Nomads In Time
5 sections, 27 poems each. How do you know when something is finished?
Yesterday I counted up the content in each of my poetry book’s sections and found there are precisely 27 pieces in each. I realized that sense of finish I’ve been feeling is telling me the book is done. Ready to go to the editing, refining, illustrating stage.
I had a feeling this week amidst my writing, rearranging, and composing that Heliotrope Nights was close to completion. Since 27 is my lucky number (birthday date and all), I took those 5 27’s as a sign from life my book is ready to say “the end,” close itself to any more submissions.
Conclude, resolve, close; I finished the book with a piece I felt compelled to write a few weeks back. Nomads In Time:
I’ve packed up this tent a thousand times; just when I’ve rest, I feel called to go. My heart is my light and my soul is my guide.
Eternally moving. Eternally learning. Eternally traveling Home…
It is a fitting finish. Sometimes we write our endings, and sometimes endings let us know they’ve already been written, reminding us it is okay to move on and let go.
How do you know when something is finished?
We are leaving Alaska this summer. Minus the years I left the state for school, it has been my home my entire life. Over 30+ years.
Getting closer to “the end” hasn’t been as neat as 27 sections. It’s been pieced together by a growing sense of hopelessness during the dark of the winter months. Feelings of unease at my job. A crisis of spirit where something inside of me keeps trying to burst out, but doesn’t quite have space to do so.
After my brother died last year, I knew I could no longer live in a place that housed him and I- 38 years of memories- for all these years. My cycle here felt complete.
Now it’s a year later, and I find myself staring at the end of the line; move date looming. Stress, excitement, sorrow, anticipation, unknown, unknown, unknown– I am living the truth that imagining leaving and actually leaving are not the same. This week I’ve been surprised at all the things, both big and small, that are punching in me in the gut with goodbye and sadness, even as I know fundamentally in my soul-
It is time to let go.
How do you know when something is finished?
Life doesn’t always give us neat 27’s. Occasionally the cosmic synchronicity feels so right and exact, you just know. More often than not though, our endings are pieced together with small moments of discontent, restlessness, tear drops, heart pain, and a growing sense of unease mixed with a thirst for something more we can’t quite put our finger on.
The things that once held us begin to feel too small.
We begin to feel like we don’t fit.
We begin to feel not our self. Like we are living somebody else’s life. Or maybe just not living the life we were called to live.
Perhaps a dawning realization happens that some part of you is trying to emerge. And as long as you keep yourself in that old job, that relationship, that old space, those old values, those old skins of a younger self that have ceased to fit- you will never find the new space you need to grow new wings.
My wings are slowly beginning to peek out.
It’s just a whisper at this point; silvery tips that hint at the gorgeous, giant span they may take when I am standing on the terra firma of Kauai. I haven’t come by them without pain. My old skin is ripped and torn; they’ve risen up through younger parts of me that were not meant to be mended- but cracked, slashed, cleaved through- in order to find the space to keep growing.
There is a trail of bloody silk, shrunken cocoon, and broken shell behind me. My house is slowly being emptied and filled with boxes. And somewhere in the middle of that a book of poetry emerged; all written during life in Anchorage; it feels right to publish those 5 27’s before leaving- close out the projects created in this space.
Such will be life for the next few months. Conclude, resolve, close. Sometimes we write our endings, and sometimes endings let us know they’ve already been written and remind us everything has a time.
It is okay to let go.
Nomads in time, we are all just traveling home.