Miraculous Personal Transformation

How?

Lose 20 pounds in 10 days! Meditate your way to inner peace in six easy steps! The Secret tells you how to make money while you sleep! The first proven cream to reduce fine lines and wrinkles! A better life is finally within your grasp…

Just buy this one item and voila!

THIS is what we are used to. Bullshit.

Lots of it– in all different disguises. Hope in a bottle or a tube or a new and improved plan. It begins with the anticipatory euphoria of “the me I’ve always dreamed of is finally within reach!” Or “the me I was ten years ago I can finally get back!”

It ends with disappointment, frustration and despair followed by a period of mild to severe depression, a recovery phase and the cycle begins again.

So, how do you transform yourself, for real?

Brace yourself. The answer is unnervingly radical.

Poetry.

Ugghh, gag and utter unquantifiable dread.

You might rather have your eyebrows waxed off or receive electric shock therapy. What could possibly be transformative, much less miraculously so, about poetry?

Most definitions of poetry are intimidating, ostracizing and imposing.

But, it can change your life in a matter of minutes if you let it. It all depends on what you’re looking for. Do you want to BE beautiful or FEEL beautiful? BE wealthy or FEEL wealthy? BE younger or FEEL younger?

When I was younger I was overweight and insecure. When I was thinner I was anxiety-ridden and popular for superficial reasons. When I had no money I felt endless possibility before me.

What do you mean when you say you want personal transformation?

Beauty is subjective. Wealth is relative. Peace is a matter of perspective.

You can set ideals and you very well may achieve them. Unfortunately, once you get there, the horizon line resets. And there’s a whole new level of thinner, younger, more centered, charitable, brilliant and wealthy.

So, you will always be one ideal away from the ideal you.

BUT, what if that was okay? What if giving up on achieving the unachievable actually set you free to participate in life rather than drag it around like a reluctant misbehaved rescue dog?

What if the extreme aspirations of external attributes we are so focused on as a culture are not actually why we’re here?

Commerce offers magic. But only poetry delivers it.

I do a highly acclaimed cleanse. I lose weight. I gain it back. No one notices. I apply over-priced eye serums and look the same. No one cares.

I read a poem that makes me feel vulnerable, inspired– alive. And it sparks something that glows in my skin, my eyes, my aura. I change. People see it. I don’t care. The feeling is more filling than any hunger for attention could ever be.

Poetry works miracles. Quiet, powerful ones.

Poet Christian Wiman says, “Let us remember…that in the end we go to poetry for one reason, so that we might more fully inhabit our lives and the world in which we live them, and that if we more fully inhabit these things, we might be less apt to destroy both.”

In a world riddled with reasons to detach, depersonalize and deflect – inhabiting our lives seems vital. Sounds obvious, assumed– like what else would we do? But we don’t. I don’t.

More often than I’d like, I feel like a robot, and an aging one at that. I execute a great number of repetitive tasks with precision and accuracy. Sure, the parts, the muscles, memory and ability to rebound are a bit rustier, but I am reliable.

I feel proficient, sturdy and dependable, but not alive.

The routine leaves me empty, melancholy and with a desperate desire to go home.

At some point I break and reassess what I’m doing, what I need to change, what I need to do feel alive. It is never about changing any of the repetitive endeavors. It’s not the carpooling, cooking dinner, making school lunches, writing strategy decks or trying to inspire those around me. It’s bigger.

It’s that somewhere along the line I stopped considering myself worthy of taking the time required to allow poetry to transport me back into my inner being.

In a sense, poetry reintroduces us to ourselves, to the part we thought we’d lost or forgotten – the part that cannot make sense of logic but is listening intently for something deeper.

In his essay, Magical Thinking and Modern Times, Poet laureate, Baron Wormser, explains it like this: “Something magical can happen in the poem’s precincts … Religion consoles but poetry makes the impalpable palpable. The door that poems open up is the door to the soul. I mean the word in a non-doctrinal way. I mean it as the spirit-shadow of being human, the margin that can’t be accounted for by explanation, that can’t be reduced or explained. I mean it as the feeling that we are much more than a given identity. We partake of something extraordinary in our being human. … What is important is that there be some recognition that the magic of poetry exists and matters, for it’s the magic that is endangered. Young people literally perish each day for the lack of that magic. No one has bothered to show them that there is a margin for their spirits. The margin can’t be measured, neither can the spirit. For many, if it can’t be measured, it doesn’t exist.”