My 97-year-old mother-in-law is turning into a story. At 72, I am turning into a story. Whatever age you are, you are turning into a story, too.

Here are a few of the stories of my mother-in-law’s life, stories she repeatedly tells. My mother died when I was nine. No one ever told me to go to college. I had a successful career. I owned eight houses. Big moments, shaping moments, in what has been a good, rich life. For now, she’s still the author of her stories. Sadly, before long, her surviving family, friends, and caretakers will be the author of her stories. What story will she become then?

Most of our daily, moment-by-moment experiences get left out of the stories we tell about ourselves and the stories others tell about us. Are they any less meaningful? Here’s a recent experience of mine that, if I wasn’t sharing it with you now, you’d never know.

One early morning, after unloading the dishwasher, grinding beans for my wife’s coffee, and boiling water for my tea, I sunk into my usual spot—a love seat near our gas fireplace—, switched on the reading lamp, and opened Elizabeth Jacobson’s Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air. My lower back was stiff. My head was filled with a fog like the thermal inversion fog I often see in the valley outside my window. I hoped one of Jacobson’s poems would, like the sun, warm the mental fog sufficiently for it to be lifted.

“Birds Eating Cherries from the Very Old Tree” is the first poem in the book. It begins,

I thought I would make a short list of what is not a feeling.
Birds are not feelings.
Birds eating cherries from the tree are not feelings.
This is the best entertainment, I say to myself, watching birds eating cherries,
and now I have made a feeling.

Jacobson is a very close observer of the natural world. This poem begins with a medium-range shot of “birds,” “cherries,” and a “tree.” Compared to the detailed images we find in other Jacobson poems, we could consider these images “generic.” The close-up shots in this stanza are focused on inner experience. The poem distinguishes between physical sensation—seeing in this stanza—and feeling, by which, I assume, she means emotions.

As the poem continues, the imagery becomes more specific and detailed. The second stanza begins: “The robin’s beak glistens with the sticky juice.” With this one line, we’ve moved from generic (“birds”) to specific (“the robin”) as well as from plural to singular. We also recognize a pattern forming. “The robin is not a feeling” repeats and varies its sister statement in the first stanza: “Birds are not feelings.”

As the poem progresses, the pattern continues: description of physical sensations followed by statements distinguishing those sensations from feelings. Here are four statements about feelings:

“I have a made a feeling” (first stanza)
“when I recognize . . . a feeling . . . swells from my center” (second stanza)
“when I think . . . a feeling comes” (third stanza)
“I have made another feeling” (last line of the fourth and final stanza)

Two of these statements—the first and last—are about “making” feelings. The other two are about feelings arising naturally.

What, you might ask, do these observations about the workings of the poem have to do with a personal story I could tell about my life? Well, everything!

As I read Jacobson’s poem, I began to awaken. First, from my experiences with mindfulness, I recognized the practice of noting raw physical sensations as distinguished from emotions. Second, from my experience with poetry, I recognized formal features of this poem and how they created expectation and surprise as I read through the poem. When I recognize, a feeling swells.

One surprise comes at the end of the poem. After the robin, “magpies take big bites out of the cherries.” Then, as the poem turns toward its conclusion, a sparrow enters.

The poem concludes:

A young sparrow flies from the cherry tree, giddy perhaps from all the sweetness,
and crashes into my window, breaking its neck.
The bird is warm in my hand.
And I have made another feeling.

The robin and magpies safely sate themselves on cherries. The sparrow dies. Repetition and variation. Something else awakened in me when I read the poem’s conclusion: a question. Would I pick up a bird if I had seen it crash into one of my windows? Am I too squeamish to care physically for a sparrow? Questions arise and a feeling comes.

Words on a page are not a feeling. But when the words are windows through which I see the world outside and the world within, feelings come. Words, of course, are not only windows. They are physical presences, especially when they make a kind of music that sings in the ear, including the inner ear. Listen: “tree,” “giddy,” “sweetness”: these long “e’s” are spoken with the tongue high and flat near the roof of the mouth and the lips pulled back in a smile. Even if the sound is just made internally, if one pays close enough attention one can sense the bodily experience of making the sound. And with that sound, a feeling comes. “Crashes,” “breaking,” and “neck”: the hard “c”s and “k”s create a fleeting sensation of the airflow being stopped in the mouth and bring up a feeling.

A few days after Jacobson’s poem “Birds Eating Cherries from the Very Old Tree” warmed and thereby lifted my mental fog, I stumbled across this teaching from some unidentified Hasidic masters:

“Every created entity has a spark of Godliness within it, a pinpoint of divinity that constitutes its ‘soul,’ its spiritual function and design. When we utilize something to serve the Creator, we penetrate its shell of mundanity, revealing and realizing its divine essence. Thus we elevate these ‘sparks,’ reuniting them with their Source.”

I can’t say that every moment in this teaching describes the experience I had that morning with the poem. But I can say that the poem—its soul—spoke into and through my partially awakened state. In so doing, it reached a “spark” within me and enabled me to feel alive in more ways than I had before reading it. Maybe, if only for a few moments, that spark was reunited with something from which it had been alienated. Whatever happened, I know that reading the poem both cleared and widened my heart and mind. And then a strong, welcome feeling arose.

An ordinary weekday morning. No special occasion. A story of my life.

When the time comes for you to create a story of me—and may that not be any day soon—you might say, “One morning he read a poem.”

Richard Chess has published four books of poetry, the most recent of which is Love Nailed to the Doorpost. Professor emeritus from UNC Asheville, where he directed the Center for Jewish Studies for 30 years, Chess serves on the boards of Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry and Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, where he co-directs its Faith in Arts project. You can find him at www.richardchess.com .

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