Poetry Alchemy
Poems are living beings.
They enter through your skin and eyes and ears; they swim in through your dreams. They burn through the fog of everydayness to reveal life’s brilliance hiding in plain sight. They transform your biology, your history, the rhythms of your breath. They unfurl clenched fists, open compressed throats, soften and smooth corrugated hearts.
Poems open windows in your spine, in your bones, in your brain and belly, in the soles of your feet.
And in through those windows fly the songs of the earth, the keening of stars and galaxies, the sturdy, honest presence of the Real. The entire cosmos lives in each poem. And if you invite them in — the poem, and the cosmos — they flower in you; they re-enchant the garden of your life.
Each poem I write is an invitation into realms of becoming that I have not yet entered, or that have not yet entered me.
Each poem I write emerges from the Womb of Being, from the fluid shore where formlessness meets form. This creative matrix, which loves and cherishes all unfolding life, waits patiently for me to turn toward it, to stay in its presence long enough for its particular alchemical nectar to work its way into my bloodstream.
I enter its service willingly, glad and grateful for its invitation.
Once it’s written and shared — and poems are made to be shared — a poem’s magic burrows deep in the soil of your heart. There, it takes root and flowers in a rainbow of colours, scents, textures, as you, who read or hear it, water it with your tenderness, your joy, pain, sorrow, love, your own unfolding story.
Poems are powerful medicine. They lead us home: to ourselves, our souls, to our own particular place in the ecology of being, our place of belonging.
Poems heal, palpably, the fractures and wounds of separation. When I stumble on an inner pattern that causes me pain, I stop and feel its pathways in my body. Often, one of my own poems, or that of a poet I love, will echo in my ear and I’ll read it aloud, taking in its resonance and power. The pattern dissolves, its pathways and well-worn grooves smoothed to silk by the grace of the poem.
Poems restore us and our world to wholeness.
My clients will tell you this — I read them poems, when just the right poem speaks, directly and eloquently, to the truth of their experience, the truth of something profound beyond words that we’ve been exploring together.
O, the earthy and ineffable treasures of poetry!
