” is (obviously) awesome to me. There’s an essay by

  Prisonculture
  (aka, Mariame Kaba) and Kelly Hayes on the role of listening for organizing broader movements beyond those who agree with us that is oh so good. I’m also really getting into this piece on how to cultivate endurance for movements.

• We have to stay aware of the real threat and capacities of fascist organizing in America. Katherine Stewart’s major piece in the New Republic on the Claremont Institute is worth reading in its disturbing entirety.

• I’m working my way through a few of the articles in the Journal of Social Encounter’s latest issue “On the Various Dimensions and Manifestations of Solidarity” and, phew!, is it rich. The introductory article and this one on the solidarity economy are phenomenal and challenging.

• Finally, we can’t talk solidarity right now without celebrating and supporting the historic (for my lifetime at least) level of union strikes happening this year: from the Writer’s & Actors Guild, the Teamster’s leveraging the threat of strike for a big win with UPS, and now the UAW’s massive action against the big three car manufactures. Follow sources that actually care about workers and cover these amazing movements like humans matter. But most of all, read

  Garrett Bucks
  ’s incredible essay “Love (and solidarity) in the time of political puffery:”

  • “The strikers walked out of the factory on February 11th— alive, with a pay raise, and official recognition for their union— because the strike was an act of love, in the most active sense of the word. Love in the factory meant commitment to one another. Love meant meeting each other’s basic needs. Love meant vigilance and protection. Love meant accountability and collective responsibility. Love meant the recognition that the only way out was together.”