Living Poetry
Poetry is not just merely lines on a page, but a way of living. We should not read poetry just to be fascinated but to be triggered into experience. Words are but kindling, stoking the flames of experience. This is the transformational power of poetry. A poem worth its salt it allows us to “hold what dissolves for the heart to live”—this quote, ironically, is a line from a poem!
Poetry allows us to live symbolically. Why is this important? Metaphor allows us to see ourselves in everything else. It also allows us to see everything else in ourselves—microcosm and macrocosm untied in Yin (inner) -Yang (outer) wholeness. This allows us not only to think we are One, but to feel it—a vehicle for empathy and compassion. Poetry unites us all in a felt-sense wholeness.
Living symbolically also helps us feel enriched by our surroundings without having to chop and destroy, devour and sell, so much of it. Walking or sitting amongst a grove of redwoods speaks to our own sense of family and strength in community. Subconsciously, we may also intimate their stature and limbs as our own, in kinship. With this inner richness, we can back off from outer power and greed. In fact, it prompts us to protect what enriches our inner lives. We become immaterially fulfilled, so we don’t have to try to fill ourselves by lumping material things onto our lives. Through enjoyment, we can marvel and feel ourselves part of a great and enriching mystery that is beauty to behold. Such fulfillment requires that we know how to receive, which also happens to be the foundational experience of the Nourish Practice.
When I am fulfilled with the vibrant emptiness of awe, wonder, and creative vitality, I don’t need, or want, to fill this emptiness with things. I, in fact, safeguard this sacred inner space! It remains empty as a channel for inspiration. This doesn’t mean I avoid engagement with the world. Quite the contrary. It means I have more space, energy, and sensitivity to allow crucial issues to move me—to care and to act. Poetry helps us step out of consumer culture by enriching and vitalizing our inner lives—so we don’t need as much unsustainable stimulation and can settle into our own bodies and into the body of the world.
Poetry helps us find meaning. When we possess meaning and purpose, we can more easily drop addictions. Our addiction to outward progress is emblematic of consumer culture and the neoliberal capitalism that is tearing down the world. When we live more simply outwardly, we have the time and space to cultivate inner richness, thus the motto of my work: Outer Simplicity ~ Inner Richness.
So, how to begin? Read poetry, listen to poetry, make poetry. Live poetically to stoke your creativity—not just to produce art, but to be art.
Here’s an interview I did with Carolyn Baker on the necessity of poetry in our lives.
Heartbreak
Because poetry goes right to the heart, it is the language of emotion. This is why many people write poems primarily when they are in love or heartbroken. But the object of heartbreak is not to merely visit this expanded state. The purpose of heartbreak is to open to the world and to ourselves, to become one with the world through the broken-open heart. When we open, we heal what we didn’t have access to when our heart was in tact and business as usual.
Heartbreak leaves us open, more sensitive to the world, and able to feel everything a little more than before. Poems help us heal our hearts when they break, without closing off to the pain that transforms us. Poetry is non-linear language that expresses our feelings and allows our deep imagination to find cure in the creative flow of words that match the nature of our feelings, of our pain and rebirth. Words that mean so much more than prose and literal progress. Such poetry is circular because it returns us to our center, which center we find paradoxically in newfound empathy and compassion for the world around us.
When our hearts break and everything falls apart, poetry is one of the few ways to hold all the broken pieces together as they splinter. Poetry eventually, and seemingly magically, puts us back together without suffocating or manipulating these sacred shards of ourselves, Instead, poetry allows what is painful to die by naming the process, so we can be organically renewed. This is a great paradoxical power of poetry: to heal without fixing. The result is a “spirituality of a broken-open heart,” one that remains sensitive to the world, always in love, and therefore ever-changed by grief, which only deepens us further by clearing our pain. So, life’s spiritual journey through embodied poetry is the paradox of healing by breaking open. We mend yet never close off, as the crack of heartbreak becomes our way of meeting, of toughing, the suffering of the world.
Heartbreak sets in motion what I call the “alchemical factory of the heart,” Poetry is one way to make sense of that invisible, felt-sense experience. Reading a great poem, or writing one, touches the fullness of what we are feeling, which helps us to heal without fixing anything, because much of the time the heart doesn’t need linear fixing. It just needs to be heard and held, to be able to speak its truth and bathe in its own outpouring, with words that do justice to its meaning. Creative imagination stoked, it finds its own cure. This is the heart of alchemy.
ALCHEMY
Like vinegar of
Expectant grapes
The heart draws inward
To the quiet chambers
Of restoration
Waiting in darkness
For resurrection
By the thirst of its won juices
Spilled by life’s sacred accident
Aching with a now growing
Hopefulness that comes
With enduring grief’s deliverance
From bitter days, waiting to ripen
Elegantly sour, painfully sweet,
Wisely aged, strangely blessed
Ready again to taste the world
Anew.
© Jack Adam Weber
Alchemy
Like vinegar of
Expectant grapes
The heart draws inward
To the quiet chambers
Of restoration
Waiting in darkness
For resurrection
By the thirst of its own juices
Spilled by life’s sacred accident
Aching with a now growing
Hopefulness that comes
With enduring grief’s deliverance
From bitter days, waiting to ripen
Elegantly sour, painfully sweet,
Wisely aged, strangely blessed
Ready again to taste the world
Anew.