Nobody, not even the rain

In another life, I wrote a paper for a critical theory class about the ee cummings poem that starts "somewhere I have never travelled." To teach us about "intentional fallacy," Watson (the prof) had taken cummings' name off the poem and instructed us to treat the text alone, without context. I remember pissing him off by playing with gender pronouns, writing about the poet as a "she" speaking of her lover as displaying "intense fragility" -- a quality I saw in D, my male then-lover. Watson saw this as a deliberate provocation. (Of course, he was the one who later warned me that doing a phd would "unwoman" me and I would end up "like Lois," our gorgeously Bryn Mawr dyke dean).

I keep thinking about that idea of experiencing a poem "without context," and the "rules" about what kind of context I could legitimately bring to my reading. Right now, in all of my meetings, connectings, discoverings with the people expanding my circle, I'm sharply conscious of the "high context" everyone brings to every meeting by this point in our mid-lives. So many stories already lived, so much "intense fragility" woven through amazing strength and capability.

I feel like I'm in a place where I'm ... kind of awed ... at the unfoldings of experience, histories, hopes that the people who have been in my life for a long time, and the people I'm now encountering, are carrying as we connect. I feel as though, somehow, I can now hold myself open to a compassionate place -- can see past the simply put statement of "we were together for three years, it ended, it was hard" to the layers of managed pain and thwarted hope, intertwined into a willingness to embrace new possibilities and new stories.

I feel like I have found a place to be able to behold and observe and hold the stories with a fairly -- to me -- profound and new compassion. I keep seeing the plot lines of strength -- the boundary-drawing stands to stop pain, the uttered hopes about intimacy despite a landscape of betrayal, the sheer power of self-definition against experiences that whacked against desired self. I'm sort of awed at the capacity for the people in my world to absorb, make meaning of and achieve agency through history that could toughen, but instead seasons and creates the kind of vulnerability embedded in strength that allows for true depth in the space between us.

I'm feeling like I'm in a grateful and open place. And wanting to live into who their trust makes me.

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain, has such small hands