Whose wisdom is currently showing up for you?
Poetry can be a transformative way to explore
inner, embodied, collective, and ancestral knowing.
As a story writer and human living in the world,
I find that if I begin with a question
or sit with and attend to a particular felt sense
and give the question or felt sense room to breathe,
a knowing of some kind can often emerge in response.
It might first come as a single word,
a memory,
an image,
a sound,
or a specific texture.
And if I continue to wait
and listen
and invite with my attention,
more comes:
phrases,
whole sentences,
an entire scene unfolding and rewinding
or…
the wisdom of an ancestor.
I’ve found the 5-7-5 syllable structure of the Japanese poetry form, haiku,
to be an especially supportive container
for this type of inquiry and exploration.
It seems to offer just the right rhythm and restraint
to arrive at the essence of a thing
with greater clarity and specificity.
Harriet Tubman is an ancestor
whose wisdom I often encounter
when navigating a season
of journeying and wayfinding.
Whose wisdom is currently showing up for you?