What if We Could Rest for a While
After “In Praise of I Don’t Know” by Maya Stein
My friend, the teacher and beautiful writer Dana Childers, offers poems as prompts in a weekly gathering of writers. One of her favorite poets to share is Maya Stein, and she has become one of my favorites. She may become one of yours, too — but only if you like to feel emotions or be moved by truth.
This piece below was written after her poem, “In Praise of I Don’t Know.” I hope you click the link and read it!
What if we could rest for a while in the halo of “I don’t know”?
What if we could rest for a while in the haze of “good enough”?
What if I could forgive myself for not being a wizard of telepathy, an emotional surgeon with the deft skill to anesthetize the subject and remove every filament of sorrow, slip them out of a vast system of blood cells and nerves like a splinter, leaving behind only the absence of pain?
What if I could rest for a while in the spacious quiet of “it cannot be helped,” or at least not by me?
What if I could rest for a while in the shade, with poetry and a blanket, feeling grateful without feeling guilty.
What if I could rest for a while in the halo of I don’t know, and the freedom and grace to not explain anything to anyone?
Wishing for you the specific freedom of embracing “not knowing” and being just fine with that.
Laura Nicole Diamond is the award-winning author of Shelter Us: a novel, and Dance with Me: a love letter, and editor of the anthology Deliver Me: True Confessions of Motherhood. She is working on a memoir about becoming a foster mom to a teenage asylum-seeker. LauraNicoleDiamond.com. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
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