I just read this poem and wanted to share it here with you 🧡
Hope you don't have the Sunday scaries, or that if you do, you also find and do things that shoo them away.
Lisa Olivera, who wrote this poem, also writes a lovely newsletter (here if you're interested).
Heres's the poem:
I have a history of running and being at a standstill simultaneously, itching with desperation to get to some other place, to some other version of me who has already done The Thing, already gotten The Lesson, already embodied The Wisdom, already Made It, who is already “There”, yet at a standstill because being anywhere or anyone else is impossible. I’ve sprinted and fallen over exhausted, defeatedby the reality that there is no “there”.
There is only Here. There is only This Body. There is only this life, the one I have now, the oneI am in, the version of myself that existsas I take this breath, as I type this word. There is only this life, withall of its murky crevices and dusty bits, all of its unfinished works of art and unchecked boxes,its grief and silent longings, its hidden parts and the still-empty room connected to the kitchen.
There is only this — this body left with poundsand stretched skin that were once not here,  this wrinkle above the eye and this dream not yet reached. There is only this — this questioning, this mystery, this reckoning with what could be but isn’t,this practice of seeing the open-ended present as sacred instead of something to work my way around. There is only this — this willingness to hold what is not yet here, to hold what I don’t yet know, to hold my current Self with reverence instead of captive to an unreachable different reality.
When I stray from my own knowing, from the truth that there is nowhere and no one else to be, the relief comes not from figuring it out or reaching some imaginary, all-better There, but from remembering what is true:
The Thing, The Lesson, The Wisdom, the Making It, the arrival to some ethereal future where all my woes and woundsare resolved, where I’m finally some idealized version of myself, isn’t the answer.
The answer is trusting I can meet myself where I am, as I am, with arms held wide. That I can let this, let here, be what it needs to be. That I can stop solving and practice just living. That just living includes the boring, uncertainmoments in-between, includes quietly massaging my own tired hands, includes the grieving and eatingthe same dinner three nights in a row as a way of making one less decision, the inconsistent rituals and the not knowing — includes all of it.
There is no there. There is only here. And here isn’t something to resolve; it’s something to allow. Soon, everything will be different. And for now, here I am. Here I am.