"What are your gods?"

I think this is a testimony

Background music while reading: ‘Looking at the Geese’ by Renny Conti

This started as a journal entry. I’ve never typed up or further polished a journal entry before.

Friday, May 22, 2026. 12:45 p.m. Lunch break.

Been having some interesting reflections during all this recent alone time in my car, and want to place them here (relatively composed, mostly half-baked) for a moment.

In January 2025, I was asked “what are your gods?” during a guest lecture in a poetry class. This would be my final semester of college, a few months into testing the waters of SSRIs, recovering time lost in first semester’s internal mayhem. This would become a question that stuck to and with me. (We were asked many questions like this to help us build a poem, and challenged to arrange our answers in a few different ways to examine if and how the message was different. It was honestly a great activity. Shoutout Santee Frazier for guest lecturing.)

This question ended up motivating one of the poems I’ve shared a few times online – “Praying to the small god of yesterday” – as my immediate answer to Frazier’s question had much to do with rumination on the past/anxiety/feeling stuck in some kind of monotonous “worship” that I knew deep down wasn’t really going anywhere. Looking back, the fact that my first association to prayer or worship was anxiousness was telling enough. (Love that poem though. Necessary for the time).

Anyway, that was a year and a half ago. Last week, Dad and I meet for dinner after work. We go to this sushi place neither of us have tried before and I basically talk about myself the whole time while he nods and asks more questions. He tells me I need to follow my dreams. He believes in me as a writer, yes, but maybe even more just as a person. He wants me to have more confidence.

Naturally, I cry all the way home.

On my drive, I start thinking about religion and some greater cosmic thing that certainly had to have put me where I am today. I have a fairly blunt and sarcastic, sometimes too-serious side of my personality, but in my heart I am weepy and grateful and unhardened. At the core of it, I am frequently in disbelief that this life is mine. These days, there is almost nothing I take lightly about the hand I was dealt. It baffles me to tears in my Subaru. How lucky am I.

The air is clinging to high 50s from earlier in the day, and golden hour is splitting in through my windshield. Certainly there is something greater that got me here; describing these feelings of gratitude and complicated emotion seem too beyond me in the mortal world. Maybe there is a god. Maybe I should go back to church. I mean, there has to be something to thank for these blessings in my life, for this life, for anything.

I hit a red light and start reflecting on what I know god to be. I’m thinking about god – not the one I grew up knowing in church weekly, but the one in my stomach. The one I’ve grown up with in my gut, in my mind, all around me in my life. The nameless-feeling feeling I always (fortunately) find myself coming back to — typically in these large waves of deep, all-consuming emotion.

What are your gods?

Suddenly, right there in my driver’s seat, it’s not nameless at all.

Love.

I am worshipping selfless, true love. I am finding it in small acts and moments, things I am a part of and things I am not. I look for poetry, synchronicities, meaning in all things. I stare at people in public because I am mesmerized by them, that I am one of them. I was put here because of love, and, if I’m lucky, I will leave with it wrapped around me, too.

The older I get, the more I recognize how love has been behind everything. I know it might sound corny to some, but it is probably the truest brick of truth in my life. Even bad moments are recognized as bad because of the countering love. Everything that has ever come together to grant a wish or dream of mine — even when that wish was just being here another day — has been love’s doing. External love helps me strengthen internal love, which helps me strengthen my external love once more. I am caught in a beautiful cycle. Amen.

What are your gods?

The love my parents had for me before they even met me. The certainty in their guts about creating the four of us and wanting to be parents … that they’d just believe in somebody so wholly.

What are your gods?

I don’t have enough fingers to count the number of people I have known for over a decade. I am walking through life and still have people from all corners of this upbringing beside me. What an intense, beautiful way to be seen and mutually chosen again and again. What love.

What are your gods?

The motion in a loved one’s wrist as they write a letter. The dreams people have even before they fall asleep. I am praying to the idea that one day I will love even more people, even more moments. My gods are not necessarily the “good things” down the line, but the fact that I have the capacity to trust in or conceptualize good things at all. My god is the love people have in their hearts, specifically the kind that wants them to keep loving.

This is a sacred, holy, forgiving, entirely purely-intended thing I pray to. This, I am realizing, is what I worship. Not only do I find this sentiment quite beautiful and feel extremely grateful to have enough prevalent examples of it in my life to make these connections, I also find the timeline of this whole reflection particularly, incredibly amusing (as I often do).

Now let’s go back to poetry class.

A little over a year ago, I believed I was worshipping the god of the past. I was doing so by ruminating and letting things repeat again and again. And, while those feelings were/are true, real, etc., it is not a god. It is finite, measurable.

These days, I am piecing things together and turning my attention toward what has always been boundless, immeasurable, all-knowing in my life: love, love, love!

To be clear, I have known how full of love my life is for a long, beautiful time. The distinction I guess I am trying to explain which occurred to me in the car, is that I am viewing it as something so far bigger than myself, I am beginning to regard it as cosmic. And this connection and its labeling have brought forth great clarity.

What will I do with this clarity? Probably continue to look for love everywhere and let it look for me as best I can. And I will write about it. And I will never shut up about how profoundly astounded I am that this is the landing I was so grateful to stick.

Before I make it home, I pass a little flock of geese on the side of the road. This past week, I’ve been really obsessed with the song “Looking at the Geese” by Renny Conti and have been playing it nonstop in my car. (I am also, to no one’s surprise, a huge Mary Oliver fan.) I am someone who believes small things make big, great feelings.

When two geese break from the pack and take flight, I burst into tears all over again.

I have that life.