saying yes

In social situations, I am almost always uncomfortable; I'm overcritical of myself in the first place, and on top of that my humor is very dry and doesn't always play well. And my residual 6th-grade angst leaves me at the uncool lunch table in my mind. Not a great combination. But in my second year of graduate school, I finally got to know somebody whose friendship and grace and wisdom helped me learn another way of seeing: Stephanie.

She called me 'sister' in the first note she wrote to me, which took me aback, because it was so intimate. I'm from the Midwest. We like to keep things under wraps, you know, like the Minnesotan farmer who loved his wife so much he almost told her, once? But this was an embrace from someone I thought was a stranger.

In her manuscript, which I got to read that year, Stephanie had a poem called "People Who Say Yes," about her time spent in Poland. I was struck by the idea of saying yes to things, purposefully. I knew right away what this meant: not a Pollyannaish cheer in the face of disaster, but a larger view of the world, one that believes in an all-encompassing rightness. A giant yes in the face of a whole lot of small nos.
And the idea stuck with me--that is, the possible. The limitless. Expecting things to be all right.

My friend Aarón, who is doing his Ph.D. in psychology, studies neural pathways. He told me that we change our brains just by thinking things, and we change them even more by saying things out loud. Even saying "yes" to myself changes the way I see the world--physically changes the routes neurons take through my brain. Things will be all right becomes self-fulfilling.
I think most of the poems I was trying to write wanted to say this. But it was really only after I read Steph's poem that I knew that was what I meant. In the fall of the next year, I had a class of students who so thoroughly surprised me by their willingness to learn (and to be taught), that I had to write a poem about them and their yes. And the way it changed me to witness that yes--the poem is "And Will Be," from, well, you know.
All this to say that the idea of yes--a living yes--has been part of my consciousness for the last three years. And when two of my best friends and I were hanging out, talking about a collaboration, and found ourselves nameless, it was only natural that the word yes would come up sometime.

So yes it is. (Go take a look!)