Dirty from Divine

Today’s draft was inspired by a walk in the park, a long conversation without a friend about religious and spiritual “gurus,” and the smell of wet soil.

I sometimes find that I want to put ALL THE IDEAS into a poem. I used to agonize over this, spending uncomfortable minutes scribbling and crossing out — only to end up with an empty page and cranky demeanor. One of the gifts of this newsletter has been the practicing of just getting the words down, and knowing that I can/will come back to it and unravel the strands later. This is one of those sticky poems that will need much unraveling.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedYou can spend a long time looking for a door that isn't there tugging at handles thinking someone is keeping you out of a room you are already in. You can spend a long time trying to crawl outside your own skin in order to find a way to inhabit your body. You can spend forever searching the ground with a magnifying glass for evidence of your own heart. Or you can sit back on the grass feel the itching and the warm sunlight smell the fresh earth, smell even the dog shit in piles just beyond your feet, smelling all the dust and detritus of civilization trying to overwhelm the smells of life and earth and normal body functions.You can embrace it all -- blood, dust, grass, soil, shit -- all of it. Let it all be part of you and lean into it, before you go trying to separate dirty from divine.