My poet friend Dana Maya volunteers at community events with the “Sponaneous Writing Booth.” You give the poets a one-word prompt, make a small donation to a good cause, and they write you a poem on the spot. Given the rare gift of an entire night to myself, I finally got to see the booth in action last night at a neighborhood festival.
With my husband working out of town and both kids camping, an evening “to myself” means I check the phone, then check again. The word “anxiety” already thrummed in my brain, even as I tried not to anticipate the spontaneous writing experience.
Last time I turned the phone off for an hour and put it away on purpose (Rebuke technology dependence! Free-range parent! Be mindful of now!) during one of these “to myself” times, one of my sons had a health emergency. No one could find me for that hour. This scary incident left him completely and totally fine in the end, and me with that god-forsaken phone as an appendage for life. Last week we had another non-serious (yet urgent) incident with my other son, during what should’ve been phones-off date time with my husband. Everyone is fine. I no longer question the parent/phone tether.
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I met my dear Dana in a bag of diapers a decade ago. A little ‘zine arrived packaged neatly with my clean cloth diaper delivery (during that brief faulty soggy phase). Her poem in the ‘zine stuck with me. She named and described so perfectly the unique paradox mothers feel; we can never get close enough to our kids nor far enough away, all at the same time.
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So, I put two dollars in the jar and burped out the word ANXIETY with a laugh, figuring this prompt stale and overdone a zillion times. Dana told me she’d never once written on it at the booth and she has volunteered for years. She told me most people choose words like JOY GRATITUDE MOON SUN BEAUTY etc.
We laughed about ANXIETY because she could feel it wasn’t the grand-buffet level of everything in the world seems cruel right now anxiety, and more the everyday everpresent small bites variety.
Dana wrote this poem in less than three minutes in one draft right in front of me, because Dana is an enchanting poet goddess.
She and I share these small plates of anxiety on the regular. They pair brilliantly with a glass of wine. Feel free to pull up a chair.