“May I have the courage today

To live the life that I would love,

To postpone my dream no longer

But do at last what I came here for

And waste my heart on fear no more.”

-John O’Donohue

 

So often I find that others say better what I am feeling. For a long time, I felt like that was because the they had more wisdom or were more insightful. I will happily give credit for the inspiration and artistry that writers and poets and philosophers bring to the world. I will be forever grateful for their gifts and their impacts on my own quest and journey. What I am learning, is to have that same gratitude and offer the same credit to my own ability and willingness to connect and see the “good” in the offering of others.

We are all at different places along our journeys of self discovery. When someone else’s words resonate with my particular feeling, it is a moment of connection that creates equity and communion. It is not an indication of another’s advancement and hierarchy based on more accumulated insight than I have. It is diminishing and counter productive to take a moment of reflected insight as a sign of personal deficiency. No one beat me to the punchline. I am in a conversation with them. If I position myself inferiorly to the offering, then I cannot grow or share my own insight with others.

Who makes meaning out of poetry and prose, the writer or the reader? Why does it have to be one or another?

The meaning in a piece of writing is in the way the ideas land and then launch again into the world, echoing in its referencing and retelling and recontextualizing with each new person who enters into the conversation. Even the “writer” is part of this lineage, and I believe they are not necessarily the progenitor. The writers job, when an idea or inspiration lands, is to launch it back out into the world with their best selves and best voices. We harvest their offering and in turn can make our own invitation out into the world.

If done well, they touch on the universality of an idea or experience, and provide a place for it to awaken in each of us reading their words. That awakening can ignite our own creative force and agency to share deeply and beautifully with the world.

 

May the conversation between my feelings and your words continue

As an ephemeral exchange between new actors on an ancient stage.

To invite the world to play along

And cast their own delightful enactments.