I want to think more like Andrea Gibson today

Love, light, grief, attention, and naming my brain Beatrice

I was going to write this week about distraction, but then Andrea Gibson died, and I can’t stop thinking about mortality. I also can’t stop thinking about the light, wisdom, and presence Gibson brought to dying these last few years. Such a gift to us, who will all die, who will all lose someone. I read one of their poems yesterday for Jar of Light here, but watch this other poem below in their own voice (that I stole from Insta). If this doesn’t get up into your chest and inside your heart, maybe you are not alive.

In yesterday’s Jar of Light post, I wrote, “Whenever a poet dies, I have the same vision. I see them in a little spacemobile tooting along the outer atmosphere, around and around the earth. They go where words go, to the airwaves, the lost frequencies.”

I’d like to revise this now. Not the lost frequencies. More like the collected frequencies. The voices of all the poets go to the airwaves, yes, and collect there for us. Their words live eternally for us. And, as a poet, I believe their word-spirits are alive in me.

I think I will tap into Gibson’s wisdom forever.

I wrote a poem this week, a small poem, a poem about what grief feels like in your chest. I’d just heard the news of Gibson, and then my garden was ruined in a flash flood—yes, you can grieve plants, who are sentient in their way—and I’ve been thinking so much about mortality since Aaron and I were the first to the scene of a terrible accident two weekends ago. (I described it badly in this video.)

It’s a small draft that I jotted down in a flash two days ago. It’s been helped along this week by several different poet-friends, and for that I’m grateful. (Mac, Abby: thank you!)

The Long Goodbye
 
A grief balloon, the grief of floods.
Earth lingers in a dark corner. The wind on the sand 
burns. Once, twice 
 
on the surface of grief, 
fastens me to the balloon of earth, lingers long 
after 

the wind of earth has
fastened itself to grief. A balloon hides, 
the way grief hides, in the chest.

Back in 2024, Gibson shared a poem for National Poetry Month on their Substack. I recommend listening to it.

In it, there are ideas I want to remember. I want us to remember. “My story is one about happiness / being easier to find once we finally realize / we do not have forever to find it.”

This is something, having been depressed for upwards of six months, I’ve been thinking so much about lately. This life is so short. So, so short. Shorter, often, than we expect. I have no more time for depression. I just don’t. There are books to write and animals, plants, and people to love. Projects to dive into headfirst.

And, something Gibson’s therapist told them:

The only thing we have control over in this life

is where we put our attention.

Where we put our attention. Have you done the thought experiment where you step outside of your body and pay attention to all the crazy things your brain tells you? I often do it by imagining I’m a crow (duh) on my own shoulder. Imagine me now, tilting my sleek, black head to listen in on the brain chatter. Some people imagine zooming out, floating above their body. Others who are less visually oriented just listen, just pay attention to when random thoughts float through.

I saw a video recently in which a woman explained how she’d named her brain and gave it a good talking to when the chatter got to be unfounded or negative. So I tried it. I named her Beatrice, after Dante’s Beatrice, the symbol of grace and divine love he longed for.

Anyway, my Beatrice is not the Italian Bay-uh-tree-chay but Bee-a-triss. And Beatrice is out of control! She says so many mean things to me. Why do our brains want to foil us? I think because there is safety in familiarity, and our brains want us safe more than anything else. Risk and change are not safe. They want the safety of what has always been—and if you’ve been berating yourself for a long time, well, that’s what the brain holds on to. When you’re ready to stop being down on yourself…that takes effort to break! It maybe takes naming your brain and giving it the what’s-what until it shuts up!

Where we put our attention is where we will go. Or as James Allen, pioneer of self help (we may want to equally thank him and curse him at this point), said, “As a man thinks, so he is.”

I want to think more like Gibson today. The generosity of spirt, the pervasive love in the face of disaster. It’s something to strive toward.