If you wish to attend the read around (t’s free, fun, a great way to share, and reading a poem is optional). Note: If you registered already, you do not need to register again, simply use the link sent to you in your confirmation email. Register Here:

Next Read-Around is 8/28/25 at 5:00 PM PST

How It Works:

  1. Read the poem 

  2. Do your own reflection on it, noting what it inspires in you

  3. Feel free to use your own reflection as your prompt or…

  4. Use the selection of prompts below

  5. Pick one that inspires you and write (feel free to use only one or write several poems using different prompts) or…

  6. Don’t use any of the provided prompts and follow your inspiration from wherever it comes

My Thoughts

Any poem bold enough to take on “the whole anxiety of living” is worth a read. Maria Popova tackles the topic with grace on a card devoted to the Great White Heron in her beautifully illustrated card deck collection titled, An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days.  For me and many others, it’s precious and rare to feel at home in our bodies and safe in the world. Anxiety is a natural response given the onslaught of tragedies and troubles in our daily newsfeed. Even in good times, a level of angst spreads over our hungers and our pains, our desperate striving and obsessive fretting over things, much of which is out of our control. But then, we have poetry to wrap it up in a gift box—as Maria does beautifully by reminding us that death is no different than life, which is merely the possible fastened to the present. To me, this begs the questions: What will we make possible with this one life in which we are present?

Great White Heron

The whole anxiety of living
is that we imagine death
as a hand sure to strike,
and cannot easily conceive
of a hand certain to hold,
but in the natural arrangement
of time and chance
death is no different from life
which is merely the possible
fastened to the present
and the sunshine of now
is only bright against
the deep blue sky of never

—Maria Popova
From An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days
https://www.themarginalian.org/about/

Prompt Ideas

  1. Journal or write a poem about “the whole anxiety of living.”

  2. Journal or write a poem about how you imagine death.

  3. Journal or write a poem about the uncertainties of everyday life. What makes you anxious in everyday life? How do you handle it?

  4. Journal or write a poem about the hand sure to strike and the hand certain to hold. What fists your hand and what opens it? What are you sure to strike and what are you certain to hold?

  5. Popova’s poem offers several contrasts in addition to the hand sure to strikes and the hand certain to hold; death and life, the sunshine of now and the blue sky of never…Use one of these or any other contrast of your choosing as your topic

  6. Journal or write a poem about how death is no different than life.

  7. I do not know if Popova intended the bird on each card to reflect the poem, Pick any bird and journal or write a poem as a spinoff—give yourself permission to stray or use free association as kernels for you writing.

  8. Journal or write a poem (a list poem?) describing what is between now and never.

  9. Write about anything else in the poem or in life that inspires you.