Personal Essay
Inner Spaces
Reading To Illuminate Inner Spaces
Words sounded, exhaled;
imprinted in my mind,
written on my page.
But their meaning infirm,
their definitions incomplete.
Words recalled, and re-spoken
imprinted again to
take a new form.
Gaining the retina of
new understanding.
The process continues —
I in conversation with myself
In this season of light — artificial light; bulbs and candles — we are drawn inside. The weather is too sharp. Public spaces are too full of colds, flu, and worse. I’m also drawn to my own interior, for more, if not deeper, contemplation.
Sure, maybe there are resolutions and plans to make, or a year to review. But maybe it’s a time to just sit with ourselves. Take a breath and close our eyes. What lives inside? No matter what we find, we live with it and it lives with us. Some might call this meditation or being present. For me, it’s just allowing my thoughts to flow and to inspect or interrogate them, not to push them away.
A good book, and by that I mean one that makes me think — one that leads me to contemplation — is often the doorway. Or perhaps, more accurately, the key to unlocking connections.
I’m reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s Finding my Elegy: New and Selected Poems and Jane Hirshfield’s Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform…
