Letting Go: From a Poet’s Perspective
I’m up early for the second day in a row, except the only difference is that last night I got enough sleep. I wake up early to write—at 6 o’clock in the morning—and I don’t have to be at work until one o’clock in the afternoon.
I’m
doing better now. Looking back at the
last two days, I guess you could say I had another one of my mini-crises. I was experiencing the build-up of the
pressure I put on myself in order to achieve.
It’s always something. Lately,
I’ve had this strong desire—more like a compulsive need—to create art. I’ve had this desire for a long time, my
mother was an oil painter and I watched her paint as a child. But recently, when I was visiting
This can be frustrating, however, because I don’t know the first thing about poetry. It’s like getting dressed in the dark; I try on a few verses and hope the reader can guess what I’m wearing.
I’m overly-ambitious, maybe it’s the age. The last couple days I have been experiencing this unhealthy drive to write, a lot. Not only do I want to write poetry, I want to master it. I dream of mastering the art of poetry and I become obsessed with capturing it in reality. All I do is read and write compulsively.
What’s driving this compulsive need? Perhaps I fear the future. Having an identity (i.e. poet, writer, etc.) provides me with a false sense of security against the face of the unknown, and ultimately, death.
But then I become stressed out. Striving to be good (at something), I grip my object of desire and forget to breathe. Nothing gets accomplished, except the daily accrual of massive amounts of stress. Ironically, failing to marshal my powers ultimately leads me to a peak of frustration, breakdown, and eventual letting go. (It’s so strange how grace is built into “the system”.)
Writing poetry is like achieving anything else: if I want to achieve it, then I have to let go. Last week I wrote my “spiritual manifesto” wherein I argued that our culture is addicted to activity and to constant doing. Could it be a coincidence that now I find myself wrestling with the very demon I uttered into existence?
At Border’s last night, I was reading a couple books of poetry by two contemporary poets who I admire and who were both poet laureates of our country, Louis Gluck and Ted Kooser. Just earlier I had reached my peak of frustration with my writing and now I eased into the decompression stage, the realm of letting go. I wasn’t obsessing anymore, but more open to relaxing and reading for enjoyment.
As I was reading, I heard a little voice in the back of my mind asking what makes a poet and what makes poetry. It then occurred to me that poetry is about observation and silence. It is not something I do as a poet, but rather how I am being in life. I imagined that these poets I was reading had stopped talking. They restrained themselves from speech entirely and instead just took in the whole universe; they absorbed it all from a door’s rusty hinges to an ice skater’s graceful turn to the soul’s fine rotation.
“What is it that makes their words speak to me so poignantly?” I asked myself. Their poems seemed to be telling me there is nothing to do in order to write poetry. In fact, that is the point: to stop doing. In art, like in meditation, the goal is to simply let go. Perhaps the literary arts and the spiritual arts are closer than I thought.
When I release my death-grip on my desires and let go of my self-will, then I open myself up to a radically different experience of life. While the former is a mode of becoming, the later is a mode of being. In the space of being, there is silence and emptiness. There is no need for the actor to act or the doer to do. That space is creation; I will find poetry there.
This is the real mystery of life. This is where I find my true destiny unfolding. As much as I try to impose my vision on life, as much as my will gets in the way, my true success occurs when I give up control and let my brush strokes in life be guided by the painting itself. Emily Dickinson captures this profundity in a letter to a friend by writing, “The Sailor does not know which way is North, but the needle does.”
I am the offspring of a culture of doers, extreme doers, which makes it difficult for me to realize that achieving what I want in life has less to do with doing and more to do with letting go. How can I write poetry if I am anxious and closed-off by an obsessive singleness of purpose? I can’t. I cannot observe life if I am flustered and busy-minded. To write poetry I must be serene and self-poised in my center. Only then, will the needle point me to the North.
So often I am out meandering on the periphery of myself, roaming the dark woods of fantasy, or skating along the circumference of a superficial world. Chasing after my fleeting desires, I abandon my center time and time again. But my desires refuse to be captured, they are stubborn and refuse to be fulfilled or satisfied, this is in their very nature. Nobody has ever been able to trap their desires; desire has always proven to be too clever for us, too formless; it always finds a way to escape and become something else, some other desire.
In addition, happiness and desire are often in conflict. More often then not, my desires lead me away from my happiness not toward it. What a paradox is life! The more I desire, the less happy I will be.
I know, however, that I have this authentic desire to create art. I don’t know where it came from but I know that it’s there. So how am I to accomplish my goal? The first thing for me to do, I realize, is to give up the desire, to let go of it. Self-will fails me every time. I strive to achieve what I want for so long, but it never comes.
Well, that’s where I was the other day. More than anything in life, I wanted to write a single decent verse of poetry. And I tried so hard for so many days. All this effort. I could feel myself burning up my last supply of fuel.
And then . . . almost by divine grace, I found myself in this plain of natural serenity. All of my dogged efforts eventually lead me through the door of non-effort. The tension built up in me to a point where, quite intrinsically, I released the arrow of my desire. I was finally able to open myself up to my experience. Once I opened myself up, I could see the problem.
I had been trying too hard to get what I wanted. I needed to let go. My grip in life had gotten too tight. I realized: I’m too serious, too laden, too dense. “Really”, I said to myself, “I need to lighten up for a change. I need to relax. I’m making myself so stressed out. And over what? Writing poetry—how silly of me!”
I’m convinced that our genius comes from a totally separate place than our egos. The poet must be emptied completely, before she can be filled up with poetry. Creativity comes from emptiness. Wisdom grows out of silence. Achievement comes from letting go.
We are not in touch with our genius, but all of us have access to it. No one is barred from creativity, imagination, intuition. This realm is open to anyone.
Today
I’m going to take things easy. There is
nothing to do today; nothing to accomplish.
I’m not going to attempt to become the poet laureate of the
10/25/2005