getting naked with the universe

Yesterday I was thinking I might not be a poet anymore.

I started thinking this out of a sense of discouragement and frustration at the limitations of my own art to make significant or sizable difference in a world that feels so desperately in need of change, but I realized eventually that the question was really more about ego, and identity.

Almost every significant non-family relationship I have can be linked back to my being a poet, even if that relationship now has no connection to the art. I teach poetry, I write poetry, I coach people in working on their poetry, I attend poetry festivals and read poetry and… what if I were not a poet anymore?

At least once a day, we take off our clothes. We are naked with ourselves. We are, for some period of time, a body unadorned.

It’s important, I think, for us occasionally to take off our identity adornments -- our shiny identity jewelry, our ill-fitting identity pants, our cozy identity sweater, the identity boots that make us look taller and slimmer and more imposing to strangers.

What if I were not a poet anymore? Does that feel like an opening up of space in this life, or an amputation of a limb? I roll it around in my head. I picture it -- someone asking “Are you an artist?” and my answering “No.” Or, “Not anymore.”

I think about other identities I’ve surrendered, abandoned or sloughed off. Non-athlete. Asthmatic. Chronic worrier. Enabler. Thirtysomething. Actor. Itinerant touring artist. New Yorker.

I’m not going to stop writing poetry, at least for now, so I guess that means I’ll still be a poet. But that’s not what's most important. The most important thing is that I can step back in my mind and picture myself, the inmost me, and understand that self as free from these labels, these earthbound ways of labeling and naming and supposedly knowing myself.

I can locate, in my best moments, this central Self, and see constellated all around it these aspects, these actions and identities -- and I can know that they are not me.

And it’s a comfort.

Because in that moment, I am least alone. I am most connected to the Universe, the Everything, the Divine, whatever language we give it -- I am not the sum of all this doing, I simply am.

How peaceful that is. What a relief. What a joyful place from which to begin again, and again.

time & vines

I love these vine plants, these resilient pothos I’ve propagated in water and placed on the windowsill on either side of my desk. I love watching their progress. Tubular roots pushing down and inside the bottles, leaves extending and bending back toward the light. The thing that’s so disturbing about time is its invisibility. Of course we have seasons, and faces, but for day to day time-watching, I’m for plants. I lose track of what day it is often, but only for a moment. All the technology knows and reminds. If this were a poem, I’d tell the story of how when I was five, the teacher told my mother that I couldn’t tell time, couldn’t read a clock with hands. All of ours were digital. Time is the oddest, slipperiest thing. How much sleep did we get, how many hours until, how late for, how old, this series of agreements that increments and assignments we’ve made to portions of what we know to be “day” and “night” matter so much. Order our known lives. Real and not real. Time and money. Money may not be real but my landlord is, so what we call tomorrow there must be what we call a check. My philosophies don’t change that. But in this what I call minute, I can stew about that or I can look at the plants. Watch the light push through the translucent roots.