“Stripping truth down to its original lie”

March 6, 2012March 5, 2012 Sarah Stright1 Comment

My friend Keeley is one of my favourite people to talk with for hours. We sit in cafés and talk about the things we are learning, and we connect new ideas with old ones as we help each other round out our understanding of the world.

Keeley is a writer, too, but of a different kind. She is a poet, able to capture unique glimpses of humanity in lines and stanzas.

Recently, Keeley wrote this beautiful and thought-provoking poem that really resonates with me:

I have often felt like I am broken. Like what I really am is only a reflection of what I present to the world. Like I need to lie to continue to breathe, to cope.

I often felt like this in the months before and after my mom died in 2008.

Feelings like the ones “Reaching” evokes are also similar to the ones that led to my leaving the church several years ago. Falsity. A sense of shallowness. “Masquerading honesty”. “Skewed perception”. (Disclaimer: I don’t believe all church communities are like this. Mine was. Too many are.)

Go back and read Keeley’s poem again, if you can. It’s so nuanced and insightful.

I want to say more about this poem, but I am afraid of not doing Keeley’s words justice.

So I’ll let them speak for themselves.

I am a Fly

November 29, 2007 Sarah StrightLeave a comment

A discussion with a friend tonight led me to dig up something I wrote ages, or at least six years, ago, that I think merits sharing:

They say that love will happen when you least expect it… but how could it possibly strike me unawares when I am constantly looking for it, ever watching for its arrival? All receptors are on full alert, technicians ready to receive and store incriminating data. I am a satellite registering and measuring love’s radiowaves. I am a fly, with huge, magnifying eyes, able to see an approach from any direction. I constantly change position, leaving no area unsearched, no rock unturned in my search for love. How, thus, could it find me unawares?

And yet, I know it must.

The Poetry of Meredith Grey

February 22, 2007 Sarah StrightLeave a comment

Something I posted tonight on the “Aah! I can’t get enough Grey’s Anatomy” group on Facebook:

and mer doesn’t die. and we see denny. and there’s an izzie–denny connection. and ellis grey is no longer terrorizing meredith’s existence. and christina told her one person about her and burke. and addison might be finding love again. and sloane might be redeeming himself. and all is right with the world. okay, george and izzie and callie are fighting, and richard is grieving for ellis, and alex is confused about his jane doe, but generally, the chaos has settled, we can all breathe. do it with me now. take a deep breath. in. out. thank you, Shonda, for saving your show’s namesake.

I love Meredith. She’s gloriously flawed (that’s where I got that term for my last post), and that’s beautiful. It’s real! Sure, she may seem more dark and twisty than some of us would like to admit we are (have you ever tried to drown yourself in the bathtub?), but I definitely have seen myself in her reactions, her narrations, her thoughts.

She’s poetry. She’s beautiful and deep. She has a depth she herself hasn’t tapped. Perhaps now that the bane of her existence, her mother, has… passed on…, she can go there. She can start believing that she really is extraordinary. We all know she is, just like we know we are. We might not live like we know, but there’s at least a tiny little part of us that knows. We may be too dark and twisty to let it show, but, I’ll bet, if given the opportunity to fight like Meredith was given tonight, we’d take it.

Mer’s got a new lease on life, on love, on family, on a future. And so does everyone around her. She came back for them, after all. She loves them. We’ve seen her struggle for hope at times, we’ve seen her wallowing in tequila, and I’ve already mentioned the bathtub thing. She’s been there, done that with the suffering thing, and the wisest know it’s endurance that makes one stronger. Perhaps she wanted to give up, but with a group of interns and the best surgeons in the country, not to mention millions of viewers worldwide, cheering for her, she’s back in the race.

Meredith is poetry because we feel her. She’s poetry because her story is beautiful and emotional. There’s an intensity to her that tugs on our psyche and draws us in.

“Sometimes a Miracle”, they called it. I believe the miracle goes on, because Meredith is breathing again. And so are we.