Kathy Engel: Daily Instruction To My Self When the bombing is there, responsibility here
1. Upon waking, intercept thinking or feeling or opening eyes with breath
2. When allowing thought and feeling, let it be Ella and Jaja first, let it be the reminder of why, then a bird or something green/growing, more children, more love filling your chest to stomp out the crawlers scratching in no language
3. Touch first
4. Take one baby bayer aspirin for middle aged heart
5. Write at least one word in black notebook
before anything else, especially email or newspaper
6. Read a new poem before same
something unexpected (today Franz Wright)
7. Drink coffee, dark, Arabic, fragrant beans, taste the twigs and soil like night in morning. Never again think of giving up coffee.
8. Remember the Auschwitz survivor's words: Don't be general.
9. Read Mahmoud Darwish while drinking coffee and folding laundry and putting dishes away and sweeping and cutting flowers and folding and putting and cutting and sponging off little spots of...
10. Find air and put body in it
11. Run miles
12. Sweat miles
13. Remember exact words, faces, hand movements, intonation of those you met in West Bank, Jerusalem, Gaza, say them aloud and say a word in another language like it was a piece of your liver
14. Look at love like a two pound newborn in an incubator
Bandage it like a hummingbird's broken bones
Hold it -- long hard-worked love -- keeps growing back through tornado and tangled roots; turn to the person in an unexpected moment and tell him/her -- a gesture, a word
16. Now you may check e-mail, sign petitions, plan things
17. But be deliberate
18. Call friends who know and make room for those who don't
19. Walk to the garden, pick vegetables
20. Cook beautiful meals for people you love
21. Listen to Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Chucho Valdez, Mercedes Sosa, Nina Simone, while cooking
22. Take the clippers and basket and cut more flowers and put them everywhere
23. Do not nag children about stupid things
24. Do not stay angry about stupid things or take the wrong things personally
25. Make room for many teenagers to sleep all over the house, sprinkle poetry in corners
26. Be asymmetrical
27. Check on mother
28. Check on father
29. Attempt to imagine seeing from within another
30. Say the dangerous truth (the other more so): "U.S. speeds up sending bombs to Israel"(NY Times) /break the silence which is not a veil but a jail, a killing of soul and history, one life after another, simply life
31. CEASEFIRE
32. 50,000 years ago there were 5,000 people on earth. Presumably a place we call Africa.
33. Begin with we
July 22, 2006
