Offering Plate
a communal collecting | 003
Sometimes, I don’t have much to give. Sometimes, my own words exhaust themselves. My Offering Plate series is my way to still pour, borrowing from the well of things that have kept me going — whether that be a song, words from my archives, a reminiscence, pieces of conversations with wise souls, words from others, and so on. The idea of the offering plate is to pass it around, to sow a seed. Think of it as a communal collecting, where members of this community are encouraged to leave their own offering in the comments. To sow and be sown into. To hold and be held. To heal and be healed.
Archives for January 2023/Insertion of a poem from November 2023—
I often grapple with the havoc grief seems to carry, and the uncertainty that it brings. Sometimes through its sudden nature. Sometimes through its inevitable onset that has been the drawl of slurred vowels, or a long, deep breath waiting to be exhaled. Grief is the one thing that uproots you. Everything you’ve ever known, certainty, suddenly seems to become a wavering ensemble, a gloomy ballad.
Grief has such a prevailing strength. It swallows you whole, and then spits you out abruptly. It’s the kind of thing that’ll leave you on the side of the road at 3 a.m. on a Wednesday, mourning. It’s the kind of thing that’ll have you staring at the empty chair that your grandmother used to sit in. It’s the kind of thing that’ll have you laughing one moment and then crying the next. It’s the kind of thing that’ll make you leave your bed unmade, or that’ll leave your heart undone. But perhaps grief is the only certain thing that’ll ever lead you home.
For it is not what breaks us, but it is how we find ourselves on the other side of chiseled bone, how we dislodge what aches, carry it to the river, set it all free.
External offering:
A little more time/
A little more love/
That’s all we need/
It’s all we need.
And now, I pass the plate. If you have an offering (words of encouragement, or anything on your heart that you want to share) please leave it in the comments.
With love and light,
Mariah Maddox