Poetry of the Present

I’ve returned home from a delicious week away. It was a week filled with family time—hours and hours in the pool with my boys, morning coffee and girl talk with my step-mom, a longish walk with my dad, and evenings gathered together around the table. My boys were in heaven, partly due to my dad’s playful antics, and partly due to his Xbox. Thanks to both of these, I had time and space to simply be.

In one such quiet, spacious moment, I sat down to write in my journal. There was nothing to process. Nothing ultra newsy to report. No drama to suss out. For a fleeting moment, I imagined that to be a problem. I imagined that the space within me required filling. With a bit of effort, I could have conjured some drama, but somehow, I managed instead to stay within the quiet for long enough that its beauty emerged. Here’s what I wrote in my journal:

When you lean into the moment, everything is poetry. Swim trunks drying in the sun. My toes, wiggling inside the bold stripes of my compression socks. A blue-bodied dragon fly, hovering like a helicopter over the deck. A lizard, perched perpendicular on the rungs, head pointed downward, indifferent to gravity. The hum of the refrigerator, the jangle of dog collar, and from beyond the window panes, the singing of birds. The sound of my own sighing exhalation.

Poetry, wonder, awe. These sit underneath the press of obligations, the straining toward health, the doing, the dreaming, the fearing, and the mental chatter. Underneath the boredom and below that tic that makes me reach for my phone. Underneath all of this is the pure poetry of the present moment. Every moment contains poetry, if we hold ourselves still and open long enough to take it in.

Why does this matter? Why am I writing this woo-woo mumbo jumbo in a newsletter for long-haulers? Because our healing isn’t just physical. In the same way that there is no tidy separation between me and the world around me, it is impossible to fully disentangle the physical from the psychological. Mental and emotional well-being contribute to physical well-being, and vice versa. Mental and emotional anguish contribute to physical anguish, and vice versa. This doesn’t mean that illness is in our heads, nor does it mean that there’s no hope of recovery. To me, it means that I have more than one way to help my body heal. For me, this feels empowering. I could approach healing as a strictly physical goal, but I believe that I improve my odds of success by attending to my whole being. And hey, doing so also happens to bring me joy. I can think of worse side effects!  

What poetry hides underneath your experience of illness? What, for you, is the poetry of healing? How can you create space in which to feel the poetry of this moment right now?