That Bright, Unbroken Planet

Fragmentary Musings from an Upside-Down World

In my writing workshops, we often use poetry to inspire our work. Today’s musings grew out of those sessions.

I. Innocence

Praise the mutilated world. The broken one.

Praise, too, the hopeful world, the shining one.

Praise the brand new world, reinventing itself each day, each moment.

Praise the ancient world, the 4.5 billion-year-old one.

Praise the changing world, the mysterious, unknowable one.

Praise the humans who keep trying. Who get up each day and stumble forward, perpetually second-guessing themselves, never quite knowing if they’re doing the right thing, but trying, still, to be humble, to be kind.

Praise their open hearts, their willing gazes, their bleary eyes, opening again and again to the rising day.

Praise sun and fog, rain and snow, clouds and mist, hail and sleet.

Praise infants, hatchlings, fry and larvae. Praise each newly minted creature coming into this world guiltless, blameless.

Because if ever there was a misguided idea, it’s “original sin.”

You can never persuade me that anyone is born guilty, no matter who they are born to, or where, or when.

So let me praise innocence, which I believe in. I praise the newly hatched and the freshly born, and I praise the innocence that still dwells in each of us—our innocent yearnings, our innocent longings, our innocent hearts.

II. Broken

We gaze into the night
as if remembering the bright unbroken planet
we once came from,
to which we will never
be permitted to return.

- Tony Hoagland, “Jet”

A dear friend was ranting on Facebook the other night, to the point where I wondered if he was having a breakdown.

People you love will die before this is over, he wrote. They will disappear. And if you think that’s not true, then you haven’t been paying attention to history and seen what’s happened in every other authoritarian regime in the past hundred years.

For a moment this struck me as extreme. But as I sat looking at his words, I could not say he was wrong. People are disappearing already. Immigrants. Mahmoud Kahlil, detained for lawful protest. And people many of us loved died of Covid, in large part due to the arrogance, inaction and willful misdirection of this same authoritarian buffoon.

I paused, trying to think of something to say to my friend.

Finally, I wrote, I love you. You are not wrong. And still there is friendship. Still there is love. I am grateful for that.

When I awoke the next morning, he and two other friends had hearted my comment.

I am listening.

I am trying to listen to life and figure out what it’s saying. What it wants from me.

I remember a time when one of my sons had a meltdown. I heard him screaming in his room and throwing things. I ran up to his room and found him under a blanket, sobbing.

I want to go home, he wailed. I want to go home.

What do you mean, sweetie? I said, holding him in my arms. You’re home.

I don’t belong here, he cried. Nobody talks to me. I don’t have any friends.

I thought of my friend Do Peterson, in his song Soul Stretch, chanting

I feel lost.
I feel lost.
I feel lost here
take me
back to Africa.

Do—pronounced like the action verb—is a Black man born in New York City. He’s never been to Africa. And though I am neither Black nor a man, I’ve always felt a deep connection to his words. I too have felt lost. I too have been at home, longing for home. I believe we all ache for that bright unbroken planet Tony Hoagland wrote about, that place where we feel wholly loved, wholly accepted, whole.

III. Brave

“It’s a brave thing to step onto the field.”

- Julia Fehrenbacher

It’s a brave thing to get up each day and try.

It’s a brave thing to stand before the mirror, meet your own eyes, see the ways you’ve fallen short, and vow to try again.

It’s a brave thing to say, I don’t know what to do, and I’m afraid, but I love the world, so I’m going to keep trying to figure it out.

After reading my friend’s post last night, I dreamed of Nazis. They were holding me hostage in a garage. It was scary, but not quite as scary as it sounds, perhaps because I’d figured out how to escape. My energy in the dream was not one of terror but one of ferocious focus. I’d discovered the people who’d kidnapped me were not who they said they were. They weren’t a well-armed militia. They were just small-time criminals looking to ransom me. The Nazi insignia was there to scare me. Which isn’t to say they weren’t Nazis, but if they were, they weren’t part of a coordinated team. They were just desperate bigots trying to make a buck.

Is it enough to love the world?

When my child was crying that day, saying I want to go home, my heart broke. I thought, I can’t bear this. I thought, If it’s gonna be like this, I don’t want to be alive.

I knew then, and I know now, that he will have pain, and he will recover from that pain, and then he will have pain again. That’s what it is to be human, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. Nothing any of us can do. It’s the hardest part about being a parent, the part nothing can prepare you for. Once your offspring are here, you have to stay here for them. After my children arrived, my go-to escape fantasies became too selfish to contemplate. Still, there is nothing harder than witnessing their pain.

Let them be okay, dear whoever or whatever powers there may be, up there or out there or in here. Against all odds and against all logic, let my children, and all children, and this shining, mutilated world, be okay.

Our prayers make no sense, but we incant them anyway. We send our nonsensical prayers out into the universe; we move through the world, step by step, never sure if we’re going the right way; and we keep loving each other, even as we long for that bright, unbroken planet to which we can never return.

What else can we do?

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The poems that inspired this writing:

1. Try to Praise the Mutilated World, Adam Zagajewski, translated by Clare Cavanagh

2. Jet, Tony Hoagland

3. The Hand that Heals, Julia Fehrenbacher