Noticing

I noticed something the other day.Not in a grand or celebratory way,not marked by anything you could point to.

Just a noticing.And for some reason, it felt like something to share.

I have posted eighty-five articles here on Substack since I began a little over a year ago. Eighty-five times I have sat down, or stood in the kitchen, or pulled over somewhere on a rainy day, or opened a notebook, and followed something small and insistent asking to be heard.

Not everything was clear. Not everything was strong. Some pieces arrived whole. Some had to be gently coaxed into the light. Some felt like offerings. Some felt like questions. Some gathered momentum.

Some barely moved at all.

And still, I placed them.

It’s easy to look at the numbers. Views. Opens. Subscriptions, Shares, Follows. To measure what lands, what spreads, what quietly disappears.

But that isn’t what stayed with me.

What stayed with me was the returning. The decision, again and again, to make a place for something true even when it was imperfect, even when it was unfinished, even I was unsure because it was tender, even when I did not know if it would be received at all.

Because most of what we live does not arrive as something polished.

It arrives as a flicker. A feeling. A line we almost miss.

And the work, I am learning, is simply this:

To notice it and not turn away. To trust that what is small is not insignificant. To trust that what is honest carries its own weight. To keep placing something living into the world without needing to know what it will become.Not how to be seen. But how to stay. Not how to reach outward. But how to deepen inward. Not how to measure the light, but how to keep lighting it.

And so, in my own small way, I marked it.

With a poem.

Seeds


I said, 

here.
this.

Not because it was polished.
Not because a thousand eyes
would fall upon it
like hungry birds on seed.
But because something in me
kept tapping the glass,
kept rustling the hedge,
kept saying look,
look at this strange and beautiful, breakable thing.

A one-legged robin
still busy with morning.
A lost ring.
A slow drive down Zero Ave.
A sea with its old blue appetite.
A woman refusing
the dimmer switch.

And grief,
lord, grief,
arriving in all its outfits:
ocean one day,
ash the next,
then some bright thing
I almost did not recognize as light
until it warmed my hands.

Some pieces were lifted high.
Some barely made it past the porch.
Some went out into the world
like a jar of raspberry jam left on a neighbour’s step,
a gift without a name,
without brass bands,
without anyone saying yes, yes, you’ve got this.

Still
I set them down.

Like stones to mark a trail.
Like poppy seeds flung
into the maybe of spring.
Like breadcrumbs, almost,
left for the self I used to be—
the one standing in the rain,
collecting evidence
of a life well lived.

And now, looking back,
what undoes me
is the devotion.

The coming back.

The faithful, unruly gesture
of making a place for wonder
in a world forever asking
to see the proof.

Eighty-five times
I opened my hands.

Eighty-five times
I let something living leave me.

Eighty-five times
I said yes
to the small luminous thing—
the feather, the ache, the shimmer,
the almost-song lifting.

And maybe that is the work.

Not to stand above the light
counting.

Not to measure its worth
by what it returns.

But to keep striking the match.
To cup the flame in both hands
as you would a small wild bird.
To shelter it when the wind rises.
To find the words.
And to pass it on.


-Mary Ann Burrows