Meditating on a few words

Writing poetry can sometimes be a form of release, and other times it can simply be a practice of meditation. I say meditation because so many people have suggested that I learn and when I work on my writing I notice that my thoughts are in the center of my mind, exactly where they are supposed to be while meditating. When I write, the world loses its grasp on me and I temporarily move into the ether—finding my path as it is laid before me by the Muses. As I begin to write, the words before me create emotions that I did not always know were there, and when true metamorphosis occurs, they become full sentiments carrying with them the ability to speak to people without ever needing to know who I am. I wish that I had the skills to create such full metamorphoses and watch, as Pygmalion did, my art and love come to life and be my partner for future creations. For this reason, I have begun to set aside time to practice meditation, as suggested, and to write on a more regular basis. Only with practice will my skill grow, and only with humble mastery will I ever achieve the quality of writing that is able to live and breath on its own.

Here is poem that I wrote a little over a year ago, and have just now come back to it. I wrote it late in the night, alone, and trying to find a place of solitude and comfort in my head. I struggle with the title, and perhaps a few lines, but more or less, I feel very strongly about this one.


Without

I am writing in third person
because I have forgotten myself.

She walks along the shoreline,
the moon in full orb,
swelling her body into a natural pool.

Sometimes I cannot remember
what was a dream and what was real.

Alone on the beach
she watches the night Jasmine bloom,
the fragrance reminds her
of a perfume she once wore.

I lie awake at night dreaming;
my reality lost, my body numb,
senseless and aware of the whole room,
naked and cold.

Through Khaos comes Eris

Last week Isaiah I and had the pleasure of getting our bedroom painted. We picked out the color several weeks ago, a brilliant slate blue called “greyhound”. With the prospect of a freshly painted room, and no longer having to live with walls painted a 25 year old pink, we embarked on the journey of disassembling our entire bedroom and implanting into our living room. Thus the war of the roses began. As our apartment grew more and more chaotic our sense of sanity began to wane until we couldn’t look at each other without exchanging battle-ready glares. Even our cat, Ogden, was expressing his unease by crying all day and attacking our feet. Two nights into the mess, and two nights before Valentine’s Day, I thought for sure that we were done for. The pressure of life was breaking us and we could not recognize how deeply our outer stimuli were affecting our moods and our affections for one another. When Valentine’s Day came around, and I had already put in two 10 hour days of hard-rocking retail work, I just wanted to run my car into a very firm building so that I could take a vacation from everything in a room where no body could talk to me. When I left my house, I was in tears, I couldn’t stand looking at my boyfriend, my cat had become a man-eating tiger, my apartment still looked like a high-class dumpster, and I loathed the idea of going to work. When I can home, though, Isaiah had spent the entire day putting the furniture back together and had a beautiful spread of take-out Thai food waiting for me on the coffee table; my favorite place to eat dinner. At that point we began talking—not yelling—and we realized how much a well groomed home could affect our demeanors, even the cat’s. Life since then has been back to normal. Our relationship is better because of the hardship of the weekend, and our room is more beautiful than I had hoped. I continue to desire more renovations of the old place, but my apartment is really becoming a home. It’s amazing how, with worldly order, strife subsides and inner peace blossoms, and my cat goes back to a toe-free diet.