I want to begin this essay with the final poem of my recently published collection, Start Here:
A Conversation I Haven’t Had, Yet
The words ring like a death sentence
an invocation
an opportunity.
The words land like an indictment
of my indecision
the way I want it all and
will sometimes trade freedom
for pleasure.
“I’m pregnant,” I hear
echoing from the love
we made before
I came
to sit in silence
on my quest for
transcendent promises.
A pistol goes off in my mind
a tree falls in the forest
jet planes slam into skyscrapers.
My plans implode
bleeding out right here
on the cushion.
Words like knives
slicing clean through skin
fresh wind
finding its way in
washing away
the life I had
undoing the self
I was busy saving
evaporating
the future
I’d find.
Now a new devotion begins,
me emptied
of me
nonetheless.
Life emerging
still insisting
on existing
amidst all this
death.
Life forcing my hand
ending my flight from love
quenching my indulgence and
torching my hesitation
in the fires of necessity.
The fires of necessity
burning all that is not -
Love, just as I hoped
eating me
Whole.
Gathering a collection of poetry is an emotionally difficult thing. I haven’t been trained as a poet; for me the practice is a way of surrendering to my deeper self. It’s a discipline of discovery and a way of releasing control that is both scary and intensely fulfilling. A poem arriving carries a specific resonance in my body, like an overdue burp, a readiness and a release. Stephen King says the writing process is like scouring the dirt for the finger bone of a dinosaur fossil. You find the finger and start digging to reveal something whole; already existing, waiting to be unearthed. My real poems feel like that - they arrive in a moment and pour through with ready-made rhythm, metaphors I could have never thought up, and endings that reveal more of myself back to me than I’m usually ready to encounter.
Real poems are mirrors, thresholds, revelations, confessions, prophecies. At their best, poems are transmissions and invitations into the deep heart where all our stories meet. Robert Bly says that there is no poetry without the say of the unconscious and that feels true. That’s the fuckery of them. I can’t look away. Once written, once known, there is no unknowing. There is no eraser for self-revelation.
This poem, A Conversation I Haven’t Had, Yet caught me while I was sinking into my cushion at a meditation retreat last year. As it says, the words “I’m pregnant” had been following me around since I arrived, and as I settled into consecutive days of silence, there was nothing to drown them out. As the teacher rang the bell, the pressure became too great and I knew I had to turn to my journal. In five minutes, the poem dropped through and I spent the rest of the meditation shaking with its implications.
“I know men who are healthier at fifty than they've ever been before, because a lot of their fear is gone.”
Robert Bly
Like every poem, there are many layers here. Level one is obvious, the fear of pregnancy which is actually a fear of commitment, a fear of all the doors I’ve worked so tirelessly to keep propped open, slamming shut at once. This is typical, a common (and reasonable) adolescent attitude that frequently, in lieu of initiatory tempering, lasts well into adulthood. Aspects of this attitude have been true in my life. Open doors mean possibility, new beginnings, a new future to project my hopes for perfect belonging onto. Open doors, or the illusion of them, mean safety, should the dreaded thing happen again. Open door mentality is one response to trauma. And actually, underneath this fear, is a deep longing to be a father.
Layer two is a dispatch from Life to my ego about what Life actually is. “Life emerging/still insisting/on existing/amidst all this/death.” Life keeps trying to teach me this in the moments I’m really present, drawing my attention while on a forest wander to a patch of diseased and dying aspen trees, and then to the multitude of healthy, vibrant saplings surrounding them. Life will never stop re-creating itself. As another dying aspen tree told me in a different poem in a different forest, “Life will never die.” My egoic ideas around “moral behavior” in this age of extinction and social collapse that I’ve been cultivating across a decade are incinerated in a five line stanza.
Layer three takes it deeper. “Life forcing my hand/ending my flight from love/quenching my indulgence and/torching my hesitation/in the fires of necessity.” Ending my flight from love. What a fierce mirror, what a humbling, undeniable accusation. It’s the ultimate insult to work ethic and goodness and trying so damn hard. The poem is reminding me what I always remember in my free moments: Love is always right here. It’s the unearned bounty of being that emerges from the ground of existence. Love is always trying to give itself to us. It’s not even mystical. It’s just what is, the energy of creation-in-harmony.
This layer continues with the final lines of the poem, the release of tension and the new direction for my soul laid bare before my eyes. “The fires of necessity/burning all that is not/Love, just as I hoped/eating me/Whole.” All that is not - aka my entire paradigm. The many maps of salvation imbibed from many great books, the instructions from countless teachers, all the breaths counted and forgotten, the tears shed in catharses, the daring confessions and the promises and vows, the breakups and the blindspots. Love is coming for them all, which of course has always been the point. The challenge is realizing this and forgiving myself for the well-meaning ways I secretly devise to keep the destination forever in the distance.
“All that is necessary to awaken to yourself as the radiant emptiness of spirit is to stop seeking something more or better or different, and to turn your attention inward to the awake silence that you are.”
Adyashanti
A Conversation I Haven’t Had, Yet is the last poem of a collection that was written over ten years that details, as skillfully as I am able, a process I never knew about and didn’t consciously choose to engage in. In a way, it’s a counterpoint to many of the poems in the collection, which are filled with the deep emotion and ache of finding my voice in a faltering world. When I was doing the final layout it became clear that it was meant to be the last poem. Now that the thing is done, its meaning is sinking in. Just as I hoped, revealing myself in painful detail and choosing to make that revelation visible is serving as my rite of passage into the next chapter of my life, which is towards commitment, full feeling, and the magic of the everyday.
It’s amazing to watch what happens, in my own life and the lives of my friends and clients, when we step across dreaded thresholds and tell stories that we never thought we could. Energy starts moving again. Synchronicty returns, housing options open up, new friendships arrive or established friendships blossom. Deeper layers of old stories rise to meet the new capacity as Soul sees our commitment and we become more of who we’ve always been.
All that stands between you & everything you have known since the beginning is this: this wall. Between yourself & the beloved, between yourself & your joy, the riverbank swaying with wildflowers, the shaft of sunlight on the rock, the song. Will you pass through it now, will you let it consume whatever solidness this is you call your life, & send you out, a tremor of heat,
a radiance, a changed flickering thing?
Anita Burrows
One of the images that has been with me recently is the way cuts heal. More specifically, scabs. I’ve always been a scab picker, and as a result, especially in mosquito season, my body is often bearing blood somewhere. My fingernails, my legs, my arms reveal my Taurean seeking for comfort in the relief of itching. Give me pain and blood any day.
Of course I know that the best thing to do with scabs is to let them be. There’s a whole many-billion year process of regeneration at work. There’s healing going on beneath that crusty exterior. It’ll fall off when it’s ready, and the skin will be back to normal. But there’s a long human distance between what we know and what we do. That distance is the labor of healing.
What Start Here is revealing to me today is the way that heart wounds, and heart scabs, can heal the same way. There’s a place for hard work. Taxes, building a house, slaughtering a cow, running a marathon.
And there’s a place for courageous inaction. Not feeding the beast. Letting the hunger for wholeness be separate from the protestant capitalist conditioning about how things happen. Coming back to life is a slow, brutal, beautiful process. The tenderness at the center of ourselves has known so many gashes and as Francis Weller says, “the soul moves at geologic speed.” The Buddhist Eightfold Path posits right effort, which is simply the willingness to look and see what’s here, all the way to the bottom.
For me, when all the deepest gashes of my life came in a three year onslaught as a very young adult, the only thing I knew to do was struggle to try to find my way back to a self that no longer existed. All the hard work I’ve done has been necessary. Through my desire for wholeness I’ve grown, healed, learned skills, met and didn’t run away from a wonderful partner, made friends and relaxed into allowing myself to have community. I’ve collected a library full of books I’ll probably never get to reading. I found out what I’m supposed to do in the world, which is synonymous with recognizing that the soul wound isn’t a bug, but a feature of what it is to be human. The Greek myth of Chiron points to this: We are never fully healed of our deepest wounds but are instead invited to use the “poison” to make the medicine which is ours to give to the world.
So, here’s to spring endings and beginnings and not picking at scabs.
The words ring like a death sentence. An invocation. An opportunity.
Life, just as I hoped, eating me Whole.
There are many great resources on this subject, but one of my favorites is this episode of The Emerald podcast, On Trauma and Vegetation Gods. If this essay stirred some feelings, it might be a great listen.