On Creation
Goddess, sing a spark of simple
splitting into parts and spreading
open so the dark can slowly
grow to know its face,
broken like a heart, blood
brimming, overflowing into form,
made of heartache
and the hardening of space
The Ancient Greek word for poet, poetes, means "maker." This etymology tells a story: Something about poetry reflects the essence of "making"— —of creatorship— —with a particular clarity. This means that if we want to create anything— —Art, wealth, family, community, a fulfilling life— Perhaps the secrets of poetry can help show us how.
"What feels true in my heart is a full conscious uncoupling." I remember the feeling of receiving this text from my wife of 6 years the way I remember the first time a kickboxer kicked me in the liver. A liver kick takes a second, sometimes a few seconds, to sink in. And then it feels like a bomb explodes through your viscera, and your spirit breaks. I read the text again, and again, and break it down word by word until the relief of certainty numbs the pain for a brief dull moment. Then memories of the last 6 years rush into my head with a pressure that builds until I know without a glimmer of a doubt that the only way out is to kill myself. I scan my mind for the location of a pistol. I don't own one. I think of the nearest bridge I could jump off, like a friend of mine did. I find it in my mind. I imagine running there. It would take about 10 minutes. Imagining myself 10 minutes from now opens some kind of valve in my head. Pressurized vapor hisses out. I realize that all of this will pass, Including me. I climb into bed and turn the lights off.
Listen: empty echoes
of an ever-elder emptiness
are blending as they enter in
to end their own embrace,
embers of an older order
ornamented over
by the holding of an almost perfect
paradox in place
When Nothing cracked to birth the universe, we gave up perfection for beauty. Every act of creation mirrors this sacrifice. Poetry in particular—the art of the word made beautiful—bleeds beauty from the wound of broken symmetry. We find the only perfect symmetry in zero. Nothing but Nothing reflects itself perfectly across every dimension. The weaving of rhythm and rhyme, meaning and time, draws its breath, line by line, from the death of potential and the decay of silence, Just as the birth of a new life demands the blood of a dream.
The day my marriage dies, a story keeps me from killing myself: This too shall pass. But as I lie in bed, hiding, my grip starts to slip. My mind can't stop running. If everything I thought I knew could vanish so completely— If every story that I've told about my life could prove to be a lie— How can I trust this one, This story of impermanence, The belief that this suffering will end? Maybe hell is real. Maybe it does go on forever. Maybe I've arrived. I watch the bottom of my own mind fall out as trust in any thought dissolves, And doubt blossoms into psychosis: A naked emperor, telling tall tales in the shards and hollows of a broken heart, Tales of a young boy laughing and pointing, covered in ichor, Screaming at a false king crucified by vanity before a sneering, weeping, non-existent crowd.
Cracked like the metal
of a breastplate forged
by the cunning and the craft
of the last of the kings
Cracked, like the yellow
of an old ring poured
in the blast of the bellows
of the blacksmith, sing—
If you've ever yearned for something out of reach— A lover, A sense of certainty in your path, A peace that finally lasts— You've touched the heart of poetry. Poetry captures in words what words can't capture. This means it has to do what it cannot do. The basic meaning of poetry rests on an impossibility. And this impossibility, this fundamental demand to accomplish something miraculous, reveals something about the nature of all human experience. Because everything we feel, hear, see, taste, imagine— All of it is poetry: A desperate work of holy symbols, A story told of something far more vast, and terrible, than any story could ever tell; A song of mystery, cried into the dark. Our perception consists of a failed miracle. And at the heart of this failure we find the same impossible longing that gives birth to literal poetry: The longing for symbols to transcend the symbolic, The craving to touch, and know, and merge with something real and true beyond perception's limits. This yearning IS our creative power. And our capacity to create flows directly from our willingness to be torn apart by it.
I wake up to autumn light. The echoes of my madness are fading into birdsong. Soon I find my feet on grass. The ground feels soft and true. I feel as if a spell has lifted. The piece of electric living mud I call my body moves, and leaves a trail of stories in its wake. I don't know who I am, or why I'm here. But the earth is singing. And, somehow, The song seems simple, Like the song of a nightingale in a great old forest. The autumn feels like spring.
simple
like that spark that split
to open up beginnings,
like our longing come to be a way
belonging never will,
sprouting like the seeds of "when,"
a sometime we remember,
spreading, growing, dying, leaving,
singing songs of staying still
The humans who tap into their full creative power— The poets of life itself, the dream-smiths and conscious co-authors of this strange and wondrous song— Become transparent. Not transparent in the sense of continuously narrating the details of their internal experience to everyone around them— But transparent in the sense of clear. In other words: Creating means letting the heart of existence shine, unobstructed, through the aperture of the self. And a few specific stories obstruct this clarity more than anything else. #1 — "I exist." Believing firmly in the story called "the self" erects the greatest obstacle to our natural creative power. We don't have to dig deep to understand why: The self serves as the aperture we aim to make transparent, and believing in its reality makes it opaque. The people most tapped into life's creative power hold their idea of a "self" the most lightly— And so, paradoxically, as a self, they create the greatest ripples through the fabric of inter-being. We soften this story through active wonder. #2 — "I don't exist." While some consider this view more "spiritually advanced" than the first, Holding it causes a cascade of dissociation and nihilism. Neither of those qualities deepens our access to creative power. If firmly existing makes our window-to-the-creative-source opaque from within, Firmly not-existing paints over it. We clear this story by feeling fully, as both a body and a heart. #3 — "I can have what I truly want." This story blocks our connection to the eternal longing of existence. Longing hopes for the hopeless. So holding hopelessness at bay, with a story like this, freezes over the profound creative power inherent in our longing. We melt through this story by engaging with tragic beauty. This includes the practice of Existential Kink, as well as giving ourselves over fully to heartbreaking art. #4 — "I cannot have what I truly want." This story blocks our creative power in exactly the same way as its opposite. Dropping fully into our longing requires letting go not only of hope— But also of hopelessness. Stories of existential hopelessness or hope both disconnect us from the metaphysically visceral wound at the center of Being. Tapping into the creative power of Being itself means becoming deeply intimate with this wound. And we clear the way to that intimacy through the courage of innocence.
I hold my newborn son in my hands. His tiny face rests at peace in the glow of candlelight. He looks both stunningly human, for something so small, and also extremely alien for something so human. It's been a few hours since Megan birthed him, in a tub in our bedroom, and ten months since the early miscarriage of our first pregnancy. I remember the heartbreak of the miscarriage, and the feeling of holding Megan through the downwards-pushing waves in her belly, so similar to the early stages of this birth; I remember our burial ritual at the roots of a tree, at a crossroads in the woods behind our home, And the blood-red flowers that sprang up there on the next full moon. These memories illuminate this moment with my son as much as the candlelight. I remember that we should probably name this baby. Megan walks back in from the bathroom, tender and glowing with wonder. "What about Gabriel?" The little alien munchkin squirms. "Yes. Gabriel." Soon he sinks into his mother's warmth. What a poem he is, I hear. What a beautiful, breathing poem.
Simple, like that spark that split
to open new beginnings,
like a poem come to be a way
our longing never can,
sprouting like the seeds of "when,"
a sometime we remember,
spreading, growing,
dying, leaving,
singing songs of "I still am."
Active wonder, Embodied feeling, Courageous innocence, And surrender into tragic beauty— I don't think these practices will ever lead to true mastery in creatorship, Because I think true mastery may, for us, lie forever just out of reach. But if we want to live fully, Possessed by the yearning of life itself, Face to face with mystery— Pulled forward by longing, Animated by death, And ever-more transparent to whatever lies beneath this crumbling poem— I think that this is how it starts: Choosing, in the face of all our dream-shattering limitations, To aim with all our heart for that which we can never touch; Choosing to trust in that which can't be trusted, And to forget, again, how much it hurts to love; Choosing— —in the words of an old mentor, now dead, who I never got to fully thank before he died— To love anyway.