← The Slowdown: Poetry & Reflection Daily
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- [00:00]
Major Jackson
Hey, slow down, listeners. This spring we have two live events coming your way in LA on March 28th and Nashville on April 8th. Find more info@downdownshow.org I'm Ajor Jackson and this is the Slowdown. So it goes like this. Wake up, eat yogurt, commute to work or walk into the next room, your home office midday. Call a relative, possibly a sibling or a parent. Text a friend. Laugh through the hours at some scrolled meme, at some Joke on a Zoom meeting. Prepare an evening meal or pick up takeout. Sit down at the table and scroll the headlines. Get angry. Shake your head, watch a TV show to chill you out. Go to bed. That's the general cycle. Throw in a book you cannot put down. Throw in some workout routine or an after hours gathering at a favorite watering hole with co workers. Throw in time with a beloved, your favorite human being on earth. What breaks through the impenetrable folly of it all? What lends itself as miraculous in the dailiness of our lives? The magic sprouting of a bed of daffodils in springtime, A sculpture made from black twizzlers that the artist intricately wove together into a font of wonder or the breathtaking smile of a friend that is all the gardens you ever gazed at. Sometimes, just sometimes, someone will utter a phrase that sends us reeling inward, that seems off the grid of the unexpected, that lifts us above the quotidian. Likely, just likely, this is the work of poetry. Well, it's why I return to poetry again and again. I want the chance to know that I am not alone, not suffering or merely living in some void. Today's poem reminds me that we are made to experience life to the fullest. A Little Slice of Heaven by Jaswinder Bolina, and it makes sense for the thing you feel least in the afterlife to be the thing you felt most in the current life. Though you'd have to admit if there's an afterlife, it'd mean this life is reckoning for prior execution. Which means this shit show might be the penance we deserve, she said, which seemed an odd stab at small talk even for a madcap pediatrician, but alakazam. She pronounced the baby perfectly healthy and ordered him a round of shots before redeploying us to another six month stint in the wild. But that thing, she said, really stuck with me, sitting beside you the whole bus ride home and later feeding the toddler a bowl full of Consolidated peas and carrots and beside you in bed until morning and the days peeled away like that, like platitudes from a quota day calendar, like rounds of a daily loaf off a slicer, like cross sections of the cortex cut clean by an mri. And it really stuck in my head, that thing, she said. And it probably always will until I acquit myself of the grist of this life and submit to the next one, where I may never feel again as I do beside you tonight, sopping up bouillabaisse, my serious love with the soft guts of a baguette on a Friday in a life I must have qualified for and justly received I know not the hokey jurisprudence of why the Slowdown is a production of American Public Media in partnership with the Poetry Foundation. This project is also supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. On the web@arts.gov to get a poem delivered to you daily, go to slowdownshow.org and sign up for our newsletter and find us on Instagram @downdownshow and bluesky.downdownshow.org the Slowdown is written by me, Major Jackson. Our lead producer is Micah Kilbon and our associate producer is Maria Wartel. Our music is composed by Alexis Cuadrado, engineering by Josh Savageau. Our digital producer is James Napoli. Additional production help by Susanna Sharpless, Rebecca Rand and Lauren Humphert. Our executives in charge of APM Studios are Chandra Kavati and Joanne Griffith.
- [06:23]
Unknown Host
The Soul to Story podcast is about how teaching kids to read went wrong. But now we have a story about a school district where things are going very right.
- [06:34]
Unknown Educator
Let me make sure my friends are sitting crisscross applesauce, hands in their lap.
- [06:38]
Major Jackson
I've never had a child that couldn't read.
- [06:40]
Unknown Host
How did they do it?
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Unknown Educator
When I tell some of my other colleagues that may be at other schools that this is what I do and they would say, you kidding me?
- [06:48]
Unknown Host
New episodes of Sold a Story are available now in your podcast app.