Category: Mental Health

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April 20, 2026

11:10 am

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Mental Health, Mi Familia Loca, NPM, Part and Poetry, Sleeper Stories

This week we have arrived at the portion of the NPM celebration wherein I acknowledge that I will be so glad when it’s May. Not because I can’t write a daily poem – I can, and probably should. Not because I can’t draw a daily doodle, either, though these images are only just now becoming the shorter, quick-sketch thing they were meant to be from the beginning, with fewer attempts at a photo-realistic literal and more impressionistic and observational within a metaphorical window… but because I always (always, always) set myself some project expectation that I absolutely struggle to complete. While the poems are moving from externally observant and becoming more internal, I’m finding that the form is inhibiting me – though this was a deliberate choice. Tricubes are meant for brevity, after all, and this is a process to teach myself to lean into that – but it’s just… hard. Normally I use poetry to process. Often there’s more I want to say, but it feels like dwelling – and I’m not going to change forms, though I feel the desire. Additionally, I DO have other things to do…

swinging bridge

between now
and back then,
a crevasse:

dear parents,
leave something:
some kindness –

memories
of soft hands
as a bridge.

Poetic addendum: Saw family this weekend. People of color who experienced physical ‘correction’ have a number of people telling them that culturally this is ‘necessary’ or ‘just how it is,’ or any number nonsensical things. I think there’s a part of us that goes cold and doesn’t recover, and when the punishing parent is approaching their four-score and whatever, and you still don’t feel safe to be familiar with them… what has the ‘culture’ done? What have we normalized? What is the profit…?

hourglass
avalanche
forces hands –

we can’t hold
time’s passage:
sand’s slipping.

leave something –
in loving
memory.

I guess a double tricube could be a new form?

{poetry friday poem: after Donika Kelly}

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November 14, 2025

12:52 pm

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Mental Health, Part and Poetry, Poetry Friday, Random Notes and Errata

Welcome to Poetry Friday!

Poetry Peeps! Just a reminder that our challenge for the month of November is composing ‘Eavesdropped & Overheard’ poems in tribute to our pal at the long-running Chicken Spaghetti blog, Susan Thomsen. I look forward to your post or on social media with the tag #PoetryPals on NOVEMBER 28th!

And speaking of Susan, today’s poetry prompt comes her, and a poem she shared a couple of weeks back, Donika Kelly’s Poem To Remind Myself of the Natural Order of Things. In it, the poet hearkens back to that thicc and wondrous baby hippo captured our hearts during lockdown, then turns her attention back to her own heart.

From Process…

Now, I wasn’t going to do this challenge. I am truly bad with memes — some of what other people find funny or cute comes off as either sad, weird, or mean to me, and hello, welcome to my sideways brain, I guess. But then, I read Susan’s poem, and all the poems of the others taking part in the challenge, and they were so good that I thought of one meme that hasn’t left me alone.

Yeah, so – remember the viral ‘Paws-In Test’ from about six months back? I …disliked that so much (once again: weird brain. NO SHADE whatsoever if you thought it was cute. It a fundamental way, it is cute, because: dogs). The ‘test’ was owners putting their hands in a stack and silently requesting their dog to take part in their weird human activity. And some of the dogs, you could see the gears turning as they looked from one of their human pack to the next, trying to figure out what the ask was… trying to make sure that they were doing whatever was being asked of them “right.” And egads, that seemed way too much like the social tests of life for me, and all of my oh, noooo anxiety kicked in, just looking at those sweet liquid eyes, staring at the humans being …baffling, and waiting for…something… ❗

…To Poetry

However, the point of the whole exercise is to find more in the ephemeral memes and ‘moments’ observed in the social media stratosphere, and I love that Donika begins with the word “observe” and leans in with just that – forcing us to look back and remember the delightful chonk that is Fiona, and how the posts from the zoo lightened up our hearts in a heavy time. Hadn’t love, the poet seems to realize, once done the same for her? And thus, I found my way into writing …some kind of poem. For once, it helped that I did this last minute, so forced myself to truly lean in to the mentor text: no rhyme, no wordplay, just… thoughts. (Or, vibes, no? I mean, if we’re talking memes, we are fully USING the lingo.)

“A Poem to Reminds Myself of the Inutility of External Validation”

After Donika Kelly

Observe them, seated,
facing, arms extended,
hands stacked, awaiting:

Head tilts, calculation
a silent klaxon blaring
whatnow/whatway/what’sright
as longing takes a gamble
lifts paw: a closed circuit,
validation lights up faces.

Sweet puppies, always,
forever, the goodest good dogs.

But you –
Down, Girl. Find it!
Sniff out your OWN path.

tanita s. davis draft, 2025

It’s Carol who is hosting the Poetry Friday roundup today, so pop by for an apple from her orchard. Remember – there is no ‘right’ way to act. There is no ‘correct’ response. There is only you, and yours, and the choices you make to fulfill your needs. And, you. are. enough. of a majority to rule. Now, off to find your own way, you good being.

Happy Friday.


{npm♦4/14}

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April 14, 2025

4:41 pm

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Mental Health, Musings on Extemporanea, NPM, Part and Poetry

Odd that ‘doomscrolling’ only first appeared in 2018, but here we are with it a relevant household term. While widely recognized as increasing anxiety, distress, and emotional fatigue, in the moment, doomscrolling …relaxes us. Since constant exposure to distressing content reduces emotional responsiveness and empathy, it actually allows our brains to confirm our bias that everything is crap – which produces a dopamine burst, providing brief satisfaction. It creates the illusion that by reading about the news we’re somehow in control of it, even a little bit. Which we aren’t…even a little bit… which our brains points out to us later, usually between two-thirty and three AM.

Psychologists have a name for this constant emotional dysreguation via doomscrolling: Headline Stress Disorder.

“Do not go gentle into that good night,” Dylan Thomas advised us. If we’re all going to crumble, let it not be like this, led to our executions with our souls abscessed and our eyes glued to our phones. The only way we can reliably bear witness is to occasionally bare our faces to fresh air and sky, connect with what we’re fighting to preserve, and stay grounded. Rage against the dying of the light – and admire a bit of moonlight, too. Otherwise, none of us will finish this race, and it’s a marathon, not even a little bit of a sprint…

(im)passive

had I my druthers
I’d always come out swinging
walk with running steps
plan every contingency
prepared for whatever comes.
given no choices
I’ll take what I am given:
my own self-control
conscious delusion? Maybe.
…most we can do is our best.


{national poetry month: “not everything is lost”}

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March 31, 2025

12:05 pm

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Mental Health, NPM, Part and Poetry, Seven Sisters, What We Do, Who We Are

“This / is the world I want to live in. The shared world.”

The 2025 NPM poster features lines from “Gate A-4”, a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye, as well as artwork by New York Times-bestselling author and illustrator Christy Mandin. “Gate A-4” is a poem which has always resonated – because I used to love the swirl of humanity in airports, all the people-watching and the excitement of going. This was, of course, when I was in my twenties and still new to air travel, still believing in the public transportation contract of paying-to-ride, before a world where people beat a man and dragged him off a plane because they’d overbooked and wanted his seat for someone else. Post 2001, I saw air travel’s underbelly – a world wherein adults sometimes wept silently, frightened, frustrated by a language barrier and exiled from all they knew. I had the …experience of flying aboard a USAID flight where I put on the seat belts of other adults and a woman with a tiny infant because the flight attendant talked at them – and there was no translator. It was literally – for it was a flight out of Miami – a steaming hot mess. A toilets backed-up-and-overflowing – people airsick and vomiting – no AC on the whole flight – grit-your-teeth-and-endure hot mess, from Miami to Minnesota. I prayed those people found a home where they could be clean and fed and free of the wailing bewilderment they seemed mired in that day.

Suffice it to say I can almost feel the frustration of the gate attendant, the wary, xenophobic cringing of the other passengers at all that… foreign emotion, and the bleak despair of the woman on the floor wailing. Naomi Shihab Nye’s act of mercy and humanity made so many people’s lives better in that two hour wait for the next flight, but it is the final lines of the poem, rather than the two that the American Academy of Poets highlighted for this month that make me tear up and hold my breath: “This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.”

Those last two sentences always make me want to whisper, “Really? Do you promise?”

Yes. Not everything is lost: because everyone who is loved is found.

Not everything is lost: because we have it within us to be maps.

Not everything is lost: because not everything we lose is a loss.

Not everything is lost: because we can find beauty and meaning in remnants.

I don’t know what’s going to come out of me for National Poetry Month, but I will be in conversation with this, and have settled on this as my theme – and my hope. “This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.”

“Not everything is lost.” It’s true. It’s got to be true. Not everything, not all the time – and we will find ourselves again.

{#winterlight: meeting}

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December 3, 2024

1:01 pm

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Mental Health, Part and Poetry

A couple of years ago, our chamber group did a Shaker piece called “In Meeting We Are Blessed,” and the words echo lately. It’s a song about confluences, about coming together from our various shores and commingling. It’s also about choices to retain connections when our pathways diverge. It reminds me of rivers. We don’t actually have a ton of river confluences in my area – they’re mostly much further north, where the Sacramento River blends with the Auburn, tidal creeks surging up north of Redding, etc. We’re just not big on rivers here so close to the Bay, but if you’re out on the water you can see bay confluences, too. It’s always a little messy, these waters coming together – a lot of ripples, a bit of silt. Coming together is never…neat. And yet, it’s part of flowing into the ocean.

Over and over the message I’ve heard and passed these last few weeks has been about community. About connection. About coming together, making space, offering resource exchange, and staying together. Holding on.

in meeting

turbulence jostles
waves churn in the wider world
that makes up the sea