I hadn’t been to a Monday morning yoga class for months, but one particularly bad day in March, I found myself on the mat with my toes together, head pressing down in child’s pose. Then, the tears started. The second my forehead touched the floor, I started to cry. And because I was face down, my eyes filled with tears quickly and there was no way to stop it. I blinked and they splattered on the mat. I closed my eyes again, but they keep coming.
“Set an intention for your practice today,” the instructor said, and I popped up to quickly wipe away another rush of emotion. I wanted to let it all out, to dive down deep into this mat and let the tears flow. I wanted to cry hard enough to let it all out, like a good hard cry would release me. But I had set my mat in the front and center of the room and couldn’t spend the entire class in tears. I needed to get it together.
I tried to casually wipe more tears, knowing the instructor would be telling us to shift up to plank soon, then back to downward dog. Then I heard it, a voice that said, “I made you for deeper things.” I almost couldn’t take it.
The voice was in my head, but I wondered if it was mine or, perhaps, God’s. I can’t remember when I ever heard the voice of God audibly, even in my own head and heart, so I don’t know how to discern if this is just something I wanted to hear or if it really was God speaking to me. It doesn’t matter. What matters is I heard it. What matters is I needed to hear it.
Deep calls unto deep, I thought. Psalm 42. I hadn’t thought of that verse in a long time, but it bubbled up inside me along with more tears I was pushing down. I sat up and wiped my eyes, knowing the yoga instructor would see me but hoping she would understand. I was there because I needed this: time to sit face down on the mat, time to stretch, time to rest.
Instead, the yoga class was more challenging than usual. She has us contorting and balancing, teetering on the edge of what our bodies could do. It was just as well, a welcome distraction, an invitation into the body and out of my head.
—
On the drive home, I was still thinking. I woke that morning carrying an anxiousness about starting the week. That’s been happening more and more on Monday mornings. I worry about what the week holds in store for me. What will I get accomplished and how I will get derailed this week? I make plans each week, creating a calendar I’m supposed to follow but know I won’t. The only things I show up for regularly are workouts and naps. Everything else is subject to my whims. I hate that about myself and try my best to lean into routine.
I kept thinking about these deeper things. What did that mean for me now? So often, I’ve talked about depth, about the deep work we’re called to, either in our personal lives or in our careers and vocations. The world is so noisy, and we’re encouraged to keep things light and shallow. But I feel the ever-present call to something deeper. I can feel when my spirit is weary from keeping up all the time. What I don’t understand is why I continued to experience this even though I can feel the pull toward deeper things. What exactly is going on here? What am I missing?
The last years have been spent in therapy, working through traumas and tough issues. Long ago, I threw out the map and started drawing a new one, but the path wasn’t easy or smooth. The bumps were relentless. I felt helpless, like all I could do was hold on and keep fighting. And fight I did, though it was underpinned by this need to constantly prove myself. I had to be good enough, and not just good enough for myself, but good enough for everyone else.
From the outside, I was smart enough, pretty enough. Inside me were worlds of potential and I was bent on not wasting it. But beneath all that was a hurt little girl, one who was crying out for someone to see her and love her. She has needed desperately to be acknowledged. Now that I’m an adult, the only one who can do that is me.
—
I’ve been thinking a lot about poetry. One sunny afternoon last summer, I sat on the patio with a cold drink and scribbled down a poem. It was just one poem, about nothing really. The lines came out, one at a time, and pulsed through me. It had been a long time since I’d felt that. When I write prose, the phrases come just like lines in a poem, but instead of stanzas, they are sentences. Instead of exploring language and sound, I’ve been exploring the terrain of my inner life.
But the muscle memory is there. I remember what it feels like to have a poem rolling around in my mouth, how it feels when it comes out, choosing each word carefully. I wanted that back—I wanted to write poetry again for the sheer joy of it, because it speaks to the deeper parts in me. Not because I have a graduate degree and not because anyone was telling me I should, but simply for the joy of the words on the page.
Poetry doesn’t require me to prove myself or be good enough. Instead, it helps me give voice to the things down so deep inside I can’t always easily find them. These last years, I’ve ignored all that, but the poetry inside me keeps coming back. No matter how much I’ve ignored it, it’s always been there.
At home, I told Adam: “I think I should write poems again.” Then I laid out my case, saying I’d always been so happy when I was doing something creative for myself: learning photography or sewing a quilt or playing around with watercolors. “Why did I stop doing those things?” I wondered aloud. “When did everything become so serious?”
“You’re like a sponge,” he said, stirring the chili he was warming up for lunch. “A sponge doesn’t take long to soak up the water, but a completely dried up sponge in a giant bucket of water takes a long time to rehydrate.” I furrowed my brow at this. “You’re so dried out, you don’t even realize it.”
This made sense, but I didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t want to hear that I was dried out and hadn’t been taking care of myself. So much of my energy was spent trying to walk the line between self-care and hard work, but often felt like I was failing. Would poetry solve this for me? Would it give me the language to process my life in a healthier way so I wouldn’t find myself dried out again?
—
Spring is springing, even if T.S. Eliot insists that April is the cruelest month. Perhaps it is. But perhaps, too, something new is on its way.
March was like taking a good, hard look at the mirror and being surprised at what I saw. Maybe I haven’t been looking clearly enough. I’ve lost my perspective, and everything is a blur, all the colors running together. For so long, I’ve been trying—trying to figure out who I am now, trying to find my way. I’ve been trying to get your attention and keep it. I’ve been trying to prove my worth.
And it’s all been at the expense of what’s always been true in my heart: that my life and my work aren’t about proving anything, but about letting what’s already in me come out and shine. That’s the deeper work. That’s the good stuff.
If I’m hungry for deeper things, if I need more space to dive into things that matter, then it’s up to me to set those boundaries. No one will create the space for me—I have to do that myself.
I’ve said it before, but I’m going to repeat it: This isn’t a writing practice; it’s a living practice.
This is about living well. It’s about listening deeply. It’s about taking the time to nurture ourselves, to think things through, to seek beauty, to write poems and turn our lives into poetry.
It’s not necessary to keep proving ourselves. We don’t have to keep up. What we need more than anything—what I need—is to listen and wait, see what bubbles up from beneath, what sorts of things might rise to the surface. What we find there might be worth sharing after all.
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