Are you looking for an “experience” gift for yourself or someone you love? Spots still available in our January 8-13, 2024, Write Together session. I’d love to see you in this one hour, twice-daily workshop in which we all quietly write together from a guided prompt. It’s a beautiful way to usher in the new year. $200, with one $100 no-questions-asked scholarship available. 

People keep telling me I have to pick a side, pick a side. Here’s the side I pick: The world is a mess, and the world is beautiful, and people are awful, and people are wonderful. Let me love the world, and its humans, like a mother.

Rain, New Year’s Eve, by Maggie Smith 

The rain is a broken piano,
playing the same note over and over.

My five-year-old said that.
Already she knows loving the world

means loving the wobbles
you can’t shim, the creaks you can’t

oil silent—the jerry-rigged parts,
MacGyvered with twine and chewing gum.

Let me love the cold rain’s plinking.
Let me love the world the way I love

my young son, not only when
he cups my face in his sticky hands,

but when, roughhousing,
he accidentally splits my lip.

Let me love the world like a mother.
Let me be tender when it lets me down.

Let me listen to the rain’s one note
and hear a beginner’s song.

Click here for more information about writer Maggie Smith.
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My podcast: Words by Winter