When Poetry Was Magic

Poetry used to be my religion.

It used to be my tangible experience with God.

In fact I never talked about God the way I do now before writing poetry.

But the more I wrote, the more that beautiful synchronicities poured into my life.

It felt like a dance.

Every time I grabbed the pen, life would move with me in some beautiful way.

I'd write about butterflies and ended up on a date with someone living on Mariposa Road.

I went to a Monarch Sanctuary and a butterfly stayed with me for 18 hours and nestled in my hair.

I helped an international bestselling author host a tour across the country.

I volunteered in prison to share some poems for the first time and a few months later I had a full time job made for me out of thin air.

I traded my pen for a prison clearance badge.

Then the magic shifted.

Instead of experiencing God through poetry and synchronicities, I met God in the men I was communing with behind bars.

I met God through the neglected and silenced.

I met God in the hearts of men who have taken lives.

Through their stories. Through their effort and earnestness to heal and in the sincerity of their tears.

God was loudest to me when I was in spaces that nobody cared to listen to.

Meeting Myself In Prison

And then I realized that it wasn't just God I was meeting through these men.

I was meeting myself.

I was meeting the truth about the human condition.

I was confronted with the hidden corners of our shared humanity that our society has rejected.

My job titles have been to teach business and poetry, but those were just the vehicles.

I go to prisons to see these humans at the level of the soul, and to serve them like they are deserving of it--because they are.

For 2.5 years, I've spent nearly 1,000 hours inside prison working with over 300 men across multiple California state prisons. I'm inside Uncle Sam's greatest arena of separation and hate with a mission of love, healing, and second chances.

No wonder I've felt at a loss of words.

It makes sense now looking back, but I didn't realize how much in overdrive my nervous system has been. I was making sense of my place in the world while being so entrenched in every in-between. I was in the thick of all ever gray areas of life--Right and wrong, love and hate, life and death (I'm still a death doula too).

When Presence Replaced Poetry

So what's this have to do with poetry?

Poetry got me into that room. But it wasn't going to help me navigate through it.

What I needed was a reckoning with myself. What I received was an intimate understanding of the full spectrum of our shared humanity.

I've had to look at the ugly parts of life in the eye and see it through the same eyes that see beauty and art.

This required presence--raw, unfiltered, unbiased.

No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't make poetry do the job that presence could. After all, the magic of poetry is in the presence it provides--raw and unbiased. There's another word for that too: unconditional love.

My work in prisons awakened something in me that made poetry feel small.

I couldn't fit our shared humanity into lines. I didn't want to force the men's healing into rhyme. I was being boiled from the inside out.

I was afraid of my new place in the world.

I was afraid of being misunderstood and disagreed with.

I've been discrediting my own lived experience of being in these spaces.

Finding My Way Back

All of this to finally say...

I've missed poetry.

I've missed writing.

And I'm excited to explore how writing fits into my life, whether its poetry, essays, or reflections.

Maybe the magic was never the poetry itself.

It was always the willingness to be honest, to be vulnerable, to share without knowing how it would land.

Stay tuned for a writing challenge I'll be announcing soon.

I want to get back to writing everyday. And I want you to do it with a community.