It's alright to search for gentler things.

The light that falls, pooling in a honeyed glow, from the small reading lamp, illumining words from a book you've read so many times, will read so many more. The anticipatory mangoes sitting, early pink & green earrings on your tree.

The green jewellery of your garden's resident iguana, growing fatter and unhunted. The solidity of your grandmother's prayer oil in its puncheon bottle. The face of your mother, and the laughter of your child, who is learning to walk in this newly strange world.

I understand the temptation to pelt big stones of great risk, at the high security walls of adversity. I understand, too, the need for poets to bear dangerous witness in dangerous times. And I am. And I do. And to do that, I learn I must be gentle, first.

Must sometimes count each breath, clicking softly in my throat like the soul's abacus, and say thank you. For each one. For the breaths that I take while being unaware of them.

For the certainty of my body, a soldier who has borne up under so many hurts, a soldier putting down a dismantled gun and picking up an armful of wild heliconias, a gardening jug dancing with rainwater, a prayer.

What I've come to see, frequently, in the past month, is that the anxieties of this time are almost helpless, frantic in their desire for a piece of you, a rib of your time, a pound of your equanimity.

The manic work emails, the calls-that-can't-wait, the as-per-my-lasts and justify-your-jobs: these may be increasingly inevitable, particularly to those of my colleagues working in the creative arts. And to them, as to myself, I say, no email can supplant your next breath.

No urgent report is worth your untensed jaw, your chronic sleeplessness. Some things, some gentle things, that help me when the barrage comes, that help me to slow it, hands up to unmatrix the speeding bullets of *must* and *now*:

*the sight of my dear friend's growing sons, proof of the vulnerable tenacity of life, of its robustness, of its need to play
*the arms of the books into which I throw myself, familiar teachers and companions, books that wound and heal in sync

*the remembrance of salt air and fishing boats dotting the coast
*the remembrance of mountains cradling the deeply green valley
*the fact that it rained so hard in recent memory that the gutters cleared, the roof steelpanned, the house felt safe within it all

*the sweetness of unexpectedly finding an old dress from infancy, the fact that I once was housed within it, and safe, too
*wildflowers. wild animals. wilderness, be it far, but feeling near

*the reality of the sea, weathering everything, even now as I sit here, writing this to you, washing the feet of the rocks til they shine, promising nothing less than a perpetual return, return

If nothing will be as it was, then that, in time, is something to be made into its own gentleness, too. And if that's hard for you, if you are in the business of making fire, of bringing fire, more fire, I understand that. I get you. I want to do that, too.

Stay a little while with me, why don't you? Let us tend the tenderness of a newborn flame. Let us revere the kindling, the flower as well as the danger of the heat. The life that gives us that heat, to stay.