Jayne Gumpel

The Toothpaste Tube

A Tribute to Love (Eventually)
He squeezes the toothpaste tube
from the middle.Every time.No matter what I say.
He leaves it just under the cabinet ,never inside,
like I’ve asked again and again.
I shouldn’t have to ask. He should know.
So I sulk.Not about the toothpaste
but about what it means. He just doesn’t care,
I tell myself. This is how I make him into the villain
of my quiet heartbreak. That shelf the one beneath the cabinet,
now stained with minty smears-was the last thing my father gave me before he died.
We were not close. But that day
that one day- we measured, drilled, held the wood in place like something sacred.
Like a moment we both knew
we might not get again. I didn’t realize
how much it mattered until I said it out loud.
Until someone listened without fixing. Until he sat across from me
and heard what I had buried under sighs and sarcasm.
He told me his mother yelled at him
to hurry up, to get out of the bathroom.
Four sisters.
Nowhere to go.
No mirror that belonged to him.
He felt unseen.I felt uncared for.
We both carried old stories into the quiet war
of the morning routine.
But here- in the sacred space of intentional listening, where no one interrupts,
where empathy is the only rule we saw the child in each other.
We saw not toothpaste but memory.Not disrespect but longing.And love……real love-
was not in the fixing,but in the seeing. We still squeeze the tube differently.
But now,when I see it lying there, I think of his boyhood ache.
He thinks of my father’s hands. And sometimes-
we laugh.
Because love, eventually,
makes room for everything.


You Are Not Writing the Poem
Totally inspired by Dinty W Moore

You see, the trouble begins
when you try to write the poem.
As if you were some separate self
harnessing language like a mule,
dragging it through the field of your will.
But writing, like living,
is not something you do.
It’s something you notice happening
when you stop pretending
you’re in charge.
The words don’t come from you.
They come through you.
Much like breathing,
or falling in love,
or realizing you’re standing
in your own way.
Thich Nhat Hanh reminds us~
without the cloud,
there is no paper.
Without suffering, no compassion.
Without pause,
no poem.
So~ slow down.
Look around.
There’s nothing to achieve here,
only something to recognize.
Vita Sackville-West once said,
“It is necessary to write,
if the days are not to slip emptily by.”
Yes-
but not because we must “make meaning.”
The butterfly does not fly to be captured.
It flies because that is its nature.
Writing is not a task-
it’s a trace.
When you write,
you are not manufacturing a truth.
You are catching a glimpse
of the moment
before it disappears.
And Joan Baez, quite rightly,
spoke of songs crawling down her sleeve.
That’s it, isn’t it?
The moment we stop tightening our grip,
the words arrive.
Not summoned.
Not forced.
But welcomed.
They come like rain on the roof-
unexpected, inevitable.
So I invite you-
don’t write to prove.
Don’t write to earn your place.
Write because
life is whispering something,
and it would be a shame
to ignore it.
Let mindfulness be your method:
not discipline,
but wonder.
Let the poem write itself
while you,
quite naturally,
become
the cloud,
the net,
the open sleeve.


What if?

There is a moment____________
before the shift,
before the answer,
where everything known
gives way to something
more spacious.
Not clarity,
but a trembling openness
that asks only
for your attention.
We do not heal
by rushing toward insight.
We heal
by allowing ourselves
to stand still
long enough
for the ground to rearrange itself beneath us.
Serotonin rises,
dopamine fires-
the body takes its first breath
without the story.
We call it altered.
But what if this is the natural state,
and everything else
is the mask?
Disassociation,
they say- - - -
but I hear something more tender:
a loosening
of the grip
on what we thought we had to be.
A space
not of forgetting,
but of remembering
what it feels like
to question
without fear.
The therapy,
the molecule,
the touch of another’s listening…..
these are only invitations.
The true work
begins
when we say yes
to the mystery
that lives inside not-knowing.
When we speak aloud
the quiet truths
that tremble at the edges
of certainty.
This is the apprenticeship:
to stay present
in the presence
of possibility.
To prepare the future
not with answers,
but with a tone of welcome.
To let the self
we are becoming
arrive
one breath at a time.
And in that moment
when the world no longer demands
you be anything
but fully awake
you find the courage
to be changed
by your own willingness
to remain.


About the Author

Jayne Gumpel: Poet, psychotherapist, entrepreneur, retreat leader, meditation teacher. Mother of 2 beautiful grown sons Zak and David. Beautiful Daughter in law Ev.
Lover of nature, flowers (and poems about flowers).

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