When your world is being swamped with cruelty and greed, when you’re exhausted by the hatred and pain others seem determined to unleash, what do you do? How do you resist? One way is to write fiction. Not as an escape, but a conjuring.

Doesn’t matter if you’re not a writer, write the world you want to live in. Write the world you do live in but make it better, full of people who see others as they truly are – fellow humans with dreams, hopes, sorrows, loves. Don’t give away your power. Understand that conjuring begins with knowing that things that seem impossible right now aren’t. Think of those bulbs that flower under snow, and imagine the world you want to live in, and then stubbornly live in it as if it already exists. Will a better world into being until it blooms.

Henry James, by June Beisch

“Poor Mr. James,” Virginia Woolf once said:
“He never quite met the right people.”
Poor James. He never quite met the
children of light and so he had to invent them.
Then, when people said: No one is like that.
Your books are not reality, he replied:

So much the worse for reality.

He described himself as “slow to conclude,
orotund, a slow-moving creature, circling his rooms
slowly masticating his food.”

Once, when a nephew asked his advice
on how to live, he searched his mind.
Number One, be kind, he said.
Number Two, be kind and
Number Three, be kind.

Click here for more information on June Beisch. Today’s poem was first published in 2004 by Cape Cod Literary Press in Beisch’s collection Fatherless Woman. 
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