Step Back and See What Happens

photo credit Thomas Lloyd Qualls

I stopped writing poetry for a long time. I think I felt like the early poetry I had written was born of the ignorance-is-bliss hubris of youth. During a time when I didn’t know that I wasn’t a good enough writer to be a poet. Maybe because of that, occasionally I wrote some passably good poetry, in spite of myself.

But life is a game of hide and seek. Sometimes on purpose and sometimes accidentally, we hide all kinds of things from ourselves. Like when we want to put something in a top-secret location, so no one else will find it. And then we forget where that was, so it ends up hidden from even us.

Also, like the $20 bill we find in a pair of jeans we haven’t worn in a long time, we stumble upon the things we’ve hidden. Some of you know I’ve been working on and off on a third novel. I won’t go into details, but I decided one of the characters was going to write poetry. And so, I started writing daily free-verse poems as if I were this character writing them. (Because I still believed I was not a poet, and I couldn’t possibly write poems on my own.)

The amazing thing is it worked. Because I was able to set myself aside for a few minutes every day and just let an imaginary character write these poems though me, poems ended up on the page. Around 70 of them, actually.

I think my point is this: What if our ideas of ourselves are mostly fictional. What if we are so much more than we imagine. What if, whatever we imagine we are or are not capable of, we are wrong. What if the universe is so much different than we can conceive.

And here’s the most important part. What if life is way simpler than our overthinking imagines it is. What if the universe just wants us to be happy. And we are constantly pushing rope in other directions, thinking we know what we are doing.

What if we are all ok. What if we just stop it with all our obsessions with personal growth and transformation. What if all the shadow work and psychedelics and complicated human design charts are not the answer. What if we don’t need a shaman or even a life coach to straighten us out. What if those people we pay for some kind of answers are also lost in ways they cannot see.

What if the truth about ourselves is simple and easy to discover. What if it is right in front of us. What if, if we can just be still, the universe will place what is sacred directly in front of us, or even in our hands.

What if all we need to do is be still and wait. What if we actually have all the answers we need already inside us. What if we are born knowing. What if our truth is easy. What if we just need to let go of our ideas of what we are supposed to be. And just let ourselves be who we are.

What if we are all already poets. What if we are already beautiful. What if we are already wise. What if all our longing is really just us looking outside ourselves for what we already have, who we already are. What if we just need to step back. What if the world is an impressionist painting that we can only see clearly from some distance. What if we are the painting. What if we could set down our lifelong story of ourselves. What if we dared to believe that story wasn’t true. What if we made it up. What if the story is only a single page in a manuscript that isn’t finished. What if we can turn the page and keep writing.