Metaphors

I took a walk this morning. On my way back, a neighbor I don’t often talk to waved me down. She was refilling her bird feeders, but set her task aside to get closer to where I stood on the road.

We exchanged greetings and then talked about . . . hair. And somehow, hair and hair management was the metaphor for all the big things: connections and interdependence, the difference between isolation and solitude, the truth of our fragility and the truth of our resilience.

It reminded me of this poem:

I Confess
I stalked her
in the grocery store: her crown
of snowy braids held in place by a great silver clip,
her erect bearing, radiating tenderness,
the way she placed yogurt and avocados in her basket,
beaming peace like the North Star.
I wanted to ask, "What aisle did you find
your serenity in, do you know
how to be married for fifty years, or how to live alone,
excuse me for interrupting, but you seem to possess
some knowledge that makes the earth burn and turn on its axis—"
but we don’t request such things from strangers
nowadays. So I said, "I love your hair."

~Alison Luterman (her website is here: https://www.alisonluterman.net/)

I love this poem for the way it highlights the rich interior connections we make with others and the mundane greetings we send into the world pregnant with meaning. (I also love it because of the way it entered my world: a dozen years ago Todd got home from work and was emptying his pockets. He handed me a little wadded scrap of paper and said, “oh, this is for you! I thought you’d like it.” My first thought was that he was giving me a used tissue, but I carefully opened it to find this poem. He saw it inside a MAX train, on the wall, and wrote it down. Quite possibly the most romantic gesture of all time…)

I’ve been thinking that maybe many of our divisions are because we forget that we are a metaphorical people. We forget about the deep, rich interiors of one another. So, this month of May I am on the lookout for those current cultural metaphors that we use when we don’t have words to say:

• you are amazing

• you are beautiful

• I don’t know how to help

• I don’t know how to make it better

• I see you

I would love to hear from you. What cultural metaphors are you noticing?

And, seriously… I LOVE your hair.

A Call to Worship: The First New Blue Pigment Discovered in the Last 200 Years

There are many around the world suffering from senseless violence. Here in Portland, Oregon we have lost people needlessly as well. I wrote this call to worship last week, after 3 men were stabbed for rising to the defense of 2 teenage girls on a train who were being verbally assaulted. Thanks to Cedar Mill Bible Church for giving me the opportunity to deliver this call today:

We are not innocent

we are not guilty

what we are

is Sad

(have you heard of the discovery of a new shade of blue?)

we are sad for the city, we are sad for the children

we are sad for two teenage girls on a train

just kids

and we all lost something when hate screamed and then

tore red holes in the world

we are sad that we needed the helpers and heroes

and the temptation is to huddle in the upper room

to say, “Now what Lord?

Now what?

Now what?

This is a new shade of blue.”

When Christ looked at His city, He cried too.

How did the disciples know it was time?

to leave the room and enter the streets?

no speech, no word, no voice was heard

and yet love breathed courage and called them,

Knock on a door

Console

because this is not political

You Know

You Know what is critical here,

a sorrow shared

a universal tongue

a hand outstretched

a hand taken

lives given for one another

we ask God, “How will you heal?

What will you do?”

And He answers, “That, my child, is why I made you.”

—Michelle Winter, 2017

Air and Water: An Interview with Singer-Songwriter Alli Rogers

I have this friend.

She is fascinated by the ordinary. She inhabits the earth, the wind, the Real Things that we miss. She notices breath and notices clouds. She feels the tremors beneath our words. Because she embraces what is true, she elevates the ordinary. Her noticing makes it sacred and she invites us to see through her eyes, to feel through her heart.

I wanted to share her poet-soul with you. She said yes. Alli Rogers is visiting with us today, talking about writing and inspiration:

Michelle: Are there metaphors or symbols that are particularly meaningful to you that show up often in your work?

Alli Rogers: I am constantly writing about water. As a child growing up in Iowa, we spent a lot of time in the summer at my grandparents cabin near the Mississippi river. That was probably where my fascination with water began. It was just so mysterious and powerful. Why was the water moving so fast and where was it going? Why were the sandbars constantly changing? Why was my grandmother so scared of the current? I later became acquainted with the ocean and its overwhelming beauty that still calms and terrifies me all at once. Water represents a longing often in my writing, it remains for me an image of our journey through life, and it illustrates a unique take on the biblical truth of weakness being strength.

“Under heaven nothing is more soft and yielding than water.
Yet for attacking the solid and strong, nothing is better;
It has no equal.”

— Tao Te Ching

I also tend to come back to the moon and stars in my writing. I find it interesting that these two things are sources of peace as well as fear for me. I suppose I write about that which confounds me, in my attempt to make sense of it, as well as to remember that God is God and I am not. The fact that there is so much out of my control or understanding is in fact proof that God exists, and the beauty of it all is  proof that He is good. That is how I see it. 

M: Can you let us into your process a little bit?

AR: My process has changed with different life seasons but a couple of principals have been good guideposts for me. First, the idea of working regardless of inspiration has been something I come back to. Inspiration is wonderful and every artist and poet depends on it, but you cannot wait for it to hit before you pick up your pen. That kind of thinking also negates the value of the learning that happens through writing many bad poems and songs. Each throw away is part of the process, or at least that makes me feel better! It helps to work regularly to get your creative muscles in shape so you are ready when the inspiration does come. Madeline L’Engle says it like this: “One must write every day. Otherwise when it comes time to get out of the way and listen to the work, you will not be able to heed it”.

The truth is that I have gone long stretches where I’ve let my creative self get lazy and I have paid for it. So this is my ideal process, one that I thrive in, but it has been hard to implement in these years of raising young kids. 

“Write to pray, write to process life, write to remember, write to apologize, write to understand, write to grieve, write to celebrate, write to give thanks, write to notice. ”

— Alli Rogers

The second principal which I picked up from a songwriter friend is that when inspiration does hit, just write and edit later.  if you’ve experienced it you know it is like riding a wave. When you are on it you don’t think about having perfect form or balance, you just go. It is the same with writing. Editing comes later. Editing can be painful but that is another topic of discussion that I could talk about at length! 

My process is essentially: Write as often as I can, about everything I can. Write to pray, write to process life, write to remember, write to apologize, write to understand, write to grieve, write to celebrate, write to give thanks, write to notice. And then after that, edit if needed (it usually is) and decide if it’s purpose is to share or not. Sometimes songs never get shared and that can often feel like food spoiling on the counter. Little deaths. But I think there is something essential there also. Even a discarded apple core can become food for the earth and maybe it is like this with songs.

I sure hope so.

Thank you Alli!

This is one of my favorite things: to open all the blinds on a Thursday morning and fill my space with the sound of Alli's voice singing the things I didn't even know were in my heart. You can listen to her music here: 

Alli’s latest release Breathe is on iTunes click here.

Her website is AlliRogers.com

And here is a gift for you from her generous heart. A song to listen to while looking out the window:

Playing With Opposites

I love paradox. I love seeming contradiction. I love putting them side by side. Just like complementary colors when placed side by side, create an edge that seems to shimmer, paradox expands our knowing into understanding.

This week I have been playing with those ideas in poem form. This is an unfinished poem, but I wanted to share where I am in the journey. I decided to write about the autumnal equinox because it is one of two days in the year when day and night are the exact same length. That equality of contradiction was exactly what I wanted to explore.

Autumnal Equinox

I stand

in dry weeds

               hip high

and in short

               damp grass

at the edge of the vegetable garden

between the spent blue lake beans

               gone to seed

and the pregnant yellow-blush tomatoes

The air from the pasture

rises warm alfalfa sweet

leaving the ground beneath it cold and sharp

And that sound

the scream that masquerades as silence

               at the insect changing of the guard

               half the swarm readies for rest

               half charges the dusk

Attacking my ankles

               I am become a bistro to the miniscule

               I know better

                              but I refuse to wear long pants

                                                                           or socks

                                                                           or shoes

I bite into a warm tomato

               juice crawls down my arms

               drips onto my cold feet

I am 37.

Poetry for Healing

I talked about how I stumbled into leading arts-based groups here. I still love poetry as an avenue into healing. Often survivors of trauma or loss are not quite sure how to make sense of what happened. Trauma memories are stored on the right side of the brain as fragments of image, sound or smell. Playing with imagery blurs the walls between our compartmentalization of senses and meaning, allowing us to experience a more holistic way of knowing. It allows us to access our imaginations through our senses and connect them to meaning or verbal expression, which is housed on the left side of the brain, in a non-threatening way.

Trauma and loss explode us into fragments, separate and divide us from ourselves and others. God invites us to bring our bits to Him and He will make something beautiful from them. Art is one of His gifts to us. Art collects the pieces and helps us to hold the shrapnel in God's Presence.

When we read poems that resonate with our experience, we feel less isolated. Those poems can help us to name what was unnamed. They can help us find our voice. We when speak words we know deep in our bones, but didn't write, we join ourselves to others who have experienced something similar--and survived. Those words can become a catalyst for releasing our own writing.

When we write poems we have to examine our experience from many angles. We make meaning where there was none, or worse, where there was wrong meaning. We enter into shared humanity with our own stories told in our own voices and in our own ways.

These are two of my favorite resources for poetry and healing:

Finding What You Didn't Lose by John Fox

Poetic Medicine by John Fox

Streams of Themes

Though we might be different in the details, we are all so similar in the broad strokes. We all have interior structures that help us to understand new information, to navigate the world and absorb fresh perspectives. We all have streams of recurring themes in our lives: something we never learn, topics that always fascinate, mistakes we always make, concepts that we always struggle to understand.

When I was working on building a relationship with my father he became a common topic in my work. It wasn't conscious initially, I just had him on my mind. Frequently. I sent him every poem I wrote about him except the last two that I wrote when he died. Those poems became portals for us to reach each other. Here is one of them:

A Visit With Grandpa

My kids surround my father

They’ve grown, he’s lost, 3 inches

Photographs pass back and forth

My father’s stories hover over and underneath

Soak into them

A gift of belonging

I pluck at the pictures, hopeful

“He loves me, He loves me not, He loves me…”

He walked with giants and ran with horses

And weathered the ebb and flow of me

Courage passes easily

between them, these people

who bookend me

Things I should say

And questions—unanswerable

Slip back down my throat

And since I cannot do the words

I make a lemon pie.

                              —Michelle Winter

Do you see it? I didn't at first.

The bridge between us, the portal towards one another?

It's in the lemon pie.

Contradictions

This morning I think about gratitude, attending, noticing. These things all imply a posture that leans forward, that bends towards. At the same time I am cultivating an attitude of receiving rather than taking and that implies pulling back, resting, lowering. Just trying to walk through life this week has turned into a workout. How far can I lean into something before it becomes a chase? How far do I pull back before I become absent?

This is Wednesday of Holy Week. The week starts with shouts of joy, and ends with shouts of hate. It starts with a triumphal entry and ends in a disgracing execution. How quickly things turn around completely. 

Contradiction floats over everything right now. Perhaps this is always true. I wrote the poem below during a sermon one Sunday. The Bible uses metaphors and symbols to explain concepts, but sometimes the ancient agricultural symbols can get lost on a modern urban audience. This particular Sunday the sermon explained threshing, the removal of chaff, the papery and insubstantial husk, from grain. All that's important is in the grain. During threshing the seeds were shaken or beaten so as to loosen the husks, then tossed into the air. The wind carried away the chaff, the grain was caught and saved. You can imagine what we were meant to glean from the sermon. However, I found I identified more closely with chaff than grain.

I Am Chaff

I am chaff

A flibberty-gibbet

Whim-minded

Wind guided

Insubstantial

As I tumble in the eddies,

I am dancing on God’s warm sigh.

Joy.

               —Michelle Winter

Perhaps stepping forward and stepping back can become dancing. Perhaps shouting emotionally can become singing. Perhaps contradiction can become poetry.

Poems About Noticing: People

We think we know the people we love just because we love them. The truth is that people carry entire worlds within themselves that we have yet to discover and appreciate. Each person is complex, beautiful and endlessly fascinating. I think that is what God thinks of us as well. One of my favorite moments in the gospels is when Jesus is surprised by the faith of the person in front of him (the centurion). To think that we can surprise God makes me happy.

Here is another poem on noticing. This one is about how we so easily miss what is happening inside the people around us.

On Being Three and Waiting in a Lunch Line

“Pizza-pizza-pizza-pizza-pizza,”

he chants

savoring the sounds with his lips

bouncing the syllables bodily.

“Don’t you want a hot dog?”

asks his wispy mother.

“Um-hmm,” he smiles.

“Two hot dogs,” she orders

from Ted

the hot dog man.

“Pizzapizzapizzapizzapizza,”

the little boy sings

And she wails

as her purse slips off her shoulder

“but this is a hot dog stand

there isn’t any pizza here . . .”

while her joyous boy dances to his own music

          —Michelle Winter

Poems About Noticing: Nature

I am constantly surprised by how little I notice. Perhaps that is why I am so fascinated by the topic. This poem is about mistaking the ordinary for being . . . ordinary.

The Web

It appeared one morning

Knit into the upper left corner

Of the backdoor frame

Pine needle tassels along the side

Preserves hanging like ball fringe from the top

“Why did you knock down the spider web?

It was so beautiful!”

“Oh!” he said, wide-eyed

Examining the loose threads

Body bending into the mystery

 “I didn’t know

that it was beautiful.”

          -Michelle Winter

Holy Hour

A week of noticing. A week of paying attention. Holy ground, holy people, holy moments. Parts of my list are starting to look like poems. Here is one:

Holy Hour

In the calm of night

After the heaviness lifts

And the sounds widen

When everything breathes deep and wise

Dreams no longer hover threateningly,

               but permeate like healing ointment,

I rise and

Barefoot, make pilgrimage to holy ground

There I sit

among the relics of my domestic church

               cracked boots still warm by the woodstove

               a pink oval hula hoop

               a snail shell

               And a smooth rock

I wait

And poems find me.

              ~Michelle Winter

Is there something on your list that wants to become a poem?

The Breath Giver

God breathed Life into me, and yet I know His Presence by the way He steals my breath: 

• at the beach
• during a sunset
• beside a waterfall
• during a meteor shower
• at the birth of a lamb
• when my husband puts his arm around me
• when my kids laugh

Evidence of the Breath Giver is breath-taking.

You know those moments, you stop for them. You allow yourself to experience the wonder. You receive the gift. These are moments we can't control or command, we can't take them. They are moments that are given and we receive them. This is the foundation of faith--wonder. This is the heart of the psalms, and the heart of so much poetry. We notice the ordinary and we wonder at it.

And that impulse to stop, to breathe it in, to write it down? Another name for that is worship.

I looked up the definition for wonder and it is this:

to be surprised by beauty

And that is exactly what wonder feels like isn't it?

We have been keeping a list of what we notice to be sacred. We started it on the first day of this month, and it is good, right? To unclench ourselves and open our hearts and eyes? To receive the gifts already given? The practice alone is good.

But perhaps we might use our list to write some poetry. Ummmmm, won't that be good too?

Being Lost

Sometimes, for me, getting lost is a spiritual practice. When I start to notice that I am holding things too tightly, overly concerned about order, control, or doing things "right," then I know I need to get lost. The name for this spiritual practice is "Wandering." Centuries ago, Celtic Christians took their wandering very seriously. Today I do this on a much smaller scale. I turn left instead of right, I take paths that are unfamiliar to me. I walk until I don't know where I am anymore.

And yes, sometimes I feel afraid.

It is an opportunity to trust that God never loses me, He always knows where I am and what I need. It is a reminder that I am not in control and that God is never out of control.

Lost

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.

                          ~by David Wagoner

Noticing the Way Marks

Before I left for the pilgrimage in Spain I had heard that the way would be clearly marked. No one said exactly what those marks would look like, just that they would be obvious. It turns out that every district along The Way keeps its own way marks, so they all look different. And yet they were similar enough to easily recognize and follow.

After the resurrection, Mary Magdalene went back and looked into the tomb. Just as trauma survivors do, she had to look again at the place of intense trauma. And the tomb was empty.

But, wait.

No, it wasn't empty. It was filled with memories of the horror and grief of the past few days, but it also housed the sacred. What she found there were way markers pointing to evidence of God's presence, Christ Himself.

Today I hold my tender places in God's gaze and ask Him to reveal for me the way marks hidden in my memories. Lord, where were you in those times of trial? Show me where the tomb of grief houses what is sacred.

Today I add to my Sacred List: The hospice room where my father died two years ago. It was truly a place of grief touching the sacred.

Poetry For Saying Stuff

What is a poem? When I was in college I had an entire textbook dedicated to answering that question. Honestly, I still can't answer it. Not reliably. My answer changes with the weather . . . or the tides.

But ultimately, one of the reasons poetry is relevant in every age is because it is a curated voice. We are respectful of the form, careful with the genre. We want to use it to say stuff, but after we have placed our guts neatly onto the page we always ask each other timidly, "Did I write a good poem?" Which means that we are curating the way we shape the invisible. We want to speak the underlying Truth of Things.

Here Andrea Gibson has given voice to a girl bullied on the playground. This voice is graceful and strong, not the voice of a victim. The poet reads her poem in the clip below and the sound gives shape to courage. The video is of 13 year old dancer, Nataly Santiago, who embodies the poem. The words, sound and movement speak the underlying Truth of Things. From the outside it might look like we are in opposition on the playground, but actually, we are two persons. Write back soon.

Here is the transcript from the clip:

A LETTER TO THE PLAYGROUND BULLY, FROM ANDREA, AGE 8 ½

maybe there are cartwheels in your mouth
maybe your words will grow up to be gymnasts
maybe you have been kicking people with them by accident

I know some people get a whole lot of rocking in the rocking chair
and the ones who don't sometimes get rocks in their voice boxes,
and their voice boxes become slingshots.
maybe you think my heart looks like a baby squirrel.

but guess what? you absolutely missed when you told the class I have head lice
because guess what? I one hundred percent absolutely do not have head lice
and even if I do
it is a fact that head lice prefer clean heads over dirty ones
so I am clean as a whistle on a tea pot.
my mother says it is totally fine if I blow off steam
as long as i speak in an octave my kindness can still reach.

my kindness knows mermaids never ever miss their legs in the water
cause there are better ways to move through an ocean than kicking.

so guess what,
if I ever have my own team
I am picking everyone first

even the worst kid
and the kid with the stutter like a skipping record
cause I know all of us are scratched,
even if you can't hear it when we speak.
my mother says most people have heartbeats
that are knocking on doors that will never ever open,
and I know my heart is a broken freezer chest
that's why I can't keep anything frozen.

so no, I am not always crying.
I am just thawing outside of the lines.
and even if I am always crying
it is a fact
that salt is the only reason
everything floats so good in the dead sea.
and just cause no one ever passes notes to me
doesn't mean I am not super duper.
in fact, my super duper might be a buoy or a paper boat
the next time your nose is stuck up the river
'cause it is a fact
that our hearts stop for a mili-second every time we sneeze
and some people's houses have too much dust.

so maybe sometime if somebody would sit beside me on the bus
and I could say,
guess what, it is a fact that manatees have vocal chords
but do not have ears.
just like Beethoven made music
even when he could no longer hear.

and I know every belt that has hit someone's back
is still a belt that was built to hold something up.

and it is fact that Egyptians slept on pillows made of stone
but it's not hard for me to dream
that maybe one day you'll write me back
like the day I wrote the lightening bug to say,
I smashed my mason jar and I threw away the lid.
I didn't want to take a chance that I'd grow up to be a war.

I want to be a belly dance or an accordion or a pogo stick
or the fingerprints the mason left
in the mortar between the bricks
to prove that he was here,
that he built a roof over someone's head
to keep the storm from their faith,
my mother says that's why we all were born.

and I think she's right.
so write back soon.
sincerely yours.

~Andrea Gibson, 2010

Sacred Sounds

A few years ago I started listening for the silence between sounds. It is an interesting exercise to listen for the pause in birdsong, or the space between waves coming and going at the beach. There is an intimacy in it, almost like hearing the earth breathe, like sitting next to someone while he sleeps. There is a sacred immensity to it, like being invited into someone's vulnerability.

Poetry sounds. If poetry and prayer are about paying attention with my whole self, then what would I hear if I listened with my entirety? What is a holy sound?

This morning as I walk I listen. I listen for the sound of the sacred. I wonder what it will be, what might stand out as holy noise. No place is truly silent and today there is much to hear.

I listen hard, I listen intentionally . . . until I forget I am listening. I'm not sure when it happens. I was so determined to listen well, but there are smells and sights and the chilly air is invigorating and . . . my concentration evaporates completely.

And then, when I am not listening at all, I hear it. And it shocks me.

It is the sound of my breath. My own breathing.

Part of me can't accept it and I wrestle with the idea as I walk. Is it ok to put myself on my Sacred List? Am I really holy? Though it is not difficult for me to see some one else as sacred, the thought of seeing myself that way is somehow terrifying.

It's not until I'm home, fumbling with my pen, slowly printing my name on my list, that I realize my cheeks are wet.

How is your Sacred List coming along? Each day for the month of April I am looking for the holy in my life. Join me?

The Hundred Names of Love

We are celebrating National Poetry Month and today I get to introduce you to one of my favorite contemporary poets.

I had the immense pleasure of meeting Annie Lighthart several years ago. She is a generous and genuine soul. I love all of her poetry, but I wanted to share this one with you because it illustrates "Noticing the Sacred" which is where my heart is right now. I remember those exhausting early days of parenting, waking up in the middle of the night to the cry of a child. These moments become luminescent when Annie shines a light on them, helping us to notice the sacred in the ordinary.

The Hundred Names of Love

The children have gone to bed.
We are so tired we could fold ourselves neatly
behind our eyes and sleep mid-word, sleep standing
warm among the creatures in the barn, lean together
and sleep, forgetting each other completely in the velvet,
the forgiveness of that sleep.

Then the one small cry:
one strike of the match-head of sound:
one child’s voice:
and the hundred names of love are lit
as we rise and walk down the hall.

One hundred nights we wake like this,
wake out of our nowhere
to kneel by small beds in darkness.
One hundred flowers open in our hands,
a name for love written in each one.

~Annie Lighthart

Want more? She has a beautiful book of poems here.

And her website is here.

Noticing the Sacred

I went for a walk in September last year. I walked and prayed for over 200 miles.

And I wondered, What if Jesus Christ really is The Way?

Not just the goal. No. What if He is the road we walk? What if He carries us continuously? Wouldn't that mean that everywhere I step is Holy Ground? What would my life look like if I lived that way?

Today is the first day of National Poetry Month. I challenge you, and I challenge myself, to notice the sacred in today. The essence of poetry is the same as the essence of prayer--paying attention with your entirety. What if you are standing, right now, on Holy Ground? What if you treated the person in front of you as Holy? What if this moment, this object, this...This was sacred?

My Sacred List for the month of April begins with these:

1. Warmth and the smell of applewood just beginning to push back the cold in the morning, thanks to the hands of my beloved who rose before me and braved the cold floor to make a fire.

2. A text--a smiley emoticon from my 19 year old son away at college.

3. My yoga mat. It used to belong to my father, now I use it to connect my spirit to my body and to pray for the people with whom God populates my heart while I'm stretching.

What's on your list? I would love a glimpse into your sacred life if you are willing to share in the comments.

Thank you. And. Happy National Poetry Month!

Homing Instinct

Is it faith

In the stories

Passed through generations,

One freckled butterfly

To the next

That carries them brave

Over seething seas?

Is it hope

In the fragrant fields or

The promise of nectar

Sweet for their children

That steers their purposeful wanderings?

 

Is it devotion

That tethers the bee to her hive,

That enables her to carry

Four miles of heathered hills,

lilac and clover

inside her brain the size

of a grass seed?

 

How do Jews always know where Jerusalem is?

How do Muslims know which way to turn

To face Mecca?

Most of the time, I don’t even know where I am or

Where I’m going

Let alone the direction of

My hidden home.

                              —Michelle Winter

A Small Patch of Common Ground

I look for myself in you

In the curve of your nose,

The shape of your face

The color of your skin

I look for myself in your life

The stories you tell

The way that you see

And move

And speak.

Perhaps

It is enough

That we share a fondness

For anchovies

And runny eggs.

                              —Michelle Winter

1 in 6, India Part 7

The television was always on in the hotel restaurant. The large flatscreen at the far end of the room was most often tuned into the news. The news was (understandably) Indo-centric and skewed slightly in India's favor, so I was shocked one morning when I heard the anchorwoman preface a story with:

One in six girls in India does not survive to reach the age of fifteen.

One in six.

One in six?

And the girls we were working with? They were girls who did survive. They made it to fifteen years of age, but they have endured so much in their little lives.

One in six. I am not a numbers person. I had a hard time understanding the statistic. I needed a visual. How could I wrap my mind around the meaning in those numbers?

One evening some new friends took us to visit various sites around Kolkata. It is truly a beautiful city. We saw civic memorials and religious sites including a Hindu temple and the Anglican cathedral of St. Paul's. We found relief from the Kolkata heat in the cool interior of the cathedral. Behind the baptistry, at the back of the church, was a framed quote from John Donne. The words were so familiar to me, but standing in India with a heavy statistic pressing on my heart I read them, heard them, as if they were brand new:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never ask for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

We are all a piece of the same cloth, together we make a tapestry. That statistic is not just a number. Because we all participate in humanity, we are all diminished by the death of another, all diminished by the hurt of another--even if we don't know it.

So, here is a piece titled 1 in 6. It is a visual for myself to see what that number means. Two broken eggs from a box of a dozen. When I was finished with this textile piece, I took a sharp blade and tore 6 holes into it in no particular pattern. I was trying to mar the piece without symmetry or beautiful placement of the ripped places. Because our tapestry, our humanity, is marred by the death and misfortune of others.

1 in 6, Michelle Winter ©2016 polyester & rayon thread with cotton print fabrics on natural cotton twill, stitch mounted to 16x20" museum board

Whether we acknowledge it or not, whether we understand it or not, when lives are lost, we all lose.