I just heard a quote from Shakespeare “The meaning of life is to find your gift, the purpose of life is to give it away.”
William Carlos Williams, who lived from 1883-1963 said of his writing, “words offered themselves and I jumped at them! I would continue medicine, for I was determined to be a poet; only medicine, a job I enjoyed, would make it possible for me to live and write as I wanted to. I would live: that first.. and write, by God, as I wanted to if it took me all eternity to accomplish my design, for the sheer drunkenness of it.” Williams and Shakespeare lived in different times, with different demands, yet I love how they have both were driven to create and share.
Best Practices
I am protesting the “violence of self-care,”
how we must do x,y,z to pamper ourselves,
to combat the livingness of a through w.
The life hackers and optimizers speak of 10,000 hours,
perspiring until we achieve enough mastery to achieve flow.
I resist that loving oneself requires
rising before dawn, a stiff back, a hard floor.
It does and it doesn’t.
I envy the poet William Carlos Williams (Bill!)
a physician active in the early and mid 1900s
who wrote a famous poem about
eating someone else’s plums from the icebox (an icebox!)
and seemed able to reconcile the
twin sensations of pleasure and guilt.
I want him to have been my doctor,
to have written the poem Girl in the Window
after taking out my stitches.
I want him, he uses lots of exclamations and dashes.
In his portrait he has soft eyes, a focused brow.
The word Bacchanal was gifted to me recently,
follower of Bacchus, a drunken reveler,
an occasion of drunken revelry, orgy, bacchanalia.
The character Bobol was also offered,
Greek goddess of lasciviousness
who transcends the linearity of maiden, mother, crone.
In my notebook I record a quote (from someone, Jung?!)
if we don’t attend our shadows they
hang out in the basement and lift weights.
I no longer excise pieces of myself that are troublesome,
rather give them swings and a seesaw,
all with soft footing beneath.
My defects romp on a playground tucked among trees,
an ice cream truck comes tinkling by on warm afternoons.
Earlier today I misread an appointment time for acupuncture.
I hadn’t been to the clinic and didn’t know
if there was a waiting room.
I opened the office door to a darkened room
with nary a practitioner in sight,
in the center was a massage table,
on it lay someone, swaddled.
The patient was corporeal, older, resting,
they looked surrendered, dead even.
They made me feel connected to the meridian mother lode,
accessible by well-placed hairlike needles, yes,
but availed of more, some wellspring of possibility beyond just me.
They made me think when it is my time to go, it could be lovely.
What a gift my impatience, my arrogance,
my innocence gave me.
I blushed to no one,
thought, I’ll never tell it was me.
But next week,
when I actually have my appointment,
I might.