The Spaces In Between

I gave this message on September 7th 2025. If you want to read the full service, you can find that at this link here.

An excerpt from “The Nutritionist” by Andrea Gibson

What I know about living
is the pain is never just ours.
Every time I hurt I know the wound is an echo,
so I keep listening for the moment the grief becomes a window,
when I can see what I couldn’t see before
through the glass of my most battered dream.
I watched a dandelion lose its mind in the wind
and when it did, it scattered a thousand seeds.

First Hymn: 137 Green Hymnal Teach Me to Stop and Listen

Readings: The Summer Day by Mary Oliver (1992)

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Excerpt from “Falling Back in Love with Being Human: Letters to Lost Souls” (2023) by Kai Cheng Thom

“It wasn’t just my world that was falling apart. It was everyone’s. So I wrote. I wrote as though I might be casting a spell or chanting a religious litany. I wrote as though poetry and prayer might mean the same thing, as if words might reconnect me with what I once considered my unshakable relationship with the human divine.”

Excerpt from In the chemo room By Andrea Gibson

Remind me all my prayers were answered
the moment I started praying
for what I already have.
Jenny says when people ask if she’s out of the woods,
she tells them she’ll never be out of the woods,
says there is something lovely about the woods.
I know how to build a survival shelter
from fallen tree branches, packed mud,
and pulled moss. I could survive forever
on death alone. Wasn’t it death that taught me
to stop measuring my lifespan by length,
but by width? Do you know how many beautiful things
can be seen in a single second? How you can blow up
a second like a balloon and fit infinity inside of it?

Why did I go so long believing I owed the world
my disappointment? Why did I want to take
the world by storm when I could have taken it
by sunshine, by rosewater, by the cactus flowers
on the side of the road where I broke down?

Message:

Intro: It has been a year since my first message here, when I reflected on the grief I felt after Wells College closed. Today’s message is also going to be partially a meditation on grief, as I continue to process the loss of my career, and as I learn from and reflect on new losses this summer. Once again, “Grief becomes a window.” I will also be speaking about life, and what it means to live a wide, and full life, a precious and wild life. My message is about pain, and also poetry and prayer. It is about continuing to love all the messy parts of being human.

Glimmers and Grief:
Starting a new job at SUNY Cortland in April was a relief after a year of job hunting. At SUNY I am able to continue the diversity teaching that I love, while also mentoring students. However, student affairs/admin life is very different from faculty life, and the relief I felt at the end of a long job search and a hard year of financial insecurity unexpectedly shifted into a deep depression this summer as I adjusted to a new schedule, commute, and career.

Along with the support of friends and family (and this community), one of the things that kept me going was creating little “glimmer” zines. A glimmer is something that gives you a sense of joy or happiness when you think of it. Zines are DIY magazines of various sizes/topics. Here is one of my mini zines, which I create from a single sheet of paper (showed congregation one of my zines).

In my April-June Glimmers zine, I listed things like:

Pippin’s soft ears
Foraging ramps and ferns
Oriole singing, orange spot in budding branches
Coffee with cream
Fluffy foals in the fields on the way down into Locke
Swimming at Hannah’s

These glimmer lists, these joy-things are messages to a future me saying, “look, life is never all bad, there is always light and color amid the darkness.” They are a poetic prayer, saying, I hope it gets better. And an answer: It will get better. It is already better than you think.

In my July-August zine I listed things like:

Fireflies slowly rising above the long grass
A sunny yellow kitchen
Breakfast on the porch with Pippin and Indigo
Andrea Gibson’s poetry and wisdom.
RIP. August 13th 1975-July 14th 2025.

That was a hard day, the day that Andrea Gibson died. They were my favorite poet and all summer, I had been holding onto lines from their poetry to help me keep going. Although I knew this day would come ever since they announced that their cancer had come back, it still felt like all the air had left the room when I first read the news.

Gibson was a queer, non-binary slam poet from Colorado. They wrote about mental illness, identity, gender, social justice, love, community, relationships. Their words were included in my vows to Indigo, and their poems have guided me through life ever since I first heard them in my twenties. They taught many people how to feel their feelings and how to be vulnerable, how to talk about things that often are viewed through a lens of stigma and shame. Since their initial diagnosis of ovarian cancer four years ago, they shared the journey online and invited people into their experience of living with a terminal illness.

They once said, “Whenever I leave this world, whether it’s sixty years from now, I wouldn’t want anyone to say I lost some battle. I’ll be a winner that day.” In a post about their passing, their wife Meg wrote, “I won’t sugarcoat the fact that they desperately wanted more time on this planet that they loved so much. This planet of squirrels and romance and basketball and moonlight. But the time they had was significant, prismatic, and wild.”

It has been a strange experience to mourn someone that has had such an impact on my life, but who was not a personal friend. It has also been a beautiful experience to mourn in community with my friends, and with thousands of other strangers who also loved them. The day Andrea Gibson died, three of my former students reached out to me, from three different colleges where I had taught in the last decade, saying that I was the first person that they thought of when they heard the news, and thanking me for introducing them to Andrea’s poetry in my classes.

For weeks after their death, friends and strangers alike were posting Andrea Gibson quotes, including one of my favorites, “In the end I want my heart to be covered in stretch marks.”

A Precious Life:

A week after Andrea Gibson died, Indigo and I drove down to Virginia for Indigo’s grandmother’s funeral. Sarah was 100 years and six months old when she passed in June this year. She had 8 children, 22 grandchildren, and many, many great-grandchildren. She was born in 1924 in Kentucky, on a small farm with no running water. Later in her life she said that she never stopped feeling grateful for the water that flowed whenever she turned on a tap. Her life was long and full of love and laughter and children. Oh, how she loved children. One of the photos in the slide deck at the funeral showed her holding a newborn grandchild up to her cheek, with a look of pure delight on her face. Indigo has many memories of running around with a pack of their cousins at their grandparents’ house, and sleeping in a giant pile of blankets and mattresses on the floor in the “kids’ room.”

I did not know Sarah that well, although we did celebrate her 100th together in November last year, but I appreciated learning about her life through all the family stories at the funeral. I found it ironic that the minister kept referencing her “short life on earth” given that she had lived over a hundred years, but he considered it short compared to “eternal life in heaven.”

Over the last month I have been thinking a lot about the contrast between the length of Grandma Sarah’s life, and Andrea Gibson’s. One over a hundred years long, and the other, one month short of 50 years. Both lives were filled with love and laughter, and both Sarah and Andrea leave behind family and friends who wish they had more time together.

Mary Oliver says “Doesn’t everything die at last and too soon? Tell me what do you plan to do with your one wild and precious life.” I have seen this quote being used as inspiration to push as far as you can go, to reach for the stars, and not waste any time before chasing your greatest dreams. But I think that is a misreading of the poem, which is about spending the day in the fields, and delighting in the beauty of a grasshopper.

Andrea Gibson says, “ Wasn’t it death that taught me to stop measuring my lifespan by length, but by width? Do you know how many beautiful things can be seen in a single second? How you can blow up a second like a balloon and fit infinity inside of it?”

I am grateful that my depression has eased as we move towards Fall, thanks to therapy, friends and family, anti-depression meds, and the start of a new semester which means lots of students on campus again! I am continuing to write my glimmer zines, and I am reading poetry that soothes my heart.

In the “Summer Day” Mary Oliver writes, “I don’t know what a prayer is.” I am not sure what a prayer is either, in fact, I am often suspicious of prayers, especially when politicians use the phrase “thoughts and prayers” as permission to do nothing in the face of injustice. But I love Oliver’s invitation to “pay attention” and agree with Kai Cheng Thom that maybe poetry is like a prayer, and that both are a way for us to connect to each other in this human world, and beyond.

I pray that all of us are able to find delight and joy within our lives, even in tough times like these. That we are able to fit infinity into moments, and that we cherish the precious and wild lives that we have.

Hymn: 1, All Things Bright and Beautiful

Closing prayer or message: I want to end with some more lines by Andrea Gibson, Love Letter from the Afterlife

“My love, I was so wrong. Dying is the opposite of leaving. When I left my body, I did not go away. That portal of light was not a portal to elsewhere, but a portal to here. I am more here than I ever was before. I am more with you than I ever could have imagined. So close you look past me when wondering where I am. It’s Ok. I know that to be human is to be farsighted. But feel me now, walking the chambers of your heart, pressing my palms to the soft walls of your living.”