Standing Together

with gratitude and love for your presence in this world

There’s a small rug by my side of the bed that I’ve lived with for a long time. It was originally Wayne’s: I don’t know where it came from. But now, after 16 years, I’ve noticed things in the pattern I never saw before.

The first thing I saw today, as if it had flown in the bedroom window and landed on the rug, was a bluebird. Very Asian in design. A bluebird with a thick, fierce beak.

Pema Chödrön says we shouldn’t look for rescuers in the world: she says that we can’t be rescued. That hopelessness is the point of it all, the starting point to enlightenment.

I must be off to a good start: there’s been such a sense of hopelessness in my heart.

Despite Pema’s words, that bluebird feels like a personal message to me, smuggled into our world: a bluebird of happiness. Of relentless and persistent hope.

As I looked, other figures appeared in the rug that I’d always thought was exclusively geometrical and botanical in its design. There are several creatures that look like deer or flying squirrels. How can I have failed to see the piercing gaze of their eyes before?

And there’s another bluebird, in the far corner of the rug.

Once we see, we can’t un-see what’s been there all along.

How humbling it is to contemplate our own inability to notice and register what’s before our eyes!

Of course it makes me wonder what else I’ve been unable or unwilling to see.

The grass that was covered in snow and ice not long ago is starting to turn green again.

Teach me, I want to say to the grass and the house finch that snagged my gaze outside the kitchen window yesterday, with its bright red spill of feathers.

A brief exchanged gaze and then it flew away.

Teach me to live in the moment without fear. Teach me how to keep growing green while taking in all that’s changing around me.

Photo by Joshua J. Cotten on Unsplash

I think we need to allow ourselves to feel really, really sad. To grieve. This wasn’t the future we thought we’d see.

It’s so difficult to comprehend the gravity of this moment in time we are living in.

I’m looking out at the newly greened grass and the swelling buds of the rhododendron and thinking about how there is no such thing as a moment in time for Nature. There are seasons and, way beyond our ken, there are epochs. But life is indeed, as the Buddhists say, change.

A photograph freezes time. But otherwise, as it exists, time never stands still.

***

Nature is never greedy. The rain falls with joyful abandon on every thirsty being in its path. It gives with a generosity that can be shown quietly, without ostentation—even secretly, without the need for any reward. Because in Nature, everything is connected to everything else. There is no mine and yours: everything is ours.

The leafless branchlets of the just-awoken trees push forth buds that will become blossoms in a spirit of abundance, as a call to mealtime to the bees, whose work they depend on.

It’s all symbiosis, everywhere: The sunlight and the color green. The swelling buds and the come-hither blossoms. The pollen that hitches a ride on the delicate legs of bees and butterflies.

There’s symbiosis in the forest canopy where one tree shapes its pattern of topmost leaves to share the sunlight with another.

In the daffodils that gladden everyone struggling to awaken from the unrelenting bleakness of a winter that seems as if it will never loosen its icy grip on us.

There’s symbiosis between the reader and the writer, who derives much-needed courage from the privilege of sometimes being able to open someone’s heart with her words.

Writing is a very isolated and lonely calling. I have to tell myself that my words are the gift I have in my giving. They help me feel as safe as it’s possible for me to feel. They help me feel connected.

I would not want to be on this life-boat alone. I treasure your presence here with me in the middle of this crazily dangerous sea. I can’t even begin to express how grateful I am for your presence in my life.

Photo by Dario Brönnimann on Unsplash

Where We Keep Our Fears

With the lens of my right eye removed,
replaced with something not-me,
will I learn to un-see the sight
of my father’s temple throbbing?

It was our own early warning system
that the ground beneath our feet
was about to buckle and sway.

Earthquakes are familiar to those
growing up in L.A.

And yet I only remembered
when one had started again:
the windows rattling in their frames.
My soft-spoken father possessed by rage.
His long-fingered hands that soothed my hurts
and smoothed my long brown hair
contorted into fists.

He never hit me. Behind the closed door where he made me wait,
I heard my mother’s cries and felt the thud of his fist
on her flesh.

Earthquakes in Southern California endure
from ten to thirty seconds, that is to say forever
in that pitch-dark place where I still try to hide
from the betrayal I know will happen again,
sooner or later, until I’m reborn
with new eyes that never had to learn
to be afraid.

Copyright ©️ 2025 by Barbara Quick

I got my royalty statement from Regal House yesterday for what I believe to be my very best work. My payment for a book that never even got an advance? Zero. I apparently failed in that I didn’t hire a publicist or devote my life to promoting the novel when it was published in May 2022. I believed (and still believe) that my job is to just keep writing. But there’s an award-winning audiobook narrator who wants to record the book—and is trying to convince one of the publishers she works for to give it a chance. You could give the novel a boost by buying it directly from Regal House. I’m casting about for a way to keep my life-boat afloat.

You can watch and or listen to the interview and reading I gave at the Library of Congress this past January here. What Disappears got the highest endorsement ever from our high priestess of the poetry world, Grace Cavalieri. I also read a bunch of my poems. The experience was tremendously meaningful to me.

Photo by Jack Skinner on Unsplash

Are you planning to go to a protest on Saturday, April 5th? We have to do whatever we can for the cause of compassion, justice and, yes, democracy. We need to do whatever we can to protect our world from evil-doers who don’t give a fig about the Earth and its beauty and the children of this planet who deserve something much better than what they’re proposing.