I lived like a poet
Someone whisk me away to Paris and paint me naked in the river
It felt like decades for my heart to settle into the quiet.
A knowing that shift was inevitable, but awaiting me in the slow mornings,
the present moment, the relaxed mind.
Fighting the certainty that there was nothing more to do.
No corner of my soul left to clean.
No advice more needed.
That all the pleasure I mourned for existed simply on the other side of my perceived suffering. On the other side of my need for being pure and enough and finally healed, existed the part of me that simply was.
A wide-open door guarded only by the constructs of my own mind1
And what occurred in this place of not needing to know or do?
What occurred when I allowed the world around me to fall silent
When the sounds of my own bickering mind pulled back like the tide, and the sound of the world disappeared,
I began to live like a poet.
When preoccupations with perfection no longer occupied me, I slept like a poet.
My dreams wild with dreaming. Dreaming of hummingbirds transforming into a shower of coins and a beeswax candle melting over me, sealing me to be delivered.
When the concern of my contortions no longer concerned me, I made love like a poet.
My pleasure, the perfect eb and flow of release and animal action. Nowhere to arrive and no one for whom to perform.
When my idolization of production melted like gold in the flame, creativity sought me by name, and I began to write like a poet.
Read Before the Law by Frank Kafka