Earlier this week a friend / colleague, Tim Merry (The Outside) met with Quanita Roberson and me to set up a podcast conversation for the summer. Tim asked a few questions. It was mostly a connection call for what will later be a conversation (Tim, Tuesday, Quanita, me) on equity, presence, systems change, inner change — or whatever arises live in the moment.
At the end of the call, Tim gave us a heads up. “We like to ask people if there is a poem that they are carrying with them lately. Or a song.” That kind of invite lights me up. So often I’m bridging what is the arts to what is the work of organizational change. Let’s just combine it now, shall we — the art of organizational change…the art of inner change. I love the deep humanity in this.
My poem will change a bunch between now and podcast time, but my regular practice of noticing such things led me today to 1900s Spanish Poet, Juan Ramon Jimenez.
Oceans
Juan Ramon Jiminez
I have a feeling that my boat
has struck, down there in the depths,
against a great thing.
And nothing
happens! Nothing…Silence…Waves…
–Nothing happens? Or has everything happened,
and are we standing now, quietly, in the new life?
Poetry invites a different energy. It can welcome a different vibration. Just as the phrase, “Once upon a time…” invokes the vibration of a story about to be told. Poetry reopens the door to heart.
If poetry opens the door, then a question connected to an image in the poem is the doorknob.
What is new life that you now seek?
What can only be heard for you in the quiet?
What waves are moving you now?
So many choices. I love the new life of living with keen attention and surrender to what is artfully unfolding now that can bring human beings into such sweet vibrational connection together.
