Glass Soul

How do I find the words, phrases, stories, songs, novels and non-fiction books? I don’t. They’re not my creations.

My job is to get out of my own way, let the words turn up and flow through my pen. We have copyright laws and think we “own” the words we pen and type … but we don’t. We just allow them to be birthed by stepping back, disowning them and allowing them to flourish in their own sweet way.

This was disconcerting, at first, as I’d start out intending to write something and it would twist and turn in the birth canal and come out quite differently. It’s usual for stories to not tell me their punch line until I’m writing my last few sentences. Sometimes I think I’m going to write prose and a poem comes out, or vice versa. I have learned to love the mystery and allow the unknowable to make itself known to me. That’s what I call magic.

I tried to sort these poems into different categories and my logical brain decided there should be an equal number of poems in each category. But life is never that tidy, is it? And the categories … well, everything is spiritual. Everything is personal. Everything is political, in some way. So, though I have created categories, you’re welcome to ignore them and just read where the page falls open. I suspect that, if you follow that more random system – the system without a system … synchronicity – the right poem will make itself known to you each time. That’s also what I call magic.

Poetry needs no explanation for it comes not from the bright light of day, where all is certain – clear, white and explained. Neither does it arise in the night where all is black, unknown and feared. No, the sweet, small time for poetry is in the early rising dawn where nearly-light flutters through the nearly-dark, where all is potent and nothing sure. It rises as the sun, with hope and not knowing of the day ahead. This is the time of knowing we need not know; the time to revel in the mystery of unknowing when explanations banish magic and logic is a foreign invader.

Beauty is there in some deep, secret place in our minds. It wishes to release itself but we quash it in the rush to make something of ourselves in this world. What we secretly know, however, is that the rush makes something of us that we are not … and still that quiet beauty waits to return us to our souls.

Your beauty may not be in poetry or even art. It likely, however, is in the opposite of what strives you – the accountant wishing to be a chef, the chef a truck driver, the truck driver a singer and the singer an accountant … you get my drift. As the lark or kookaburra need no reason to sing, these yearnings need no explanation to arise. We are driven from birth to explain ourselves, to analyse, and prove our worth to the world in some bizarrely syncopatic genuflection to a god that doesn’t actually care for you – only for your genuflection.

And still your beauty calls without reason. And reason the world must have so you deny your beauty.

By this artifice, I strive to encourage you to write your poetry, paint your pictures, cook your pastries or drive your tractors … to do whatever calls to you from the depths of your Glass Soul and realise your life need not be exotic or fanciful to take others to places they’ve never been.

Art is simple but allowing it is not. I wish you bring you to the knees of your beauty and sip of the cup it proffers. Just for minutes each day, I implore you – taste that sweet amber. Make time for the beauty you see inside of you and shine a moment. Then allow that shine of yours to glow in us.

For a moment, just now, take off your tie, your lab coat, your apron, your overalls and scribble, write, whittle or do something useless. And then smile. Please, do it for me … just now.