This is much like the red Honda scooter I once drove to cross country practice. It was my brother's and I was sometimes able to borrow it - lucky me.

Escorting the Driver Home

Your body, tired, longs for a shower, then dinner, then sleep.
But on the drive home, turning onto a short cut, you get stuck
behind a young woman on a scooter. She wears white fluffy
ear muffs and a tan wool coat, flapping in the breeze. Slowed
in your pursuit of home, you feel a flash of irritation, growing
as you realize she's riding the same back roads. In your mind
you'd imagined racing home. Instead you're puttering behind
the slow, steady hum of the scooter, put, put, put. You exhale
the urge to hurry, inhale the beautiful evening - roll down
the window to feel the breeze. You remember yourself at fifteen,
the red scooter you rode back and forth to running practice,
your fear on the busy roads. Your heart softens towards the rider
in front of you and you laugh, realizing she'll delay you by seconds,
at most a few minutes. As the rider makes each bend and turn,
your car following behind her, you reimagine yourself as her escort,
a buffer between her and the evening traffic that may not see
her bike's weak light. You ride behind her now with pleasure,
twenty miles per hour, your chariot flag waving.

Join me for the next session of Gathering Ourselves

Poems - both writing and listening to them - offer a blank space that invites all of us, the paradoxes within and without, both our frustration and our freed hearts. If you’re looking for a warm, supportive space to nurture wholeness, I want to invite you to join me and my co-facilitator, Tamara Neufeld Strijack, for the next session of Gathering Ourselves.

Gathering Ourselves is a creativity circle to connect more deeply with ourselves and each other. In these online gatherings, we use centering exercises, prompts, poems, and our own creative expression – whether it’s collage, journaling, writing, journal pages, drawing or more – to nurture a more generous, deeper, and restorative relationship with our inner world.

You don’t have to think of yourself as creative or a writer to come - merely a desire to show up and play.

We’ll couple our exploration with group sharing – a sacred space where we can listen to ourselves and listen to each other with ‘the ears of our hearts.’ By listening to ourselves and each other, we hope to become more vibrant, compassionate, tender and courageous.

We’ll be meeting on two Fridays a month from February to May from 10 am to 12 pm Pacific/11 am to 1 p m Mountain/12 to 2 pm Central/1 to 3 pm Eastern/6 to 8 pm London time.

Our gatherings will be recorded if you can’t make it. Tuition is $320 or four monthly payments of $80 (CAD or USD.) You can learn more and sign up below.

O Nobly Born is a reader supported newsletter. If you appreciate receiving the poems of O Nobly Born, you can bless this offering by subscribing to the newsletter (click on the red button below) or make a donation by credit card or through paypal at paypal@growinghumankindness.com. I cherish every donation, as they support this work and enable me to offer her freely to all.

With a grateful heart, Karly