Staying Power 2: Writings from a Year of Emergence: Staying Power, #2

By Phyllis Cole-Dai

The word "emerge" is hidden within "emergency."
For good reason.

 

As people of hope, we lay that hidden word bare and focus our energies upon it. We insist that momentous potential lies as a seed within all periods of turmoil and upheaval. We search out that seed, enrich the soil, and provide what it needs to grow.

 

Our ability to do this is a hallmark of staying power.

 

Interested in this book? Get the original Staying Power: Writings from a Pandemic Year!

 

 

Praise for Staying Power 2: Writings from a Year of Emergence

 

"Reading Staying Power is like sitting down with a trusted friend for a thoughtful, life-giving, and much longed for conversation. The collection beautifully explores what gets us up in the morning and keeps us awake at night, the shadows present in our current world, and a luminous light always shining at the center of things. I know I'll return to it for wisdom and insight, courage and comfort, good questions and a sustainable hope in hard times."—Carrie Newcomer, Award-winning Songwriter/Musician, Author, The Beautiful Not Yet

 

"If you're weary of books telling you how to live your life, with how to be your best self, with how to thrive in the midst of this or that crisis when all you want is a reason to enter another day and make it back to bed, it's with a delighted sigh and a grateful heart that you'll open Staying Power. After saying yes to a cup of green tea, Phyllis sits by you, turns, looks out your window. Peace appears. She offers no solutions, no shoulds, no answers to it all. With quiet understanding she ever so gently redirects your attention, assures you that your days—even hard days—are rich with the emergence of ineffable luminosity."—Jack Ridl, Author, Practicing to Walk Like a Heron

 

"In this wise, hopeful book, Phyllis Cole-Dai helps us emerge from the pandemic chrysalis. Writing from her `true spot,' as she calls it, she offers short, creative takes on how we might navigate life in the new normal. Every essay, story, and poem tips the `Kindness Meter' toward love and generosity." Annette Langlois Grunseth, Author, Becoming Trans-Parent

 

"In her new volume of musings, Phyllis Cole-Dai says, `This is more than just talk. This is blessing. This is love at work.' I can think of no better way to describe these heartfelt and inspiring reflections. Phyllis has a gift for looking through the prism of life's challenges and seeing the myriad possibilities for hope and healing. She is not a narrator; she is a treasured companion who will remind you that `What love can accomplish is beyond superhuman. It has no limits.' This book is a blessing."—Gloria Heffernan, Author, What the Gratitude List Said to the Bucket List

 

"This is a stunningly beautiful and wise collection. Each brief chapter offers the reader resilience, deep wisdom, and kindness. It's an invaluable and comforting companion to these uncertain times."—Claire B. Willis, Author, Opening to Grief

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bell Sound Books
• Release date: Nov 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781737105527

Phyllis Cole-Dai

Phyllis Cole-Dai began writing on an old manual typewriter in childhood and never stopped. Her work explores things that tend to divide us, such as class, ethnicity, religion and gender, so that we might wrestle our way into deeper understandings of one another.  Phyllis has authored or edited nine books in multiple genres, including historical fiction, memoir, and poetry. Her latest book is Beneath the Same Stars, a novel of the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 (One Sky Press, 2018). With Ruby R. Wilson she co-edited the award-winning Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poetry (Grayson Books, 2017). Her memoir The Emptiness of Our Hands, co-authored with James Murray, chronicles 47 days that the two of them practiced “being present” while living by choice on the streets of Columbus, Ohio (3rd ed., Bell Sound Books, 2018). Phyllis now lives with her scientist-husband, teenage son, and two cats in a cozy 130-year-old house in Brookings, South Dakota. 

Book preview

Title

To Ruby and Jim Wilson,

ever forward, never straight,

all the way to the summit

CONTENTS

Introduction

Gentle Road Home

The End Doesn’t Always Mean It’s Over

Never Look Anything but Real

How Do You Be?

A Mighty Grand Parade

The Turning Hinge

Mother

More Than Just Talk

On This Our World Turns

When a Rose Is More Than a Rose

Nuggets of Or

Arise, All Women Who Have Hearts!

Dropping into the Net

Life’s Too Deep Not to Dive

It’s Up to Us to Finish the Work

Putting on the Purple

Letter to the Mountain Called Grief

No Way Around but Through

Stepping through the Round Open Door

Winter Solstice: A Time for Letting Go

I’ll Listen As If You’re a Poet

What You Get Into Will Change You

What Shape Is Your Nest In?

Parable of the Stream, in Five Parts

Random Notes from a River Raft

Laughing in the Dark (Again)

Hiking Through Poetry

I See Your Golden Feathers

A Certain Slant of Light

The House That Love Builds

A Mighty Grand Slam

The Lie That Was True

Are You Friends with Your Hands?

Hands

Time to Re-Treat

Lemon Tree, Very Pretty

Why’s the Tough Stuff So Tough?

Lighting the Way Home

And the Sky Leaned Closer

Thus Will a Way Open

Refusing to Nest in the Nesting Dolls

The Call in the Night

Calling All Saints

The Big Stink and the Open Window

It’s More Than Nothing

Thoughts from the Train

Afterword: Your Life as Cento

A Special Request from Phyllis

Annotated Centos

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Phyllis Cole-Dai

To recognize the momentousness

of what has happened

is to apprehend what might happen.

Inside the word emergency is emerge;

from an emergency new things come forth.

Rebecca Solnit

Hope in the Dark

INTRODUCTION

Rebecca Solnit reminds us in the epigraph that the word emerge is buried within emergency. If we’re people of hope, our proper work is to lay bare that hidden word and focus our energies upon it; to insist that momentous potential lies as a seed within all periods of turmoil and upheaval; and to search out that seed, enrich the soil, and provide what it needs to grow.

This ability to trust in the good that might emerge from trouble is a hallmark of what I call staying power.

Staying power is an expression I grew up with, back on the family farm in Ohio. As I described in the original Staying Power volume (2021), the phrase refers to our ability to keep at a task that must be done, despite how hard it is or how tired we get. More than mere stamina, staying power involves exceptional commitment and trust, even a kind of faith. It’s as much about the spirit as the body.

With staying power, we’re able to work through demanding situations without giving up. No matter the odds stacked against us, we stay put, hold fast to our center, and see the tough thing through. Even in extremity, when all we can do is sit still and wait for the problem to resolve itself, that’s what we do—we sit and wait. And hope. That, too, is a form of staying power.

We cultivate staying power by nurturing gratitude. By building resilience. By practicing patience. By developing empathy and compassion. By appreciating the beauty of what’s true. By keeping faith with ourselves and others. And as Solnit would say, by continuing to believe that something valuable can emerge from every emergency.

This book aims to inspire and companion you in that very sort of soul building.

* * *

In March 2020, just as COVID-19 was beginning its rampage across the United States (where I live), I launched a newsletter called Staying Power to help sustain readers such as you. Two and a half years later, I’m still producing it every week for a circle of loyal subscribers. We’ve passed through a remarkable ordeal together—historic, in fact—and we’re not yet entirely on the other side. The pandemic landscape, like the original virus, continues to morph. Despite mitigation by vaccines and other measures, risk still looms. We pretend we’re invulnerable, at our peril.

Though the US has so far withstood successive waves of COVID variants, the country remains in dire need of treatment on other fronts. Our communities are suffering from crippling inflation; prolonged strains on health-care systems and shortages of medical personnel; political divisions that verge on rhetorical (and sometimes actual) civil war; dramatic episodes of racial injustice, erupting from structural oppression; a contagion of gun violence; the spread of extremism, especially among white supremacists and Christian nationalists; constant catastrophes traceable to climate change; and the fallout from a tragic series of regressive rulings by the US Supreme Court at the close of its latest term, including the termination of women’s full reproductive rights.

As if these problems weren’t dire enough, a bipartisan US House select committee has now presented clear, compelling evidence of an attempted coup on January 6, 2021. That coup was incited and abetted by a sitting president unwilling to surrender office, despite having lost the vote of the people. Yet multitudes of my fellow citizens either refute that evidence, aren’t bothered by it, or are disappointed that the coup failed. As of this writing, it’s unclear how, if at all, we’ll hold the main actors in the plot accountable for their actions.

All this might have you feeling paralyzed. Or cynical. Or outraged. Or stricken by anxiety.

Maybe you’ve emotionally checked out. The country’s problems are so immense, and you feel so powerless to address them, that you’re just keeping your head down and slogging forward, wishing for the best.

Maybe you’ve tried on some or all of these reactions. Looking in the mirror, though, you don’t think any of them suit you. They don’t fit. They’re not your color. They’re not what you need.

In short, the mirror has you wanting more staying power.

* * *

In this collection, you’ll find musings, stories, and poems I’ve written since the publication of the original Staying Power. Unlike in that book, I haven’t arranged the contents in strict chronological order. Rather, I played with the pieces of text as I would the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that can be assembled in thousands of ways. Snapping them into place beside unexpected neighbors shifted their colors and altered their significance. The serendipitous picture that began to emerge held more appeal than one simply dictated by the calendar.

You might say that I created this book as a poet would create a cento. A cento is composed entirely of lines or phrases lifted from the work(s) of another author(s). The poet imaginatively reassembles the selected fragments into a rich, fresh text.

Cento-making can be an exercise in staying power. It epitomizes the process Solnit described: sticking with a situation long enough to apprehend what’s possible, then letting a new thing come forth, even from broken pieces of the old.

I’ve bookended this collection with two centos of my own design. I open with Gentle Road Home, woven from the words of Father Gregory Boyle. I close with Thoughts from the Train, knit together (mostly) from the tweets of Chef José Andrés. As you’ll learn, both these men, along with the dedicated staff and volunteers in their organizations, know all about staying power. Every day, they have to conjure up more. Every day, they have to help the good emerge from emergency.

If they can do it, so can we.

Choose love as the architecture of your heart, the first cento says, borrowing from Father Boyle.

       Catch yourself not wanting to get

       separated from your kindness.

       Be at home with yourself,

       then put the welcome mat out

       so that others find a home in you.

   If you are lost," the second cento says, borrowing from Chef Andrés,

       share a plate of food

       with a stranger.

       You will find who you are.

     I offer you this anthology as a welcome mat, as a plate of food. May you emerge from the reading with appreciation and hope—and all the staying power you need.

GENTLE ROAD HOME

After I was fully vaccinated against COVID, my first in-person, out-of-state event was a three-day retreat, which I led in California. At its conclusion, one of the participants kindly presented me with The Whole Language: The Power of Extravagant Tenderness by Father Gregory Boyle. I happen to be an admirer of the author. He’s the founder of Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles, the largest gang-intervention, rehabilitation, and reentry program in the world.

Extravagant. Tenderness.

Upon leaving California, I read snatches of Boyle’s book in hotel rooms, in airports, on bumpy flights. When I finally finished, I flipped back through the pages, reviewing lines I’d highlighted.

Make us into a cento, they said, in chorus.

So that’s exactly what I did, stitching together scraps of lines from Boyle’s book. As I explained in the introduction, a cento is a poem composed entirely of text fragments lifted from the work(s) of another author(s) and imaginatively reassembled into a rich, fresh text.

I didn’t use every sentence of Boyle’s that I’d marked, nor did I quote every line in full. I just cut the literary fabric into pieces, then patched them together in a novel way, as if making a quilt with no pattern.

What resulted was a didactic poem: a poem that instructs. It’s the kind of poem I tend to turn to when feeling drained or bewildered. That’s how I often feel these days, as our country emerges (fingers crossed) from the worst of the pandemic.

A good didactic poem invites. It encourages. It stimulates and catalyzes. It reminds us of what we know and what we can be. At times, by doing all these things at once, a didactic poem provides a warm covering for our spirit’s bed.

I present this cento to you on the following pages, thick (but not heavy) with layers of extravagant tenderness. Consider it a gift, courtesy of Father Boyle and those beautiful souls he loves from the ground up. May your reading of it serve you as well as my creating of it served me. Maybe it will inspire you to patch together a cento of your own.

GENTLE ROAD HOME: A CENTO

In gratitude to Father Greg Boyle

Lean into the grief.

     Look death in the eye.

     Say yes to the necessary

     culmination of life.

Abandon performance.

     You’re the boss of you.

     Deepen the sense of your own truth.

     Live this truth against all odds.

Choose to stay on good terms with your life.

     Choose love as the architecture of your heart.

     Catch yourself not wanting to get

     separated from your kindness.

     Be at home with yourself,

     then put the welcome mat out

     so that others find a home in you.

     Be poised to enter into relationship

     with anyone

     anywhere.

Look to the excluded and say:

     We will not live without you.

     We all have the same last name.

Enable folks to high purpose.

     Be on the lookout for the hidden

     wholeness in everyone.

     See who other people are

     and quit staring at who they aren’t.

     It will always be less exhausting

     to love than to find fault.

We are all medics in a war zone.

     We want a different world.

     It’s not about getting to solutions

     as much as getting to each other.

     Every day, we inch closer.

So, what do we do now?

     Repurpose our