This poem is from my poetry Patreon, where you can read three brand new poems every week before they are published in a book, and it is about all that I am thinking about right now: release, redirection, and rediscovery.
I've been thinking a lot about what I expected my reality to be at this point in my life versus what it is.
Maybe my reality is that I cannot write books right now. Not fiction. Not stories. Not novels.
To write a story, short or long, feels like holding my breath. I’m sure this isn’t the best approach, but despite years of trying to adjust, it’s who and how I am.
Maybe it’s time to accept that.
And accept its sister truth: that perhaps this season isn’t for work that requires me to stop breathing, to ration my oxygen and exhalations.
As a mother living through a lingering pandemic with a partner that’s been turned chronically ill by its viral clutches while we grieve my recently deceased father, maybe this is exactly the time to let things go. To not clutch tight to that which threatens to drown me. To breathe deep and stay afloat in the midst of the floods in which I find myself.
I’ve always seen myself as a writer of stories more than anything, even though the words that appear at the end of my pen tend toward poetry more than narrative.
I’m forty years old.
I am entering the second half of life, I’m told.
Maybe it’s time to redefine my path, my trajectory, my self.
So the reality is that I give myself permission to release that which deprives me of breath. That which feels forced. That which drowns rather than buoys. That which crushes rather than heals.
Maybe it won’t always be this way. Maybe when my children are grown, I will find stories blossoming from me once more.
But for now, the section of soil in my creative self from which stories grow is barren. I allow it to lay fallow and, perhaps, with time, renew itself.
I won’t force it though.
Because there’s so much else to do than stay true labels and dreams that no longer nourish me or serve the world in the way I would like.
There are poems to write, textile art to stitch, and creative experiments calling me, begging me to give them time and attention.
So I will.
I will feed into the things that feed me.
And I will prune the shriveled branches of my life to make way for fresh growth.
This all feels very appropriate as it is spring in my part of the world, a time where the cold and dead gives way to new life — and what cannot sustain life is left to decay into nutrients that will, eventually, feed the earth.
Easter is this weekend, and while I do not celebrate that particular holiday, I do celebrate the springtime revival of warmth, light, and life — in myself as well as in the earth.
I look to the sky and let the warming sunlight shine into my tired eyes and wash my old worries away.
My questions for you are:
What is nourishing you, and what is taking from you without giving anything back?
What labels aren’t serving you any longer?
What dead growth needs to be pruned from your life in order to let fresh green shoots sprout?
Feel free to journal on these questions, or write poems or create art to address them. If you do, I invite you to share them in our creativity circle on Facebook, here.
