My home, which houses two school-aged children, has become a den of disease. We’ve been passing germs and infections among ourselves since the fall.
I skipped the office holiday party for strep and Christmas with my extended family because of COVID. I did manage to stay healthy enough to attend three funerals — for my colleague, my grandmother, and my uncle — in February and March.
Between these losses, and the ongoing stress of life, I’m not in a great place.
Recently, for example, I woke up at 3 a.m. and couldn’t fall back asleep, and then vomited next to my car — twice — before I drove to the office.
It's my sense that, in difficult times, people turn to religion. Without getting too far into the details of my background, upbringing and spirituality, I will say that I’m culturally Catholic, raised agnostic, and that I think about Emily Dickinson’s poem "Some keep the Sabbath going to Church" more than once a month.
But also, lately, Galway Kinnell’s short poem, "Prayer," has been hitting me right.
Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is is what
I want. Only that. But that.
I’m very into his pronouns — that, whatever, what — because I can project all over them. Whatever happens, whatever what is is, includes illness and death and stress and misery and also poetry and rosaries and lavender lattes and board games and this human body, this brain.
The poem’s center — Whatever / what is is is what / I want — to me, carves a path forward. It moves from the bewilderment of “Whatever happens” to the chiasmus (or symmetry) of “what is is is what” to the naked expression of desire in “I want.” Whatever what is is, whatever existence is and means — I'm an agent in it.
There’s a tension in the last line, which moves from grasping — "I want" — to retraction — "Only that" — to an assertive firming up — "But that."
That "that," to me, encompasses a pre-commute puke, emoting to a friend during our weekly walk on the bike path, watching a group of children play with MAGNA-TILES in the hallway of a funeral home, and drafting this commentary.
Only that.
But that.
Lauren Ostberg works and lives in western Massachusetts.
