On one of my long internet jaunts, where I follow this link and that link and sometimes end up down dead ends and sometimes discover something new and beautiful, I came across another Tara.

This Tara is a coach who combines psychology with spirituality. She is evidently fiercely intelligent without being a dry academic, and she is also very much in touch with her intuition and inner wisdom, without being inaccessibly new agey about it.

She also writes lovely poetry, and has produced a collection of eight poems called The Real Life, about “the things we are all grappling with”. This one below nearly had me jumping up and down going ‘yes! EXACTLY!’ But they all spoke to me in some way, so I wanted to share them with you. 🙂 (Also included is some beautiful art by artists she loves.)

You-Shaped Hole

Sometimes the world feels inhospitable.
You feel all the ways that you and it don’t fit.
You see what’s missing, how it all could be different.

You feel as if you weren’t meant for the world, or the world wasn’t
meant for you.

As if the world is “the way it is” and your discomfort with it a problem.

So you get timid. You get quiet about what you see.

But what if this? What if you are meant
to feel the world is inhospitable, unfriendly, off-track
in just the particular ways that you do?

The world has a you-shaped hole in it.
It is missing what you see.
It lacks what you know.

And so you were called into being.
To see the gap, to feel the pain of it, and to fill it.

Filling it is speaking what is missing.
Filling it is stepping into the center of the crowd, into a clearing, and
saying, here, my friends, is the future.
Filling it is being what is missing, becoming it.

You don’t have to do it all, but you do have to speak it.
You have to tell your slice of the truth.
You do have to walk toward it with your choices, with your own being.

Then allies and energies will come to you like fireflies swirling around
a light.

The roughness of the world, the off-track-ness, the folly that you see,
these are the most precious gifts you will receive in this lifetime.

They are not here to distance you from the world, but to guide you
into your contribution to it.

The world was made with a you-shaped hole in it.
In that way you are important.
In that way you are here to make the world.
In that way you are called.