From Ravi Austin
through the universe
each space, each planet, each time
Matcha & me
From Siddiq Hans von Briesen
WE are found objects
Washed ashore in the sea of life
Grateful to be alive.
From Deborah MN
Awe, the change of seasons, tea, remarkable and humbling
32 degrees today, a foot of snow last week, melting and icy this week,
awesomeness to tea
From William Singleton
Is this Thing/Object/Place animate or inanimate?/Alive or Dead?
What is your Time-Frame? Mind-set? Cosmology?
There in lies your answer.
From Karen Higgins
not really a poem but a thought.
Thrift Store…The library of lost things?
Or a treasure trove of found objects.
From Lesley Maclean
a reversing car reveals
a perfect shard
the urn itself reversed
now a platform for the guest to receive their sweet
From Sakina von Briesen
sea shells become sandstone
heated it becomes marble
we make dinner on our stone countertop
by our sea shells
From Kim C
time and space
tea with friends
the soft red silk
the ringtones of earth bowl soon to be glazed
the merging of the water drops
and the thousand earth turnings
in a tea whisk
From Karima Terry Forman
“tending what we know needs our care,”
a small way to give rather than take away.
welcoming sunshine & caressing breeze
informs this moment of all there is.
The tea is gone, the taste remains,
An excerpt from the book Lost & Found by Kathryn Schulz (Kathy’s offering):
That is all we have, this moment with the world. It will not last, because nothing lasts.
Entropy, mortality, extinction: the entire plan of the universe consists of losing, and no matte how much we find along the way, life amounts to a reverse savings account in which we are eventually robbed of everything. Our dreams and plans and jobs and knees and backs and memories; the keys to the house, the keys to the car, the keys to the kingdom, the kingdom itself: sooner or later, all of it drifts into the Valley of Lost Things.
Nothing about that is strange or surprising; it is the fundamental, unalterable nature of things. The astonishment is all in the being here. It is the turtle in the pond, the thought in the mind, the falling star, the stranger on Main Street… To all of this, loss, which seems only to take away, adds its own kind of necessary contribution. No matter what goes missing, the object you need or the person you love, the lessons are always the same. Disappearance reminds us to notice, transience to cherish, fragility to defend.
Loss is a kind of external conscience, urging us to make better use of our finite days. Our crossing is a brief one, best spent bearing witness to all that we see: honoring what we find noble, tending what we know needs our care, recognizing that we are inseparably connected to all of it, including what is not yet upon us, including what is already gone. We are here to keep watch, not to keep.
Kathryn Schulz is a journalist & author. She is a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine, where she has written about everything from the legacy of an early Muslim immigrant in Wyoming, to the radical life of a civil rights activist, to Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, to brown marmorated stinkbugs. In 2016, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for her article on the risk of a major earthquake & tsunami in the Pacific Northwest.