getting naked with the universe

Yesterday I was thinking I might not be a poet anymore.

I started thinking this out of a sense of discouragement and frustration at the limitations of my own art to make significant or sizable difference in a world that feels so desperately in need of change, but I realized eventually that the question was really more about ego, and identity.

Almost every significant non-family relationship I have can be linked back to my being a poet, even if that relationship now has no connection to the art. I teach poetry, I write poetry, I coach people in working on their poetry, I attend poetry festivals and read poetry and… what if I were not a poet anymore?

At least once a day, we take off our clothes. We are naked with ourselves. We are, for some period of time, a body unadorned.

It’s important, I think, for us occasionally to take off our identity adornments -- our shiny identity jewelry, our ill-fitting identity pants, our cozy identity sweater, the identity boots that make us look taller and slimmer and more imposing to strangers.

What if I were not a poet anymore? Does that feel like an opening up of space in this life, or an amputation of a limb? I roll it around in my head. I picture it -- someone asking “Are you an artist?” and my answering “No.” Or, “Not anymore.”

I think about other identities I’ve surrendered, abandoned or sloughed off. Non-athlete. Asthmatic. Chronic worrier. Enabler. Thirtysomething. Actor. Itinerant touring artist. New Yorker.

I’m not going to stop writing poetry, at least for now, so I guess that means I’ll still be a poet. But that’s not what's most important. The most important thing is that I can step back in my mind and picture myself, the inmost me, and understand that self as free from these labels, these earthbound ways of labeling and naming and supposedly knowing myself.

I can locate, in my best moments, this central Self, and see constellated all around it these aspects, these actions and identities -- and I can know that they are not me.

And it’s a comfort.

Because in that moment, I am least alone. I am most connected to the Universe, the Everything, the Divine, whatever language we give it -- I am not the sum of all this doing, I simply am.

How peaceful that is. What a relief. What a joyful place from which to begin again, and again.