Trying to Conceive
A poem about showing up for the impossible until it becomes ordinary
Last month a friend told me about something they were trying to do, and the nearly impossible odds that it would work. The numbers were so discouraging they wondered if it was even worth trying.
It made me think about all the things in our lives that we never once looked up the statistical probability for - things we now take for granted as fact - and how many of them were probably just as unlikely. If we had known, maybe we wouldn’t have tried those things either.
So much of life is impossible stuff that became possible simply because we kept showing up, without ever stopping to think about what was or was not going to happen. We just made ourselves available to the miraculous, partnered with hope, often without realizing that’s what we were doing. Until suddenly, the miraculous is just the regular fact of our everyday lives.
It’s almost embarrassing how many gifts we take for granted. The sky. The mountains. The trail along the river. The river itself. Dogs, and coffee, and twinkle lights at the holidays. A whole conspiracy of beauty and sweetness happening everywhere, in every moment.
Around the same time, another friend told me about her new practice of folding origami squares. She described it as a kind of healing meditation. When she told me about it, I immediately imagined all the papers lined up, as if in an assembly line of beauty, where the plain two-dimensional squares might wait in hopes of transformation, accumulating their longing across every surface. Impossible beauty just lying around, everywhere.
These two threads—the miraculous becoming ordinary, and the folding of cranes—came together in this poem. I wrote it especially for my friend in their brave attempt at the impossible, with gratitude for all those who remind me that everything, everywhere, is a gift.
May what feels unreachable today become someday something so familiar that it feels like breathing, or like falling in love. Just another ordinary task for an ordinary day.
Trying to Conceive
When they bring you a pile
Of red paper squares
With instructions for folding cranes
Your scarlet origami dreams
Quickly cover every surface
A thousand cranes bring happiness
You remind me, or heal your soul.
You will take those odds
In this life or the next. Besides
No one is going to save me
But me. You place each square
Between your fingers and fold it
On the diagonal twice before setting
The triangle in your palm. And God,
I think. Don’t forget God. But then again
Who would not want to place their life
In your hands?
The square becomes a triangle
Then a kite, like the bold flashes
That flew above the shore
The day I called you from the Boardwalk
Off the Washington coast.
To stumble upon that beauty was like
Turning tarot cards: first the clown fish
Then the dragon, then every color of
Nylon trailing, all the bright collection
Set loose on the sky.
It happens everyday, the locals told me
And I wondered if we’d ever get used to
This much magic. If the routine makes it feel
Regular, or if the shock always comes for us,
The gift. The first night we spent together
The light of you felt like a miracle
I didn’t know I was waiting for. You
Turning me over and over
Searching for the shape of me,
What I was, what I would be.
The improbability of your chair facing
Mine and how you leaned in and
Away with your lips painted
Like the would-be cranes all these
Unlikely years later, and I can say now
There was a danger between us, a salve
but isn’t there always?
You pick up the paper
And cast a kind of spell
For life to stir where
There is no life, which is
Different than becoming alive
Where once you were
Dead, but equally startling. When you
Moved one leg over the
Other, and wore delight on your skin
You made an incantation
For resurrection, a call to worship
For your children who will not abandon you
For my caution to quit coming to the door
For the rare to become regular, like we take
For granted these bodies, and the spilling out of
Words and wine that night
Long after everyone else
Had gone to bed. Or that
We would even be here at all. You
Fold and flip, and see to every
Perfect edge without any guarantee
It will take flight. I want the effort to be
Enough, to say in the end
We were a fire that burned away
Everything, in a great hope
For something new. After you fold
You unfold. For a moment
All has been lost. Until
The creases become
The base, and you lift
The sharp point
Where the neck emerges and
You trace a long, thin line
To find the wings.
It is finished.
You throw it on the pile with the others
And move to pick up another square.
In your inhale and in your exhale
I forget every narrow way
I imagined life could go
Every small idea we give ourselves
For waking up -
String them all together
The coral sun is rising
Along the shore of the Elk River -
Why not dream of peace
Again?
We are always trying to conceive something, whether we totally realize it or not. Here’s to the things we keep trying for, even when we don’t yet know what shape they’ll take.