How I Discovered I Am a Poet
I didn’t think I had it in me to write poetry. I had read poetry for years and appreciated it, but didn’t feel it was something I could do. I now have three books of poetry and counting.
Everything changed when COVID hit and we went into lockdowns. I had been writing morning pages for a few years, but something about being isolated led me to embrace self-reflection through writing. I would review what I'd written and realize it sounded lyrical. When I rewrote my sentences into stanzas, I realized I’d written a poem.
Once I opened to the process, poems came to me throughout the day and I wrote and wrote and wrote. I accumulated so many, that I posted them on social media as a way of sharing my writing and my feelings. I am not one to express emotion readily and when they emerged in my writing, it was extremely cathartic.
On a deeper level, allowing myself to express emotion brought a great amount of healing to my body. When we hold emotions they show up as aches, pains, and illness. The moment I started to write down my emotions, I released them. As they came out on paper, so did the pain. Writing out what was happening and what I was feeling, helped me be in the moment and allowed emotions to rise. When I opened that door, the floodgates were released. More and more poems came to me.
I didn't what to do with the poems, and collected papers in a pile on my desk. I had all types of paper, including napkins, notepads, sticky notes, and scraps.
I shared these with Karen Weaver, whom I had met at a Serenity Press Retreat at Crom Castle in Northern Ireland in September 2019. We bonded at the retreat and kept in touch. She has a publishing empire, so it came as no surprise that when I shared I had accumulated all this poetry, she knew I should publish it.
She asked me to pick the one hundred best and send them to her. I did, and then I had to type up the poems. While I did so, I realized that I shared a lot about what was happening in my body. I shared what I was feeling and how they related to my body. When I related this to Karen, she came up with the title: Embody.
Once she said the word, and the more I transcribed and edited the poems, the more I realized there was a deeper theme with the body and that I had captured a journey through my body’s chakras. Chakras are energetic centers in our body, and they relate to different areas in the body. I focused on the seven that are in our body plane, although there are several others.
My poetry evolved after Embody. Spirituality continues to be a big theme in all of my poetry. But we no longer live in isolation. We are connected to what's happening around us, people, and our environment and planet. What I share in my poetry is my individual experience, but it isn't necessarily unique.
What is unique is how we express ourselves. We need to get our voices out, express, and share because you never know how it can touch somebody. I've gotten feedback that one of my poems helped somebody in some way. It blows my mind because all I did was express a moment, and somebody else took it on board and made that moment their own.
People have told me they printed my poems and put them up on walls. A therapist asked me for a color print of a poem to put it up in his office. Any feedback is a blessing because it means a lot that somebody connected with what I’ve written in some way. It helps bring meaning to my writing.
Now, poems come to me in all sorts of places times: watching a show or movie, while I read, in the shower, or any place. I try to write it down as soon as I can.
What would happen if you opened up to inspiration? What kind of healing or catharsis would that bring to you?