It’s the first day of spring. The sky is a clear blanket of blue. I’m wearing a long turquoise pleated skirt that wafts gently in the wind. This morning was for poetry and inky words.
In her poem called “Improvment”, Danusha Laméris writes:
“The optometrist says my eyes
Are getting better each year.
Soon he’ll have to lower my prescription
What’s next? The light step I had at six?
All the gray hairs back to brown?
Skin taut as a drum?
My improved eyes and I
Walked around the town and celebrated.
We took in the letters
Of the marquee the individual leaves
Filling out the branches of the sycamore,
And early moon.
So much goes downhill: joints
Wearing out with every mile,
The delicate fold of the eardrum
Exhausted from years of listening.
I’m grateful for small victories.
The way the heart still beats time
In the cathedral of the ribs.
And the mind, watching its parade
Of thoughts, enter and leave, begins to see them for what they are:
Jugglers, fire swallowers, acrobats,
Tossing their batons into the air.”
From our bodies to the tulips springing up from the ground, small victories are worth celebrating everywhere. For every painful moment that holds hands with a small victory, there is gratefulness. I am grateful that I am alive and that I am a human who makes mistakes. I am grateful to learning through uncomfortable growth.
What are your victories, the large ones down to the small, seemingly insignificant ones?
Here are a few of mine:
I made it through the first winter where I lived on my own. I made it through the high electric bills, the long dark nights where I had to shut the curtains at 4:55, the snowstorms, chapped hands, and navigating hard choices amid colds and runny noses.
I followed my gut and left an old job, even though it has resulted in a lower number in my bank account for the short term. Listening to my gut instincts instead of turning to others’ options has left me stronger.
The dirty dishes and crumbs are cleaned up after a couple longs weeks of a dirty kitchen.
Like Danusha, my eyesight has gotten better instead of worse over the past three years of odd, unruly inflammation.
I’m trying new things simultaneously as the tree branches that are beginning to show their red blossoms.
Noticing the full moon’s reflection in the dark evening river — present to the here and now for a moment, instead of being caught up in my own messy thoughts.
Although the life around me is painful and uncomfortable in so many areas, there are small victories that are worth celebrating — the victories that make life a little more tolerable. There are blue sky spring days at the end of every winter.
Megan Elaine 