What Happiness Looks Like

It is Wednesday night. We are at an outer southeast Portland grade school, after hours, holding the poetry group for refugees and immigrants. I’m wrestling with the days, each of them, this month, loss and sadness my clenched fists won’t release, and fear at the realization that hope seems closer to the horizon line than to me. I almost don’t go, I am too tired to teach, to figure out childcare for my two, to even go through my files and find lessons. And I don’t know if anyone is going to show up. Sometimes the chairs are filled, sometimes not. I’ve been leading writing groups like this one for years now, off and on and on my own time, because I believe in stories and in the telling of them. Some days I think that’s all I believe in.
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