Slice of Life 2018 Day 20: Living in a Poem

"Your Life is a Poem" by Naomi Shihab Nye

About three years ago, I started regularly listening to podcasts on my iPhone. Podcasts are typically what keeps me company as I fold clothes, cook, or do the dishes. And if I can manage it, I listen to podcasts when I walk one of my dogs. One of my favorite podcast to listen to is On Being, hosted by journalist and author Krista Tippett.

The On Being Podcast hosts a variety of guests, including poets, authors, activists, and spiritual leaders. No matter the topic, I find that I always benefit from listening to the conversation between Krista Tippett and her guest. I record lines I want to remember in my writer’s notebook and am thrilled to discover new books to read or ideas to consider. Last week Thursday’s guest was poet Naomi Shihab Nye. Although this episode originally aired in 2016, I loved listening to it again and thinking about Naomi Shihab Nye’s work in a deeper way.

In the beginning of the podcast Naomi Shihab Nye shared her belief that she feels we are all living in a poem. She explained that when she visits classrooms she often writes this phrase on the board, “you are living in a poem.” In addition, she shared how she finds poetry to be organic and that we all think in poems. As part of a conversation in sharing with children the ways in which we live in a poem, Naomi Shihab Nye says, “...when you think, when you’re in a very quiet place, when you’re remembering, when you’re saving an image, when you’re allowing your mind calmly to leap from one thought to another, that’s a poem. What’s what a poem does.”

What an exquisite thought.

And these two lines of Naomi Shihab Nye especially resonated with me as I was listening to this episode:

• “If you know words, if you compose, you might want to share them because they’ll have a bigger life if you do that.” 
• “The story that you would be telling to yourself about the street, even as you walk down it, or as you drive down it, as you look out the window, the story you would be telling-it always seemed very much to me, as a child that I was living in a poem that my life was the poem.”

Since I listened to this podcast again last Thursday, this line has spooled in my mind, “you are living in a poem.” I cannot express in words how much I love this concept - living in a poem. It makes me want to savor my thoughts more and remind myself that my thoughts can be crafted into poems.

In thinking about living in a poem, and as I walked my dogs early Monday morning, these were a few lines mulling in my mind:

I anticipate yesterday’s warm breezy air as we

emerge early this morning:

me and my canine companions.

Yet cold chills my neck, numbs my face.

Immediately I return inside for my insulated coat,

winter hat, and

mittens.

Bare branches project against street lights,

trails of road salt snake on sidewalks,

and steep snow piles remain on edges of yards-

reminders that winter still remains.

How are you living in a poem today?