Inspiration is Wonderful When It Happens

Robert Frost once said that poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words. This smug little process never happened to me. My emotions never conveniently found thoughts and words on their own. I better relate to Mark Twain when he said, "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead." It's easy for me to write something elaborate, but a concise, emotion-filled poem was near impossible.

Until I found my inspiration.

On the surface, he introduced me to the notion of writing poetry by sharing his personal pieces with me and by writing poems inspired by me. He was so talented and intricate that he could hide riddles or my name amongst the lines.

Underneath, he somehow gave me emotions that found their own thoughts and thoughts that found their own words. With him, I was never happy or sad. I was walking-in-the-clouds ecstatic or put-me-out-of-my-misery depressed. It brought me to a whole new level of writing. I couldn't pull a poem out of thin air when my life was idle and dull - I needed those intense emotions. I'd put pen to paper at the height of my delight or grief, and let my emotions write for me. I'd lift my pen and have a perfect poem.

"Perfect" meant in a very personal sense, of course. You could read a poem of mine and think it is a dreadful tangle of words. But if I read the same poem, I'm swept back in time. The words rekindle exactly how I was feeling when I wrote them, like little time capsules preserving my emotions.

Sometimes I need those reminders - of where my husband and I have come from and how much we both have grown. Something about today made me feel nostalgic, and, accompanied by a glass of wine, I took a stroll through the past.

Early in our relationship, I held onto writing like a crutch. I wrote letters. I wrote poems. I wrote in a journal. I wrote in a blog. As our relationship matured and strengthened, I began to walk on my own. I no longer needed to express myself to him through words. I no longer depended on words to get me through.

After nearly six years of lying dormant in a notebook, one poem still had the power to form tears in my eyes. The emotion was perfectly preserved amongst the words. I choked back tears when I originally wrote it, and now, many years later, they cascaded down my cheek again.

I wrote this poem in 2003, and to date, it’s the last I wrote. At the time, we were standing at an agonizing crossroads in our relationship. It was inevitable that we had to choose - journey down one path together or go our separate ways. In the poem, I went back and forth between the two scenarios – life with him and life without him. The latter scared the wits out of me, but I knew that even if it was meant to be, he had a permanent place in my heart. Even if I went the rest of my life never seeing or talking to him, I knew I’d never forget him. Maybe you've experienced a moment like this with someone you love - whether a significant other or a friend. Maybe you know how I felt. Every day I thank the Lord above that we chose to go at life together, and I’ve never once wondered what my life would be like had I wandered down the alternate path alone.

I never forget the past. Tucked away in the back of my mind is an abundance of memories – to learn from and to use as a means of better appreciating the present. Regardless of whether something in my past is good or bad, it got me to where I am today. I don’t let negative memories weigh me down, but from them, I’ve learned that persevering through hard times has given us a better appreciation for one other – a trait I doubt we’d possess had we not trudged through muddy water.

My life has never been touched by poetry in this way, and perhaps it never will be again. I’ve sat through countless writing and literature classes in which we dissected poems and discussed their beauty, and I just never “got it.” Hello little light ablaze above my head. I finally get it. The words in this poem hold a deeper meaning, and they have withstood time and captured a fragile moment – a moment I can relive over and over if I so choose.

I am no poet, so the good or bad of it is beside the point. And whether you love or hate poetry, just think of this as me sharing a little piece of my heart.