Some Prose on my Writing Epiphany about Writing Poetry.

Ok, so I feel like I’ve reached a life/writing epiphany over the past few days (clearly it was a slowly cultivated epiphany) and now I’m so thrilled to share it, I feel like my thoughts are totally jumbled and will just come out in a awkward explosion of words. Agh, totally frustrating for a writer… As clearly I value getting my point across through language… so sorry if it all comes out in a dyslexic looking mess… I guess that is the random beauty of stream of consciousness.

It all started with yoga homework… the longer I am in this program the more I realize that this is exactly where I am supposed to be right now. Honestly, graduate school is still at the back of my mind, but I cannot help but think of what I would have missed out on if I had been in a traditional classroom rather than being in my currant RYT program. Not only have I formed a very close bond with all of my classmates, but I am daily/ weekly going deeper into my yoga practice, and also discovering so many things about myself and gaining an entirely new perspective, and I feel that this self-knowledge can only better my writing. Anyway… so my homework this past week was to take one of the Yamas or Niyamas and essentially embrace it into not only my yoga practice but my daily life. I won’t go into the depths of the branches of yoga right now, but the Niyama I chose to integrate into my life this week was Santosha or Contentment. It seemed rather fitting as I really was struggling with restlessness towards the beginning of the year. I will not delve into a rambling play by play of all the realizations that I had about contentment, but I will give a brief summary of some of the highlights.

Though contentment doesn’t/ shouldn’t be dependent on physical surroundings or things, I really began to realize that to be content with myself and my life I needed to be an active participant in it. Yes, finding contentment regardless of your situation is important, but I also think that contentment can sometimes be a form of settling. I don’t want to be the type of person who is content to watch tv and sit on the couch all day (unless of course I’m watching all five seasons of Weeds in one week… we all need to indulge a little bit!) So for me I realized that to be content with my life, I needed to be doing things that stimulated me physically, mentally, and emotionally. And by integrating these things into a daily routine I was cultivating myself into a person that I was content being. By actively living my life, I am perfectly content in it.

The second major thing I realized about contentment is that to achieve it you cannot be attached to results, outcomes, or have expectations. It is so hard to live in the moment and appreciate things fully when you have this huge expectation of what something should be. I’ve seen it so many times when I wanted so badly for situations to end up a particular way, and when they don’t I am always disappointed. Though it is a huge challenge, I’m finding that living in the moment without being attached to results is actually really freeing. I understand that working towards a particular goal can be good, and really motivating and rewarding… and in general I am a goal oriented person. But I’m finding that being able to separate my actions from a desired outcome allows me to really attain a sense of emotional balance.

Alright back to the writing aspect of things. So I’ve been house-sitting, living in the lap of luxury (seriously, two house-keepers came in this morning and cleaned the entire house… going home is going to be a harsh reality) and I started to realize that most of the time I am sitting around waiting for a poem to find me. Is that not the most ridiculous thing you have ever heard? I have been spending my time waiting for inspiration to hit me over the head, rather than actively pursuing it. I feel ridiculous saying it out loud. What was I thinking? Yes, life often gets in the way. Business happens, work happens, appointments happen, and there isn’t always time in the day to be cultivating a writing practice. That being said, if I’m not out actively pursuing writing in some fashion, then why would I expect that inspiration should be surrounding me all the time. My only real answer for that is that writing poetry is hard. It sounds like a huge cop-out, and essentially it is, because I find inspiration in all places of my life. Turning that inspiration into poetry is something that doesn’t happen on a regular basis because it is hard. By nature I am a loquacious person, I like my modifiers and complex sentences. I get inspired by something and I want to explain it in perfect detail, and more often than not, the way that it comes out of my head is in prose form. It is deliciously easy to sit down and type out full and complete sentences for thirty minutes and have everything I’m thinking and feeling be perfectly articulated on the page. Poetry requires an editing eye, and the ability to eliminate all the excess language, all the unnecessary adjectives until you get to a point where every last word is essential to the interpretation of the piece. I could spend thirty minutes pouring out my thought process, or spend twelve days trying to get the same poignancy with fewer words in shorter lines. And so I squirrel away the ideas for poems, type the prose, post it instantly, and am still able to cultivate the feeling good writer vibes because I’m putting something out there.

So what am I waiting for? The perfect inspiration? The time? The motivation? The inspiration is everywhere… the time is hidden in little pockets… the motivation is building some momentum… and the glue that holds it all together is the not being attached to the results. It is hard to write poetry, mainly because it is so easy to write bad poetry. And so rather than write bad poetry, I write good (sometimes mediocre) prose. But at the end of the day, I’m not content without writing poetry (though this blog does fulfill a large part of my composition cravings). I know, I’m rambling… and at the end of it all, I don’t even have a poem to share… But I will get there. The important thing is realizing that I’m not the kind of girl who is content to not write poetry. So I’m just letting you all know… its coming. More poetry is on the agenda. I am going to try really hard to put it out there without attachment to an end result. I am going to try to not always fall back on my ability to construct full and complete sentences. I am going to actively be in search of poems rather than letting them occasionally cross my path.

And I’m going to have a damned good time with it too.