A Book of Elegies for the Soul
When I met with my mentor to explore marketing my upcoming book, For the Wounded, she asked, “As you gift this book of poems to the world, what do you want the book to give back to you?” After a few breaths, my knowing showed up: “I want this book to fuel my capacity to write; to bring more juice into the writing, offering and receiving of my words.”
I’ve always loved words but have felt an invisible hand around my throat most of my 53 years. At 42, a ride with cancer opened up my voice to create a blog I eventually turned into a book, but as the intensity of the cancer saga powered down so did my public voice. When I started writing classes a few years later, almost every piece had a version of “I can’t breathe” somewhere on the page.
I have flexed the muscle of raw and honest words in the circle of my writing cohorts over the past six years and tasted their medicine, but I’ve rarely let those words leak out to the rest of the world. Chronic health challenges, the death of my parents, the morphing of my childhood faith, the releasing of my youngest child, a house build and a move - all these pulled on me to withdraw, breathe into a quieter space, and turn toward the river of intensity beneath my skin.
In the quiet, a lifelong urge to improve myself and others has taken a backseat. This urge to “help” was the force behind years of religious fervor, the application of psychology and counseling degrees, the reason I spent seven years as an energy healer. Even the full-body revelation, at 45, that I’ve always been whole and golden beneath my life’s drama morphed into a mission to help everyone else see it too in my work as a transformative coach. All these adventures were beautiful and good. They connected me with truth, with gorgeous souls, with insight and expansion. And yet I can see, from this quiet landing, that I tackled them all to try and lessen the intensity of being alive, to get out of being fully human, to bypass what terrifies and hurts.
I’m continually struck by Barbara Brown Taylor’s line in her book, Leaving Church:
The call to serve God is first and last the call to be fully human.
I feel the pull of her words, the invitation to stop running away from pieces of myself and life to try and get somewhere less wild, less painful, less intense. Richard Rohr’s Everything Belongs has become a gentle mantra in the background of daily life. In the soup of this wisdom and the silence, I’ve come to know what I truly want: To just be fully here, fully human, and tell is like it is. Speak the truth about my experience, express the full brunt of it as honestly as I can, and let the words themselves be the adventure, the life-affirming act, the gift.
I cannot find a more perfect container for doing this than a poem. I still crack up at the thought that hit me a few years back; What if all my life’s drama has just been fodder for great poems? I'll admit, it almost makes all that pain and suffering feel worth it; that’s how much I love the playground of soul-waking words. A line from a poem in my upcoming book says it this way:
It is unsayable, yet let the spirit grasp for words
to wrap around this frail wonder,
to thin the doorway between madness and surrender,
between silence and the unstoppable river of things, if only
for the sake of a raw and luminous poem.
I feel at home in this new desire to let every part and piece of me, of life, be in the room and on the page. There is tenderness and deep belonging - in life, in my body, in and to myself. Come what may, it’s time to prop open the door and let honest words move between me and rest of the world.
This little book of elegies, For the Wounded, is on its way from me to you sometime early next year. I look forward to telling you more about it soon.