Of Open Mics and Mindfulness

I'm going to share a poem that comes from a deep place. I'm excited to have written it, not because I think it is a great achievement of craft, but it marks a new level of understanding that has been opening up for me over the last six weeks or so. This semester off has turned into as much a spiritual journey as a writing one.

Yes, I'm still writing poetry since what I think of as real, serious poems started coming out of me in March. This wasn't planned but it feels overwhelmingly like coming home to myself.

Anyway, I read two of my poems last week at the Final Thursday open mic. Such a sense of power and centeredness going through me as I heard my words coming from me. I do love to read aloud and know I do it extremely well. But then, as I discovered in the fall already, open mics seem so brutal emotionally to experience -- at least this one, at least for me. There was no response at the break or at the end (okay, one colleague briefly as I was going out the door), and the pain I experienced was intense. Some of it is bummedness and ego disappointment, I'm sure -- I so longed to have someone reassure me my poetry was good. So of course one fear that came up was that it was actually so awful no one had anything good to say. But I tried to stay with the feeling and not judge it, and I realized how deep it went; to such a primal sense of non-response and the pain of not being met. Offering all you are, letting your deepest self shine forth, and then nothing. (Blogging is rather like this too, I find, but this was more immediate and profound.) And I tried to be with myself in a compassionate way.

The miraculous thing is that over the last six weeks or so I have been been doing pretty dedicated meditation/mindfulness practice, and not only is that what is part of what has reopened my capacity and desire to write poetry, it has also begun to show me that I can be the one to attend to my feelings with kindness, rather than looking for that outside myself only. That practice is part of it; there have been some other outer and inner happenings that have contributed to the opening of this new perception as well, and it's still at an early stage. Yet I can feel it is deeply transformative. One thing that has had a tremendous impact that I should acknowledge is encountering the work of meditation teacher and psychotherapist Tara Brach and reading her book Radical Acceptance, which has hit me so very deeply (I'm on the second time through now).

At any rate, here is what I wrote. I think, hope, it explains itself. I don't think I'm as wise yet as it sounds; the words themselves carry me as I discover them to a place I am only beginning to touch in real life.


Reminder

When you stand in what you have become
trying to find your way back
to yourself and the wind that roars through everything
and you let that wind come through your mouth
in the words you have plucked from it
and they feel like burning
and they feel like an offering
and you feel yourself in and out of your body
doing what you came to do at last --
then, when no one speaks to you,
acknowledges what came from you at all
you bank the fire that you thought you were,
you walk out to the night, the car, the road.
The sound you hear is the ball that is your heart
rolling loudly around an empty room.
You remember all the times you longed
to give yourself, and no one saw you there;
and maybe your words are just pretension
and you alone have no purpose here on earth.
Stay with yourself then:
Sit down on the hard floor of the empty room
silent and listening, and you will hear the wind
that moves through everything come in the window
flowing into the room, and it is the room,
and you are the one speaking and seeing
you are the giver and the receiver
standing in the room saying I love you
standing in the fire saying thanks