on courage, briefly

I’ve been thinking lately about courage—the everyday kind, especially. Dandelion-quiet, soft as a frost crystal wrapping fragile fingers around a fallen leaf, this is the courage that asks for no audience, the kind we find in our morning kitchen in the dark as we gather the strength to ask for the help that we need.

It’s been soul-filling to watch L draw on this courage after surgery, to be allowed to offer time & company & care to someone who spends so much of their life giving of themselves to those they love, to remind them what a privilege, a joy, a gift it is for the rest of us to be able to be there for them, too.

There’s a version of this courage, too, in every person who rode their bikes yesterday in honor of those killed and affected by ICE, every person who brings their body & voice to a protest, every person who believes in a better world and is willing to do what they can to bring that world a little closer. We’re not there for a photo op (though there are always cameras these days), but for one very simple, deeply profound reason: it is the right thing to do. Each of us has our own unique set of motivations beyond that, of course, our own connections to the wrongs against which we fight, but that moral conviction is at the core. You know as well as I do, it is unspeakably powerful to be in the midst of so large a group whose energy feels so aligned.

Every day, I receive two texts from D: a version of good morning, and a version of good night. This, too, is everyday courage. D lost her husband, J, to COVID in 2020, and, since then, she has taken no waking for granted. Even with a heart broken in such a forever way, she has continued to live brightly, to stand up for the better world for which she and J always fought so fiercely.

It would have been easy for D to turn inward, away from the people who love her, away from connection and the possibility of more loss, more heartbreak. Instead, she chose to dwell in that quiet courage. Every day, waking, sending me & so many others her good morning text, she chooses it again. L does, too, when they text asking me to come over in the early morning to let their pup out to use the bathroom. I imagine that you, too, often make a version of this choice.

There is much more to say, but the sun is shining and the woods are calling, so I will leave you with both a poem I wrote for D six years ago and one last piece of courage: she’s started wearing jewelry again.

April 4, 2020:

you’ve stopped wearing jewelry 
because your husband woke
in the middle of the night
or maybe he didn’t and you did
instead
and he was making a sound you
don’t have the words for
have been thinking around for a year
and he died in your bed
breathed again in the hospital
died again 
dies again
over and over and over when you are sleeping
and when you can’t 
when you hear him calling your name.
and someone took his gold ring
left hand, fourth finger
before you could reach him
before you can answer