Turning Towards Life Discusses “Saying Yes”

by rosemerryt@gmail.com
https://turningtowards.life/2021/02/28/saying-yes-episode-178/

I love the Turning Towards Life Podcast in which co-hosts Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise discuss poems and other texts and help us see how they inform the choices we make in our daily lives. On their February 28, 2021 episode,  they explore my poem “Saying Yes” and discuss the ways we frame (or not) our experiences, and how we might choose to respond to whatever moments the world offers us.

 

Saying Yes

And could I, like this picture frame
hold any image I was given?
I think of the news last night—
how I would rather not hold
what I saw there.
I think of what I learned just yesterday
about myself and notice how
I would rather push the image away.
But could I be like this picture frame
that will hold anything and in so doing
honor its importance? Honor
everything, no matter how mundane,
no matter how frightening,
as something worth knowing,
something essential to what it means to be alive,
a soup can, perhaps, a petunia, or a scream.
How easily the frame says yes to the world,
takes it in, anything, with no judgement,
and offers it whatever beauty it has.

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer