The Wind
Our parents rode in the enclosed cabin of our classic white Ford truck. They were talking but we couldn’t hear them. They never looked back to see us and we knew there was no room for us up in that sweetly, quiet cab.
To Remember A Stranger
The more people I have met, the closer I have been to suffering. Many times, this makes me want to not meet more people, and, in fact, un-meet people, like a girl in a video I resent having seen or a boy in a gas station at which I didn’t have to stop.
Writer's Habits: The Importance of Non-Writing Writing
...if you saw me by the side of the road, perhaps taking a photo with my phone of some wild grapes, you wouldn’t think I’m writing, but I am—more non-writing writing.
For the good of those who love him
Saul’s father sits down next to him, lights Saul’s candle and pats his leg. He’s always more affectionate in church, like he’s forgotten his normal behaviors. Distracted by the possibility of God, he remembers Saul.
Hazy Skies
Where I am living now, the seasons have no pivot... Springs are mercurial, senselessly violent in their cold and snow. I experience winter here like a death, wait endlessly for a green that will outgrow my grief.
On bee-ing free: racial justice, surviving apocalypse, and paying attention
White supremacy doesn’t just uphold police brutality and mass incarceration, migrant detention and colonial extraction on Native land; it’s death-dealing and ordinary and wants to last forever.
Self-Deception in the #PublishingPaidMe Marketplace
If I think too much about the racial inequalities in the publishing industry, it might push me to the point where I stop writing.
Our Hands Are Bowls of Dust
Clemonce Heard's poem, Our Hands Are Bowls of Dust won second place in the 2018 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize and is featured in Issue 49: Mattering.
A Scream
It seems insidiously cruel that we don’t get to be asymptomatic carriers for the prejudice and hatred that others infect us with.
When the Good Lord Willed the Creek to Rise
Charnell Peters's poem appears in Issue 42: Forming One Another
A Quiet Truth
In America they kill their children.
Someone thinks this of us. It may be true. If we are brave enough to see and accept that it is, what will we do about it?
On Constructive Anger
Being Black and being a woman, I have a complicated relationship with anger. Sometimes I am reluctant to show anger, irritation, or frustration for fear of being labeled an “Angry Black Woman”...Unfortunately, I am frequently angry when existing in most spaces.
A Moment for Communal Listening
In an effort to come to terms with the voices that we have ignored or silenced as a nation, we will be taking a week to listen and honor the Black voices within our creative community.
Ruminate's Role in this Moment
One of our roles as individuals is to dedicate space to listen to those who name this truth with uncompromising honesty—the grief, the pain, the anger, the sorrow. Another is to transform this listening into self-reflection and from reflection into action. To do things that you can do even if they seem too small to make a difference.
Out of the Wildflowers
And the wildflowers. The wildflowers pushing against all odds, against this endlessly small room, this seed encasing the pivotal word: might. They come. They are mighty.
A List of Songbirds
Melanie S. Smith's essay "A List of Songbirds" appears in Issue No. 55: Under Pressure
Woman
I told her she was the perfect mom. This was when she tried to pull the tubes from her arms the gloves from her hands. One of the nurses said, “Oh, she’s a fighter.”
Given Light and a Mother Who Was Always Dying in Secret
No one remembers her mother right or observes the rites to keep her whole. The woman becomes fragments, patches for quilts, and the daughter loses the needle, what North should have drawn from her hand and pinned where she could always find it.
Issue 55: Under Pressure Readers' Notes
We are thrilled to share some hand-picked readers' notes from Issue 55: Under Pressure. Be sure to check out our Summer Issue which releases mid June.
This is the Day
All we’ve ever had is this day with its daylily moments—bright, crisp, delectable. Shriveled by the next morning. As my hair grays and my bones grow fragile, life feels more and more like those time-lapse nature films we watched in grade school. As the pandemic arrived, someone sped up the projector. Sunrise, sunset. Moments quick as a hummingbird’s heart.
Postpartum Balding in the Time of the Pandemic
Every day I read about the spread of corona, concentric circles that keep edging closer and closer to my world. And the economic ruin it's triggered. Climate change. The election. Meanwhile, a bald patch forms at my temple. I cut my hair into a bob and wear it down every day to cover it.
Social Distance, Then and Now
In those months, months of northern winter when my husband took the car to work and I existed alone with a baby in the American suburbs, the sheer brutality of our way of life rained down on me and showed me that I had not, before, understood.
The Day You Were Dying
I ate lunch looking out at the struggling town and remembered the day your son and I showed up unannounced on your doorstep and shared our news, and how you invited the nearest relatives to celebrate our engagement with burritos and Pepsi in your formal dining room, our paper-wrapped meal eaten over a crocheted lace tablecloth.
Feathered Hope
Are bird songs only a matter of mating propositions and territorial disputes? Or might the Carolina wren tell bawdy jokes? Does the tufted titmouse have political aspirations? Is the mourning dove actually a comedian?
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The Waking is the online publication of Ruminate Magazine, a reader-supported magazine helping you slow down, read deeply, and live awake. The Waking is interested in reviews, interviews, and short form prose that, as Bernard Cooper says, "magnif[ies] some small aspect of what it means to be human."
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