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Dear Subscriber First Name, This morning, walking around my yard awestruck by the glory of spring’s onset, I flashed on a memory of having used the term “fierce love” in a paper I submitted for an undergraduate class on liberation movements. I imagine this rather random memory traveled through 40 years of neurons in a split second because the term “ferocious” had just come to mind to describe the beauty I was beholding. Ferocious beauty. Hmmm… These were not two words I had matched before, but the pairing seemed right. The beauty of the morning felt assertive, imploring, ravenous for my most devoted attention. Fierce, in a way that love often calls us to be. Creative words and word-pairings feel needed to me right now; those that stretch our imagination and our ability to convey life’s complexity. I find myself yearning for language that can express the felt-intensity of what we are currently facing - as individuals and as a collective. Words that beg me to dig more deeply into their broadest usage and etymology, not settling for the first synonym that arises in a google search. In this spirit, poignancy comes to mind, as it often does. Anyone who has read Wake Up Grateful or studied with me knows how much this word means to me. The nuances of the term have mostly been lost but deserve recapturing. When someone says something is poignant, they often use the word to simply mean that it’s sad. But “poignant” conveys a state of being deeply touched or impacted by a complexity of feelings. Poignancy addresses our awareness of the limitation of time in the midst of meaningful experience. Preciousness and brevity. A kind of searing tenderness. It allows for joy and grief to coexist harmoniously. It is a both/and word, like bittersweet. For me, poignancy speaks to the deepest truths of the heart as few words do. Every day, the ferocious beauty of spring delivers me into a heightened state of poignancy, precisely because the season is so fleeting. Changes in our climate have made it only feel more precious. Tulip petals crumple up like tissue paper on a hot day. Tree blossoms flutter like confetti to the ground in high winds. I crave being outdoors at all hours to try to behold and chase it all. But sitting here, I realize that every season renders me this way for a time. And every single day renders me poignant in its passage. So, being as appreciatively alive and open-hearted as I can be in each moment that life affords me is the only antidote I have found to the inevitability of loss - loss of tulips, seasons, life. Alive…with fierce love, ferocious beauty, fervent hope. May the resources in this newsletter and on my website support you to keep your heart open as you navigate these beautiful, poignant days. From the tenderness of my heart to yours -
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