This poetry post is brought to you by my latest creative game; guerilla stone drops ~ I collect stones from the beach, draw and write on them, then leave them about the place for people to find. Like this:

Maybe all real poetry is soul poetry. And by real I mean not contrived or ‘thought up’. You know, the kind that comes from the soul; just comes out, without you doing anything much except write it down and maybe tweak it here and there.

When I write poems it’s not because I’ve sat down and thought, ‘I’m going to write a poem’. It’s because sentences, half formed and insistent, have whispered in my ear and demanded to be written down and expanded upon. It’s not me that writes them, not really. I think they come from what Paulo Coelho calls ‘the soul of the world’. The part that is all of us, that we all are, the ‘unified field’, ‘universal intelligence’, Source, whatever you want to call it.

It’s like when I give Reiki; I am not the healer or the source, I am simply the vessel through which the healing flows. The vessel through which the soul’s messages flow. When I paint too. Possibly also when I’m messing about in the kitchen.

My favourite poets are channelling Source too; you can just tell. I thought I’d share some with you. {Sometimes WordPress messes with the layout of certain poems. Sorry about that.}

First, David Whyte, recently discovered. His words here speak exactly about the swing between the vast aloneness and the connectedness of everything I’ve been experiencing lately:

Everything is Waiting for You

Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice. You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into
the conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

  – David Whyte

And of course, Mary Oliver: