Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “An Optimism” by Cameron Awkward-Rich, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about a time a door opened.”

Participants are warmly encouraged to share what you wrote below (“Leave a Reply”), to keep the conversation going here, bearing in mind that the blog of course is a public space where confidentiality is not assured.

Also, we would love to learn more about your experience of these sessions, so if you’re able, please take the time to fill out a follow-up survey of one to two quick questions!

Please join us for our next session Friday July 18th at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

An Optimism by Cameron Awkward-Rich

It is morning. Remember that.
It is morning and the house is quiet,
so quiet that I can, for the moment, set myself
to wandering. I can sit patient at the door.
I can beg and bang to be let in. I am
turning this way and that. I am circling
the hole in the world of my imagination.
Let me in. I am saying the words, predictable
as any key—when I was a child,
when my mother, when the swarm of bees,
when I spent my days in mud among
the worms, rushing down the hill, our flooding
yard, when Hannah’s brother, her mother,
when I was too unclean, too wild a thing,
when I was barred from, when I sat alone
in the snow behind her house, pristine,
when, briefly, J and I were, when we
flew darkly down the green suburban
street, when he loved me, or something
in me and I loved the wind between us,
our bloody knees, when I think back, I am
nearly always otherwise alone, though
I never was alone, child of the salamanders,
child of the morning snow, the shamefaced
leaves. All my life, certainly for as long
as I’ve known I had a life, I was
like the sparrow right now outside
my window, flying headfirst, incessantly,
into what must seem, to her, like sky.
All around me people moved and laughed
and seemed, from where I fell,
to understand some silent thing,
some secret word that made itself
no home in me. Aggrieved, the world
of other people. I let it go.

Source: Poetry (June 2025)