What Is Good

When I was in college, my dear friend Kyle and I developed a habit of listing off ten good things (*right now*) every time we got together.

I think it began as a way of pushing back against the forms of gloom and those low moods that sometimes pestered us. Nowadays we call this gratitude practice, I suppose.

It trained me where to look, what to pay attention to. It helped. It became a habit.

I loved hearing Kyle's lists—his love of good food, his song crushes, his crushes—which often inspired me to appreciate things that had not appeared on my own list for that day.

Over the years, what we named as good, as sustaining and very often, beautiful, was almost always very simple and readily available to us:

• giant marigolds in bloom

• the neighbor's offer of a dozen eggs

• skies clearing after a storm

It would have been our temperament and tendency, as poets and baby Buddhists, to orientate ourselves in relation to what is rather than what could be, or what was, for that matter. The present moment. Not the past. Not even the future.

• Blue and white flannel pajamas

• This well made clay coffee cup

• Mail from Jim, Polly, and Melanie

• My husband's neck; the way it smells; how it feels against my face

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Rene' Char, translated by Franz Wright, from his book God's Silence (Knopf, 2018).

I read this poem first thing today and then I read several others: each one made me want to write. I'd made the mistake of looking at the New York Times while making my coffee and I felt rattled, alarmed, and out of whack from my encounter with even a few headlines and photos.

Focusing on a few lines in a poem brings me back to a kind of center.

It’s good medicine for me.

—Holly Wren Spaulding, September 2022