Life is My Poetry
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For most of my life, poetry has been a form of meditation for me. A practice that makes me sit with my jumble of insights and organize what I cannot easily explain (emotions, gut feelings) into words that make more sense to me.
Though poetry is not meant to be understood by everyone, it gives me space to explore myself, review my inner values and relate to the outer world. Writing poetry helped me to sum up complicated issues from an outer perspective, letting me detach from the situation to better understand the situation as a whole. Since a lot of the work that continues to touch me came at moments when I was in introspection, reading back what I wrote often felt like a divine message in my times of need, a reminder to connect to something bigger when I feel down or alone.
I recently read I is the Other (by James Geary) and this book describes how the use of metaphors has been the way the human brain makes relations for understanding. Without realizing it, metaphors are used by everyone and exist all around us to relate a connection without pointing it out. Reading about it made me realize how writing is my way of researching life issues, organizing information and making sense of what I learn.
Life is poetry. I recently saw this line and it makes me think that, yes, life is like a set of stanzas (life phases) crafted to be filled with experience (words, metaphors, similes) to flow together to summarize an expression (how I connect and what I understand). Thinking about life as poetry, I know that when I concentrate too hard on form or worry about an audience, I lose my natural flow and it takes more effort to reach words that feel true. So, too, does this apply to life. When I concentrate too much on getting approval or being correct, I stop working from a natural state (as myself) and lose sight of my inner values in order to appease someone else.
When a situation confuses me but I must make a choice, I prefer to surrender and trust so I can observe and connect to understand the situation. To live and to write are forms of experiencing life that require introspection and reflection to reach my personal understanding.
Though I stated that poetry has been my form of meditation, writing this has helped me to see that experiencing life with the aim for constant learning makes living into a meditation as well. There is nothing that I am becoming but myself, and as that is the only person that I can be, the way I live and the choices I make are always contributing to my poem.
Overview found on the purpose of meditation search: Meditation is a practice to strengthen your conscious mind, helping you gain control over your mind and body, and access higher intelligence.
