Intention of this blog

I think we all have a hard time centering in on our lives. And it seems that the more we try to focus, to bare down, to eat in one bite & enjoy it-- the more broken and distant our lives feel. This is my attempt to write poetry every week; hopefully a gentle way, and for me, an intuitive way to feel closer to my life. So that I may feel an atmosphere of life breathing in my skin, to feel my muscles unsqueeze themselves in the warmth of knowing (not conceptualizing) deeply that Life is always patient.

I have this hunch, we all have hunches on how to live the best life, thats why we have writers and dictators, and families--I have this hunch that poetry specifically can untie us from our anxious holds on our desires and destructions. Because to write a poem, one has to utterly love the poem. You don't need to necessarily love the subject matter all the time, or even the action of shaping clay words; but you must love it the moment you are writing it down. You must love it so much that it becomes real for someone else to hold. For example, if you are writing about how much you hate your mother, you must love the moment when you are brave enough to write it down, you must love all people who hate their mothers, you must love the unbareable sharp tinge when you contemplate why God made bad mothers in the first place. This love is what is going to free the words from your history and allow someone else to make use of it.

You can imagine how painful and difficult it is to love things like your poems, and completely. But I believe its exactly this practice to unbind me, to relax me hating thoughts, so that I may surrender into a place of ease. Maybe it will work for you. I will never tell you what will work for you; that would be counter-intuitive.

And so this is my intention for writing a blog. To love my poems tenderly, and hopefully have that love overflow into other parts of my life. The public aspect of this project, is to love myself in everyone, and in that begin to love openly my human family. If I can know that all people crave the things I do, maybe I'll worry less about us.

** I heard Lucille Clifton is a poem I wrote about my year as a Reading Tutor for Americorps.