poetry in the practices

It's September first. I feel as though it was the last day of August for five whole days, like July had been ending for the entire month. But we're here now, and I'm relaxing my shoulders and tuning into the softness of my jaws, windows open, feeling more awake than I have in a while.
We've been quiet in this space, and I know it. We've been traveling, exploring, reading, thinking. Here, we may have been quiet, but I know in our minds, hearts, and bodies, we've been anything but. I think you have too; Whether or not we acknowledge it, we continue to shift and grow with the passing of time, and I hope we do pause to acknowledge this. We've all just been constantly learning to be human. Constantly creating ourselves. Because here too is poetry: there is beauty and interest and softness within the way we think and decorate and become. Isn't that poetry? A saturated exploration in humanness? It's a practice, endless. Did you see the way a specific theme floated through your being to the surface of your mind? Suddenly, you saw connections? The flow and the web? There is poetry in the connections. There is poetry in the mundane, because it creates space for us. I could cry going to the grocery store for the seventieth time this year, or I could soak it in and allow my mind to go forth and explore where I am, and connect an article to a song lyric to a chapter in a book to the way that I view my body. And so I have learned something, mind wandering looking for oat milk.
Especially important when you come back from a mind blowing trip and have to sink back into regular life in a midwest city. Ha. How am I human in all settings? Especially important when shootings dance across our headlines and twitter trends once every two weeks, when we are caught between hopelessness and a deep aching hunger to heal ourselves. How am I still human when I am suffocated beneath first anger, then fear, then... nothing. Numb. Gone.
How many times do I become nothing at all? How do I come back from it?
I haven't written as much poetry lately. I am trying to accept that sometimes I don't have much to say, and it is okay. In this acceptance, my brain has been steeping. I got some things to say now.
When I am nothing, when I have nothing to say, something the practice is in the feeling of it. Just curled up in bed, exhausted, quaking, watching YouTube and YouTube and YouTube and YouTube. The practice is the interruption of a Facetime call leaving us giggling. Staying out late and eating Olive Garden and losing the breath laughing over salad. Editing pictures of that time you felt so alive and safe. Making the playlists. Inhaling jasmine and tangerine oils. Copying song lyrics when all other words evade you. Taking notes on the podcasts and articles and dusting off your origin story. Discovering the origin of a word, so construed. Re-understanding yourself. Putting on lotion or taking a picture when you feel as though your body is an enemy you are bound within. Sun soaking. Wrapping your palms around a hot mug.
I'm not a practiced person. I don't have the energy to maintain a daily routine of reading and journaling and meditating and stretching and loving. But I kind of am. Everything we do has room for the intentions. Room creates room creates room, even if we're cuddled up in the corner and haven't ventured outwards. We will.
And there is time to be quiet, and there is time to say what you mean. We'll wait for you, and we thank you for waiting for us.
Don't forget to live that life you have, and to think it through. That too is creation. That's poetry too.
Namaste, see you soon,
​M