I am someone who deeply loves poetry and who is deeply embarrassed to love poetry. The nature of it is often woeful and self-indulgent, but at my best I have always been dancing with poetry, words, and ideas. One unidentifiable day, about three years ago, it stopped. It is hard to know when, precisely, because inspiration and emotion ebb and flow, but the last poem stumpling (a stanza or so that comes to me, to be used later) I saved on my iPhone’s notes section is dated 2013.
The effect it has had on my life is quiet and immense. It is as if you had been having a languid, lifelong, coffee-and-wine drenched conversation with God-your-creator and all of creation and then one day, it stopped. Radio silence. I received nothing, and for a long time, I said nothing.
In spite of it all, I started this blog. I felt overly self-concious of what I was writing and the inherent worth of it all. I knew I was missing something essential to my happiness, but I threw myself at the commonly prescribed remedies. I exercised and went to bed early and counted my blessings. I redecorated (I am terrible at decorating). I floundered.
In the midst of my daily routine, the classes and chores, I felt an odd temptation to drop to the ground and lay, soft belly up, waiting for some angel’s touch to remind me who I was.
In April, I wrote my first poem– really any sort of creative thing– in a long time. It was almost as to end an out-of-body experience that had lasted several years. The feeling was immediate and very still.
God, or inspiration, or whatever you want to call it, still seldom calls on me. There was a time in my life when I could see a strange door and be taken away on a day-long engrossing story. Even if I knew it wasn’t a particularly good story, it was a joy to be taken.
I am trying to get back there.
xo,
Megan
anything for a joke 