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The Words We Cherish Over Time

Reflections on the power of words to shape memory, meaning, and connection across time—a gentle invitation to slow down, listen inward, and cherish the words that help us remember who we are.

I was listening recently to a recording of Robert Frost speaking at President Kennedy’s inauguration. Frost was eighty-six, standing in the winter sunlight, his hands trembling. Kennedy had invited Frost to participate as the first poet ever to read at a presidential inauguration. He had specifically asked him to read his poem, The Gift Outright—a piece Frost once described as a kind of poetic history of the United States.

Frost had written a brand-new poem for the occasion, intending it as a kind of preface to the one Kennedy requested. But the glare off the snow and bright winter sun made it impossible for him to see the words on the page. He tried, faltered, and tried again. What was quickly descending into awkwardness and potential failure rose instead into something quite beautiful. Lifting his head and setting the paper aside, Frost’s posture changed. His voice became strong and steady as he reached into his memory and began to recite The Gift Outright—the poem the president had hoped to hear all along.

Long before books and screens, humans gathered to tell stories around fires, to offer prayers whispered in the dark. Poetry and prose are how we remember ourselves and speak to what we hold sacred, to what resonates with our soul. The Book of Psalms has been sung and spoken across centuries—verses passed from one generation to the next.

Frost himself knew something about endurance. His life was shaped by poverty, loss, and long seasons of uncertainty. Several of his children died young. His beloved wife struggled with fragile health. Success came late and only after many disappointments. And yet his poems, so often rooted in woods and stone walls and quiet roads, were never simply about scenery. They were about choice and loneliness, perseverance and the difficult beauty of being human. He once said that a poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

Reading about Frost set me to wondering about the role of poetry and the written word in our social evolution. For thousands of years, words have carried history, faith, grief, celebration, protest, and hope. Poets and songwriters have shaped and mirrored values, stirred empathy, and given language to our thoughts and feelings, our hopes and dreams.

I think of Maya Angelou, whose voice carried both the wounds and the dignity of generations, and of Amanda Gorman, standing so young and radiant at Biden’s inauguration, reminding a divided nation of possibility and responsibility. I think of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whose “I Have a Dream” speech still lives in our collective memory—not only because of its moral force, but because of its poetic power.

And I reflect on the words that shaped our own nation—the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the long arc of amendments—language bold enough to hold a vision of who we might become. Those words still matter deeply today, as we struggle to hold onto the fragile promise of democracy itself. Across time, these voices remind us that language can shape not only individual hearts, but the vision of a nation itself.

We are living in a time when so many voices are turned toward platforms and algorithms and visibility and influence. We are dealing with “bots” and needing to vet stories to determine whether they are true or not. Thoughts and feelings are compressed into captions and sound bites. The currency of attention moves quickly. What is it costing us? What is this shift doing to our inner lives? How do we develop an inner practice of listening to ourselves?

For me, writing is one of the ways I check in with myself. In the writing group I belong to, our practice begins with a poem and a simple prompt, followed by fifteen minutes of uninterrupted writing—pen moving, no editing, no planning, just listening for what is asking to be heard. Often it’s only when I go back and read what I’ve written that I hear, for the first time, what was really coming through. I’m often moved by it, almost as if it were written by someone else. Recently, the prompt was “I write because.” I offer it to you, raw and unaltered, just as it came to me.

I Write Because

I write because it brings me into myself and into my thoughts. I write because it helps me remember what otherwise flies through my life unnoticed—or maybe noticed but not noted.

I write because when I’m able to capture beauty or love or wonder or pain or disappointment or fear, when I can name it and give it a place to be, I can share it. I can share it with myself. I can revisit a place I once lived and it lives again. I was there. I noticed. I wrote about it.

I write because last month I pulled a poem written twelve years ago and shared it with friends. They had been talking about how busy the holidays have been. And when we stopped and I read, they listened and were moved in their own hearts to notice their own feasts—the sacred moments—and it became one of those times when hearts quietly connect. They asked for copies. I sent them.

I write because I can share who I am and what matters, and sometimes it makes a difference. I write because it is healing and revealing.

I write because if I go very long without it, somehow time has flown and life has happened and I’ve missed it. I was there, and yet I have no memory of it.

I write to let myself see what’s coming up to be healed—the pain of a misunderstanding, the tears when children make plans that leave me out, the way I can minimize and dismiss my own feelings unless I at least write them down. In the writing, I find the places that need tending and the places that are worth sharing.

I write because if I don’t, I think I might disappear. Where will all my journals end up, I wonder—and still, I write.

I realize that not everyone keeps journals or writes poems. But most of us, in one way or another, would like to hold onto what matters—the moments that shape us, the stories that make us who we are, the quiet truths we don’t want to lose to the rush of days.

Whether through words, photographs, prayers, conversations, or simple acts of remembering, we all leave small markers along the path of our lives—ways of saying, I was here. This mattered. This spoke to me.

I’m also deeply grateful for those of you who take the time to write back to me—to share a memory, a reflection, a tear, a laugh—and let me know that something in these words touched your own life in some small way. It reminds me that writing is never really solitary. It is a quiet conversation that continues long after I hit “submit.”

Perhaps that is what poetry and prose have always offered humanity—not performance, not perfection, not applause—but presence. A way to stay awake inside our own lives. A way to carry what we love forward, one remembered moment at a time. A way to share our thoughts and feelings and know we mattered. A way to keep ourselves from disappearing.