An Evening with Ada Limón

As soon as Ada Limón walks onstage, you can tell that there’s something different about her. Something joyful. She’s wearing yellow, a color I, along with the rest of the audience at Saint Mary’s College, will come to see is entirely fitting for her. Yellow: a happy color. A perfect symbol for a poet who so wholeheartedly relishes the joy of life.
She isn’t here to give advice, which she makes clear almost immediately. Why? Because “poetry and wisdom are at odds.” Her idea of what all advice boils down to, she tells us, is this: “hydrate, sleep, exercise, eat well, be kind.” No. Ada Limón is here to do something more than give advice. She’s here to tell us about a way of being.

Sanctuary

Suppose it’s easy to slip
              into another’s green skin,
bury yourself in leaves

and wait for a breaking,
              a breaking open, a breaking
out. I have, before, been

tricked into believing
              I could be both an I
and the world. The great eye

of the world is both gaze
              and gloss. To be swallowed
by being seen. A dream.

To be made whole
              by being not a witness,
but witnessed.

She tells us that she was going to sit on her back porch and write a first draft of the speech she’s giving when she saw a bumblebee lying on its back. She flips it over, puts it back on its feet, but it doesn’t fly. Its wings aren’t damaged.
The bee is dying. So Ms. Limón runs to grab a flower, dips it in a cup of water, and sets it next to the withering creature.
She then sits in her chair and writes the talk.

Sparrow, Sparrow, What Did You Say?

A whole day without speaking,
rain, then sun, then rain again,
a few plants in the ground, newbie
leaves tucked in black soil, and I think
I’m good at this, this being alone
in the world, the watching of things
grow, this older me, the one in
comfortable shoes and no time
for dishes, the one who spent
an hour trying to figure out a bird
with a three-note descending call
is just a sparrow. What would I even
do with a kid here? Teach her
to plant, watch her like I do
the lettuce leaves, tenderly, place
her palms in the earth, part her
dark hair like planting a seed? Or
would I selfishly demand this day
back, a full untethered day trying
to figure out what bird was calling
to me and why.

The talk is winding down. Limón has taken us on not-even-remotely-connected-tangents about bumblebees and crushes and Elizabeth Bishop Who Wrote A Brilliant Villanelle That Won Her Ex-Girlfriend Back. Life is a series of fascinating interludes, she tells us. Life is an anthology of jumbled, incoherent, weird interludes.
After Ms. Limón finished writing the first draft of the talk she gives, she went to look for the bumblebee. It was curled up in the flower she lay by its side, not moving at all anymore.
It died happy.
What’s the point? That life is the thing. The thing. It’s life, not our jobs, not our education, not our wants or hopes or dreams, not what we eat, or what we wear, or the things that we decide we want life to be. Life is the thing, and not what we decide we want life to be. It’s the subtle, unintentional things, those things that are just-under-the-radar. “Maybe that small distraction is your whole life,” she says, “and isn’t that enough?” Isn’t it?
She ends with a charge: she is speaking at a college, after all. She’s not that radical; she has to end with a charge. “Life is not to be missed,” she says, “so don’t miss it.”