What follows is the edited transcript of Chelan Harkin's Awakin Call

Mark Peters:  So it’s now my honor to introduce Chelan. Chelan has been channeling ecstatic poetry for more than a decade now and has published two popular collections of her work, Susceptible to Light and Let Us Dance: The Stumble and Whirl with the Beloved, both of which were released in 2021. Her books aim to remind readers of their inherent joy, to support modes of relating to life that open the heart, and to deconstruct anything about God that doesn’t feel intimate, authentic, and warm. Her publishing journey has been supported by mystical connections and prayer experiments gone right, and we’re going to be looking into a number of those experiments over the next hour or so.

Chelan’s work has been compared to that of the great mystic poets Rumi, Hafez, and Rilke, and I would also add Omar Khayyam to that list. She lives in a scenic part of Washington State known as the Columbia Gorge with her husband, Noah, and their two small children, Nahanni, age one, and Amari, who will turn five in two weeks. And just for a bit of bonus content for any bakers who may be tuning in today, Chelan came across this recipe of Amari’s late last night that calls for nine-thirds cup of maple syrup, nine hundred 48ths cup of whipped topping—this is super sweet—eight 4ths cup of chocolate chips, and then finally one-third cup of butter—b-u-d-r.

But anyway, back to Chelan. In her poetry and in life, Chelan continually invites the fumbling, suffering parts of ourselves and our divine nature to meet for tea in the heart, to have a great laugh in the belly, and share a big hug. So it is with a big virtual hug that I am pleased to welcome Chelan. Welcome, Chelan!

Chelan Harkin: Hey, everybody. Hey, Mark.

Mark: So one of the reasons I was so keen to do this Awakin Call with Chelan was I just have this strange confidence that one of the poems she’s going to offer, or perhaps one of the anecdotes she’ll share, will in some way be instrumental in aiding one of our listeners in lovingly releasing some identification that is no longer in service to their life journey, or simply open a door to wider creative and collaborative possibilities. So whether you’re listening from Texas, Turkey, Tokyo, or Timbuktu, this is truly dedicated to you, and it’s my pleasure to introduce a lot of you for the first time to Chelan.

Chelan: It’s so good to see you, Mark.

Mark: So on a personal note, I first came across Chelan last year when I happened upon a two-hour interview with her on YouTube, where she shared a poem she had written when she was just 21 years old entitled, “Say, ‘Wow!’” And what she recited was so familiar to me, so resonant, that it felt like I was reconnecting with a very old friend or a soulmate, in the sense of a noble friend of the soul. Subsequent interactions with her have only reinforced that initial impression. I was wondering, Chelan, if you could share more about the “bad poem a day” experiment you conducted when you were 21, which bore very early fruit in the form of “Say, ‘Wow!’” and then treat us to a reading of it.

Chelan: Hmm, yeah, absolutely. So, gosh, well, it’s such a pleasure to be here. This is such a surreal, just fantastic opportunity. I’m so honored and really truly humbled to show up and share like this. It’s such a pleasure and a joy. Thank you all so much.

So yeah, when I was 21, I was really in a place of profoundly acute, hopeless suffering and despair, and felt really no access to a point of connection with anything inside of me that felt really genuine. I also had no connection with the outside world that felt that way, and I fervently longed for that. And my old patterns of relating to self and other and spirit were absolutely not working anymore and I didn’t know how to get beyond them, so I felt very, very stuck. I’d been writing poetry for a few years, and it had felt like a potential key to unlock something, but I just wasn’t really sure how to use that and how to get there.

I guess some part of me really did always have a sense that there was some kind of deep, true essence that wanted to express in a certain way. I was very, very deeply hungry for that. So somehow I found the wherewithal, I guess, or I really felt I just had a powerful prompting from my spirit amidst this really deep, heavy time of suffering and heaviness to create an experiment. And the experiment was that I would allow myself, give myself permission, to write what I called a “bad poem” every day for a month, for 30 days. I would give myself an hour to write that bad poem, and then I would share that poem publicly.

I had all kinds of hangups around judgments of good and bad when it came to my expression, and I was very afraid and insecure about sharing my work. So I just hoped that this experiment would loosen things up and get me out of what I call the paralysis of perfectionism.

So I committed to this experiment, and on the second day, this poem came through in such a profoundly different way than I’d ever experienced the creative process before. It was as though something, just an energy, really cracked open and unlocked. Whereas in the past I would, in a kind of contracted way, try to stitch together a poem, and it would take me months, this poem came through in just a few minutes, and I wrote it down as fast as it would come.

It really had this sense of being a harmony between my soul or my essence and something wonderful in the beyond. So I’ll read you this poem that came through when I was 21 and really changed my creative process and began to create a new relationship between me and God, or the Unknown, forever. This poem is called “Say ‘Wow!’”

Each day before our surroundings
become flat with familiarity
and the shapes of our lives click into place,
dimensionless and average as Tetris cubes,
before hunger knocks from our bellies
like a cantankerous old man
and the duties of the day stack up like dishes
and the architecture of our basic needs
commissions all thought
to construct the 4-door sedan of safety,
before gravity clings to our skin
like a cumbersome parasite
and the colored dust of dreams
sweeps itself obscure in the vacuum of reason,
each morning before we wrestle the world
and our heart into the shape of our brain,
look around and say, “Wow!”

Feed yourself fire.
Scoop up the day entire
like a planet-sized bouquet of marvel
sent by the Universe directly into your arms
and say “Wow!”

Break yourself down
into the basic components of primitive awe
and let the crescendo of each moment
carbonate every capillary
and say, “Wow!”

Yes, before our poems become calloused with revision
let them shriek off the page of spontaneity
and before our metaphors get too regular
let the sun stay
a conflagration of homing pigeons
that fights through fire each day to find us.

Mark: Wow. One of the things I find so intriguing about this poem is its power to evoke the very thing it’s describing. Whether in its recitation or simply listening to it, I find it returns my attention to the wow! of awareness itself, or awowness. And in doing so, an infinite scope of possibilities opens up, versus this very narrowly defined doorway that is characteristic of relating to experience through the conditioned mind. So yeah, I appreciate it so much.

This past Wednesday, I was at an Awakin Circle where “Say, ‘Wow!’” was being used as the week’s passage, and one of the attendees shared her frustration with not being able to fully abide with this “wow of being” as her entry point into the new day, as her current health situation necessitates that she visit the bathroom first thing upon awakening. But rather than lamenting her lot in life, she decided to keep a copy of the poem in the bathroom, and she’s been exuberantly reading it aloud each morning while sitting on the toilet and just looking around with wonder at the bathroom. And as she was beautifully relating this story, I was just delighting in imagining the power of wows reverberating in that now sanctified chamber. So I thought you’d be amused and delighted, both, Chelan, by that little story. Your wows are popping off in all sorts of places.

Chelan: Amazing!

Mark: And I find this metaphor of the Tetris cubes particularly compelling. I’m going to recklessly assume that our listeners have some familiarity with the video game Tetris and what it appears like. The way you use it so aptly captures the first engagement most of us have with the day, which is to twist and turn our various problems and to-do items as they descend on the screen of consciousness, in an attempt to keep them arranged and give some semblance of order to the day.

And I love your invitation, which is to say, wait, before you engage with that particular game, just try paying attention to this, this unconditioned place, and look around and just go, wow!  Anything could happen here.

I would like to ask you about one of the stanzas, if you might be able to speak a little bit more about it: break yourself down into the basic components of primitive awe, and let the crescendo of each moment carbonate every capillary and say, wow.  I was wondering, how do you go about breaking yourself down into those components of primitive awe?

Chelan: Ooh, good question, Mark. Well, it’s interesting hearing you address specifics in this poem, because it was so not a rational or cognitive process, writing this poem.  After it came through, I needed to look through it from that lens and say, does this even make any sense?

I wasn’t even really sure. It was just like a flood of energy had come through and transcribed itself onto the page, and then I had to go back and see if it actually made any sense.  So that’s interesting.

How do I break myself down into the basic components of primitive awe? Well, to me, that has to do with opening the heart, which is a big juicy conversation, because like that woman shared, often the reason, I think, that it can be hard to connect with this wow, which is everpresent but hard to access and connect with at some moments, is because often when we open our heart -- and often the reason we don’t -- is because there’s pain there when we begin this journey that we don’t necessarily want to encounter.

So I’ve just been incredibly fortunate to encounter tools that have helped me really open this pain and be able to move through this and actually find really ecstatic experience in going into these deep places of pain, which are really just trapped energy, and unlock those. And always within and beyond that is this experience of the wow, which is just an experience beyond the confines in our mind of who we are and an expansive experience of growing into new possibilities and perspectives and encountering new energies of aliveness inside of ourselves.

Mark: Oh, wow. You actually answered one of the questions I was going to pose later, which is when these poems come through, are you cognizing what is spilling out onto the page, or do you go back to it and like myself and other readers, are you extracting gems of wisdom from it much later after its initial commitment to paper?

Chelan: Good question.

Mark: I think you already sort of answered that. Sorry to interrupt.

Chelan: Oh, well, yeah, it’s a really cool process with this poetry and it still just feels completely mysterious. And I really like that I can fully celebrate it without any feeling of being self-congratulatory or anything, because it really feels like, when I talk about how special this process is, it really feels like I’m celebrating just some incredible phenomenon of the universe.

All these poems in both these books have come through in this way. There’s not one that has come from thinking it out. And that’s also, just to be very clear, that is a completely reasonable and wonderful way to write poetry. That’s just not the way that it happens for me.

When poetry comes through, it almost feels like deep tuning to a new station. And it’s like a buzz, almost, and it often happens when I’m doing something very ordinary, like washing the dishes. Often in a place of focus though, focus on something. And I drop what I do and go write the poem.

And then, because I’m in such a great state while that comes through, a very open state, it feels like, without obstacles of judgment, I usually share the poem immediately with Facebook, while I’m still in that state before the crusty judge comes in to start second guessing it. Once it’s shared, then I often go back and check it out and see if it -- there’s often this question -- is it going to be complete gibberish or does it make sense? Because it is so not of the mind, there’s that funny question sometimes. But they usually check out.

Mark: Maybe you could provide more context about this crusty judge state you referred to for our listeners.

Chelan: Oh, absolutely. Well, I just have so much fun. I’m so grateful for Mark. Oh my God. What an incredible gift Mark has been in my life and what a dear friend. And we were talking yesterday, supposedly about this call, but then we just go off on all these fantastic tangents. And one of them was just about this, what we are calling the crusty judge character that we have in our minds, and Mark and I were both sharing how we can get into these environments, inner environments really, of being so uninhibited and saying all kinds of things in that state.

And then later, in the inevitable contraction afterward, the crusty judge comes in and we have to deal with that. But I was actually thinking, Mark, that we should redefine the crusty judge because the crusty judge knows that Mark and Chelan are these wild people who can say all of these things that can be very much outside of status quo norms for expression.

And so this judge is actually trying to keep us safe. It wants us to belong, and it doesn’t want us to get too out there. So it’s just trying to moderate things. So maybe it needs a new name other than crusty judge.

Mark: Maybe four-door sedan of safety. [laughs]

The other day, I opened an incognito tab in Chrome and googled Chelan’s name and the top three results were Chelan Harkin -- The Worst Thing, which sounds like a really bad Yelp review, like, “Chelan Harkin, she is just the Worst. Thing. Ever.” The second result was Chelan Harkin bio, and we’re going to be getting to that in just a minute.

But the third thing was Chelan Harkin Quotes, and I find that so impressive. Normally people aren’t looking for quotes from someone unless they’ve been deeply touched or inspired. So it’s a real testament to the way your poetry is reaching people’s hearts, that you’re just 33 now and already people are searching for your quotes. And I was telling Chelan yesterday, I could live to be 110 and not one single person on this planet is ever going to search for a Mark Peters quote.

Chelan: I don’t think that’s true, Mark.

Mark: Something about the crusty judge, maybe. So circling back to the Chelan Harkin bio, since that’s of interest to googlers out there. I was wondering if you could tell us a bit about growing up in Hood River, Oregon, and maybe touching upon your Bahá’í faith, early curiosity you had in terms of relating to religion, God, the mystical realm. And also your first inklings about being of service in a larger sense, which was somewhat influenced by a movie that you viewed with your sister.

Chelan: Excellent, sure thing. Lyle, Washington, actually, is where I grew up. I was born in Hood River but grew up in this tiny town of 300 called Lyle, Washington, in a little cabin in the woods. That was kind of my dad’s response to growing up in LA, and it not working for him. So he went another direction.

And oh my God, how insanely fortunate was I to grow up in the Bahá’í community with the Bahá’í teachings. I’m so glad you bring this up because the Bahá’í vantage point, it’s really the primary influence that has influenced my poetry. And Bahá’u’lláh, the founder of the Bahá’í faith, really makes this radical call to redefine the ways that we relate to everything: the ways that we relate to God, the ways that we relate to religion, the ways that we relate to investigating reality, and to each other, and to institutions and to community, and it’s profound.

And that’s also what my poetry most enjoys doing. And so it gives us permission. I really received this incredible permission through the Bahá’í teachings from the beginning, to be able to not take certain ways of operating for granted, certain patterns of living and operating that were commonplace in the world.

And to be able to question: well, maybe they could be way, way better, and how do I participate in that? That’s one reason I’m just insanely grateful for the Bahá’í faith and its influence, and also a community that is deeply dedicated to encouragement, much like what I’ve experienced with -- what do you even call them -- the circles?

Mark:  The Awakin Circles.

Chelan: Yeah, Awakin Circles. There are so many similarities, so much encouragement, so much inclusivity and so much affirmation about the inherent light that we all just have as people, as souls, and also incredible spaces to practice expression.

So I really feel like I hit the jackpot with that. And at the same time, I felt really weird growing up as a Bahá’í and had a lot of shame around being different, and just didn’t really know how to navigate a deep, deep love and appreciation and gratitude for the Bahá’í faith. And then also I didn’t know how to navigate this complicated journey of really making it my own and having it feel genuine to my own heart, and how to move through varying questions and doubts and struggles like that. And so I had something of a fragmented, I suppose, relationship with Bahá’í, if that makes sense.

Mark:  As you entered your teenage years, you struggled with an eating disorder and perhaps some other buried traumas, especially from years 14 to 21.

But out of that, you adopted this very loving relationship to pain and suffering and finding ways to extract the gold out of grief. So could you tell us a little bit about what that was like, and then also maybe mention this book that was so influential for you Eating in the Light of the Moon, by Anita Johnston, and how that affected you.

Chelan: Oh, excellent! First of all, though, “the gold out of grief” -- that’s a great Mark quote right there. Everybody search “Mark Peters quotes” as soon as we’re done here. [laughs]

Anyway, so I came into the world with some wonderful gifts that I really didn’t know how to handle or manage, being just a very sensitive soul, sensitive to, I think really, the needs of the human spirit to have just incredibly unconditionally loving and accepting environments around each other, and just kind of sensitive to the potential of people to be these wellsprings of love and generosity, and I really felt that, and then this incredible discrepancy between that possibility and the way that things often play out in relationships.

And so I had a keen perception of truth and of differences between the things people said and what they did, and I just didn’t know how to handle all of that and was afraid that somehow all of those qualities of me would be liabilities in relationships somehow. And so I just needed to repress all of that. I really set out onto an active journey of repressing everything that made me who I was and every gift that I had to share, and every power that I had to offer in a loving way to the world. So an eating disorder was my tool, just mentally obsessing with how to control of my body and my intake and all of that. Really these strategies that we use, they are things that help us get by in unbearable circumstances.

And so when I was 14, what happened was, I had a very profound experience of consciousness. I’d been getting by okay up until that point, and then -- it really felt like overnight -- I just plunged into this deeper level of self and became aware and very connected with profound amounts of unprocessed pain that I just didn’t know how to manage at all. And so the strategy of the eating disorder was truly a gift. It was as though I was sinking and I found a floating log and I just got to grab onto it.

Yes. And so this book that you mentioned, Eating in the Light of the Moon, is an incredible book for all people. And really what it does is it exonerates people who have these particular struggles. Dr. Anita Johnston has worked extensively with mostly women who have struggled with eating disorders and found she was always surprised, because she would hear messages about these people being defunct problems that people didn’t know how to solve, but she was finding extraordinary capacities in these folks. And so this book is just so profound because it allowed me to see things that I had so thought of as problems and liabilities, and to see them as potential gifts.

She really talks about how in our society, such an illness is the repressing of what she calls, and you could call this many things, but repression of the feminine qualities -- sensitivity, intuition, feelings, connection with inner truth and more embodied experience. So that was a revolutionary book for me that really helped give me a new conceptual framework for understanding pain and potential within all of that.

Mark:  I was wondering if you might read your poem “The Hollow Bone,” if you have that queued up, which relates beautifully with this theme.

Chelan:  Absolutely. Absolutely. Okay. So this one will be in a third book that’s coming out pretty soon, which is exciting.

My temple most often
has been the hollow bone of loneliness,
my spirituality discovering music that sings there.

My growth almost entirely
has come from the desperate wailing
of the seed of my heart,
needing to crack open holes for breathing
in the dark room of its hopelessness
to deprive itself less
of taking new light all the way in.

I become sanctified when my frailties bleed out
and there’s no balm to grab,
save the salve of her verse
that doesn’t so much close the wound
but give purpose to its pouring.

My life’s fruits have bloomed
from being such a barren snag
that I had to graft parts of myself to God.

We must be careful lest we elevate people
for anything holy they produce.

More often than not, anything that can truly reach a heart
comes from a heart whose wounds have become so unbearable
they must burst into song.

Mark:  Wow. For me, all of your poems are “say wow” poems, because I think at the conclusion, I always want to say, “Wow!” You had a connection with poetry from a very young age when you would commission your mother to jot down some of the things you were receiving. But then later in high school, I think you had a class where you were introduced to free verse and were very intrigued by that. And then subsequently, you were starting to get hypnotherapy sessions, I guess, relating to some of the issues you were struggling with during your teenage years, and one of the therapists introduced you to Hafez, is that correct?

Chelan:  Hypnotherapy came a bit later. This was talk therapy and I was 17. Yeah. God, I just felt like such a hopeless case because therapy was reaching me at a more cognitive level, and I really needed to break open to something deeper to get relief. And so it wasn’t working for me. But he did read me this Hafez poem. Yeah, and it was my first encounter with Hafez poetry, mystical poetry. It was one of the first experiences of something being able to penetrate all the armor that I held around my heart, and it just blew me away. And so that established a really, really potent connection with Daniel Ladinsky’s Hafez poetry, yeah -- which was a foreshadowing.

Mark:  Yes, very much so. So, the summer of your twentieth year you spent with Michael Penn, which was very powerful for you. Could you share a little bit about that?

Chelan:  Mmm, yeah, I’m so glad you bring that up. Yeah. So, gosh, it was another thing, it was so strange. I just decided to spend a summer in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, with Michael Penn and his amazing wife, Kathy Penn. And I was just so attracted to both. I’d met Michael and Cathy briefly, and I was so incredibly attracted to them, on a spiritual level. I just needed to be near them.

That summer was profound in many ways. It was really an experience of happiness that transcended these mental, emotional deep struggles. And it really gave me an experience of -- just that environments could be created that were so spiritual in nature that you could still feel deep, deep delight amidst so much unprocessed stuff.

Yeah, Michael and Cathy, both, for me were just such living examples of true generosity of spirit and true connection with love. I was so attracted to what I saw in them, and I couldn’t figure out, for the most part, how to get from where I was to anything like that. I was befuddled, but just being around that energy, though, has an impact and I think can begin to create new possibilities and bridges in our minds and nervous systems about how we want to live, or just even create a more potent attraction and desire in ourselves to figuring out how to get to more of a place like that.

Mark: I know exactly what you’re talking about. It’s so powerful to have something modeled and see someone actually living a possibility that you previously only dreamt about, or maybe read about in books. And to see it lived is so powerful. Like, “Hey, this might just be possible. I might be able to do something like this.”

So your twenty-first year is when so many things popped off. You had a life-altering pilgrimage to Israel, to some of the sites that are important in the Bahá’í faith. And then you also had brain surgery that just came out of nowhere, a total surprise diagnosis. And then, of course, there was the sudden emergence of this new way of relating to poetry, where it just seemed to flow through rather than be heavily composed or cognized. So tell me about year 21.

Chelan: Year 21 was a whopper. Oh my God. Yes. So for lack of a better word -- I hope this is okay -- the shit was hitting the fan at age 21. At that time, randomly while getting an MRI for some discomfort in my jaw, the tech discovered a gigantic aneurysm in the central artery of my brain and they said I needed to be operated on immediately.

And it was so surreal. It was literally a cracking open experience. And whatever kind of latent stuff or the amount of trauma and suffering that I’d been repressing, the surgery sort of tipped the scale. Things just became unbearable after that. So that was the service to me that the surgery did, and it really was a service. I needed to get to that point of breakdown. And then a month after that surgery, I had this pilgrimage to Haifa, Israel, planned. I went by myself and I had a shaved head and this whole gnarly scar.

It’s a nine-day pilgrimage. Toward the end, we were in thee big groups to visit Bahá’u’lláh’s prison cell. He was imprisoned for years. I was really excited, for whatever reason, to visit that cell, more than any other spot. We got there and it was a stormy day and I just had a really deep desire in my heart to be alone in this prison cell.

We’d have time for prayer and meditation, and I was with this group, and these people, they would have these prayer-a-thons. They would be able to hunker down for an hour and a half or something. And I didn’t have that type of attention span, so I thought there was no chance I was going to get any alone time.

We all went into this room, probably 40 people or so, into this prison cell. And I had such an unusual experience that I’ve never had anything like it. I just closed my eyes for what felt like seconds and opened my eyes. And everybody had left the prison cell and the door was closed and I hadn’t heard any commotion or anything, in a pretty small space with 40 people. It was so surreal. Yeah, and the door was closed. I looked around and immediately had what was, I would say, the most profound experience of my life. It doesn’t feel appropriate to say I heard a voice. It was more like I experienced a voice in every cell of my body, which I took to be Bahá’u’lláh’s voice. And it said, “Let us dance.” It was this incredible cracking open experience.

In poetry, we use shorthand for things to mean so much more than what is said. It’s like these specific combinations of words that are like a code to unlock so much more. And that’s how this felt. What it did was it gave me permission, this loving authoritative permission, to relate to God and to my spiritual journey in a truthful and honest and just open and dynamic way, like a dance rather than a march of shoulds and perfectionisms.

I had this incredible cathartic process of deep, deep kind of ecstatic grief and then laughter. And then I just started singing, and it felt like this rejoicing reunion with my deepest self and soul. And in that moment also, I knew that one day I would have a book of poetry called Let Us Dance!

So that’s the name of this book. Let Us Dance: The Stumble and Whirl with the Beloved. And then it wasn’t a week after coming back from that pilgrimage that this “Say ‘Wow!’” experience cracked open this poetic flow in this whole new way. So it was just an extraordinary experience.

Mark: One of the quotes that you use -- I think at the bottom of some of your emails -- is from Bahá’u’lláh, and I love it because it ties in so closely to that invitation, “Let us Dance.” It’s “The sea of joy yearns to attain your presence,” which sounds like an invitation to dance. And you’ve just so gloriously taken up that invitation. I was wondering if you could share the poem that references Bahá’u’lláh, but also Mohammed, Moses, Krishna, Buddha, and so many more.

Chelan: Happily, Mark. Yes. Okay. This one’s called “Approach Thirsty.”

Lately I’ve been praying to Mohammed, Moses, Krishna, Buddha,
Bahá’u’lláh, Zoroaster, Jesus.

Why be choosy?
I ask any source of true love and great joy to throw me as many bones as they might.

Sometimes I pray to Mozart, Bach, or Galileo to pour music
or the stars through me.

Often I pray to Táhirih, a great Persian poet and feminist of the 1800s, who would remove her veil when addressing men and was murdered for truth at age 38.
Her final words were “You can kill me as soon as you like, but you will never stop the emancipation of women.”

I often ask Hafez for a dance and we go for the most poetic whirls.
Sometimes I ask Rumi that he pluck me an ancient, ever-blooming rose and I crush its scent onto the page.
I have a crush on Khalil Gibran and ask that he pass me inspired love notes.
I pray to Joan of Arc and Einstein for bad-assery and great ideas.

Inspiration is not elitist.
There is no muse that is off limits.
No genius you should not approach and ask to be yours.
There are no copyright issues with what you receive from prayer.
No one lays claim to certain frequencies of light.

Oh, beseech whoever you might that the master keys that open all hearts are put in your care, that your particularly necessary style of expression may open new portals of beauty to the eyes of the world.

Hobnob with all the great dead poets, thinkers, lovers, artists, leaders of truth.
They still want a place to pour their wonder into the world.
And you are a worthy vessel.
It’s an open bar in the sky.
Approach thirsty and ask.

Mark: Wow. I’m like a one-note piano. Wow. Wow. Wow. I think this is one of the first times I’ve come across the word “bad-assery” and the crusty judge of my text editor underlined it. Like, “That’s not a word. You can’t use that.” Yeah, we’re running out of time so rapidly. I can’t believe this. We’re only halfway through all this stuff we wanted to sketch out.

So, Preeta, if you can queue up “The Worst Thing,” we’ll go to that after this next bit of discussion and maybe Chelan will read one more before that.

Chelan: Perfect.

Mark: So at 21, these breakthroughs, and now 12 years have elapsed, and correct me if I’m wrong, but poetry has pretty much been coming through nonstop during that time. And sometimes almost too fast to record, where you’ve had to tell your muse, “Slow it down. Let me process,” or “Go away for a little while.” But also interwoven with all this has been this playful willingness to experiment with life in so many different ways. So maybe you could share about some of the additional experiments after that “bad poem a day” that have come around and just the way, these days, poetry continues to emerge for you.

Chelan: Hmm, awesome. Thanks, Mark. Yes. So yeah, it had been 12 years or so of poems coming through in this way. And I had a really big collection, and my deepest hope, which really just felt like a fantasy, was to publish my books and share them with the world. But I still had a lot of wounds around human relationships. I’d had some profound relationships with spirit and things, but was pretty insecure still about my relationships with other people. And I was very afraid to share my work at a bigger level because I really wasn’t sure how others would receive it.

So then basically a series of circumstances happened in 2020 that really activated this process in me, where there was no going back. And I realized, “Oh my God, here we go.” It felt kind of like when the water gets going faster before a waterfall, like I was just heading towards something. And I was scared out of my mind. It was the most vulnerable thing I’d ever done to admit that I needed to publish my poetry. The only thing that really helped me be able to do that, because I had such a mountain of fearful assumptions, was to experiment: perhaps, just maybe, my limiting assumptions aren’t truths. And as I move forward, you know, I’ll try to frame this as an experiment to get out of this binary of succeed-fail, and move forward. So I had just, yeah, a mountain of limiting assumptions. Oh, my God.

And then also, I bought a couple of my old favorite books, Hafez-Daniel Ladinsky poetry, mostly to look at formatting actually, because I was self-publishing my books and I wanted some inspiration about formatting. And as soon as I opened those books, I got another nudge that felt very much like that original “Say ‘Wow!’” experiment nudge from my deep inner self. And it was this nudge to do a prayer experiment. So I decided I would go on a nightly walk and just chat with my favorite dead poet, Hafez, and ask if he had any inspiration lying around for starters, and just see what happened with that. So I would do that. I made myself a really delicious cup of hot chocolate to make it extra fun. And I would just go on night walks and hobnob with Hafez, and inspiration started flowing so torrentially that, yeah, it became an inconvenience to my life.

And then it was so remarkable, the results of this experiment, the findings, that then I took it a step further and I started asking Hafez for promotional help. I told him I didn’t want it to be a burden for him -- too much work. I asked for him to tap all the friends in the spirit world and all the people in this world who could help me, because I genuinely, and from a place of true joy and love and beautiful desire, really wanted this book to reach people. I would do that every night.

Three weeks into this journey, three weeks after publishing this book, Susceptible to Light, I got an email in my inbox. Out of the blue, as a self-published poet with really no connections to the publishing world or any big names or anything, I got this email from Daniel Ladinsky, who has done renditions of Hafez poetry in English that have popularized the name Hafez far and wide. He just said, “I found your book. Congratulations.” And I told him this whole story and shared a poem with him that felt particularly inspired by Hafez. And he said, “Wow, this is so strange. I’m a reclusive poet. I never reach out to anyone. I think Hafez nudged me in your direction. And I think you and I need to work on publishing a book together.”

He ended up writing the foreword to this book, and oh, my gosh. At that moment, though, it was like this cosmic cork was pulled when I got this email from him in my inbox. He’s my favorite all-time poet and my primary inspiration, but really more than anything, it was that this experiment with prayer -- it just opened a whole new world of possibility there for me, and just activated so much awe and enthusiasm. Yeah.

Mark: I was wondering if you might read “Sometimes my soul feels itself to be in great exile,” and then, following that, we will address the number one Google search, “Chelan Harkin, The Worst Thing,” how that came to be. So, Preeta, after she reads this, maybe you could cue up the video for that.

Chelan: Okay. Excellent. This has been so much fun, you all. I’ve enjoyed every minute of this.

Mark:  It’s way too short. I had so many things I wanted to cover with you, we’d have to go into it for an hour; but I really want to honor the listeners who have some questions coming in for you so you can interact with them.

Chelan: Fantastic, fantastic. Okay. So this poem is called “The Soul’s Homeland.”

Sometimes my soul
feels itself
to be in great exile
from its homeland

but then I remember
my mother tongue
is the poetry
my heart is so fluent in,
its dialect,
laughter and tears

my other native language
is rising early
to praise all the great things
the sun falls upon.

My national song
is a geyser of joy
hitting the highest notes
of ecstasy
and breaking every glass ceiling
in the mind
that once trapped God inside.

My anthem is the feisty love parade
that marches gaily from my heart
to yours,

my religion is the untying
of old knots
that once kept my soul hitched
to rigidity and smallness
and my doctrine
is whatever comes after that
when the soul’s full range
of movement is restored.

My flag is every mood
of the moon
that reflects my inmost heart,

My ancestry is the collection
of radiance
from morning dew
passed down by blades of grass
as they stand vigil
in silent reverence
to be part of each morning’s inheritance
of such wonder.

My DNA is the encrypted love notes
written in the luminous ink
from the stars,

my soul is an ancient heritage
of love songs from God
and whatever it is I’m doing here
has mostly to do
with pledging allegiance
to this glorious anthem.

Whatever I’m doing here
has mostly to do
with expressing my devotion
for the borderless birthplace
deep in my chest
where beauty again and again
takes her first breath.

Mark: Wow. So beautiful.

Chelan: Thanks, Mark.

Mark: Preeta, would you be able to take over the…? There we go. Thank you.

[cello music plays]

Chelan [video playing]:

[Poem can be found here.]

The worst thing we ever did
was put God in the sk
out of reach pulling the divinity
from the leaf,
sifting out the holy from our bones,
insisting God isn’t bursting dazzlement
through everything we’ve made
a hard commitment to see as ordinary,
stripping the sacred from everywhere
to put in a cloud man elsewhere,
prying closeness from your heart.

The worst thing we ever did
was take the dance and the song
out of prayer
made it sit up straight
and cross its legs
removed it of rejoicing
wiped clean its hip sway,
its questions,
its ecstatic yowl,
its tears.

The worst thing we ever did is pretend
God isn’t the easiest thing
in this Universe
available to every soul
in every breath.

Mark: Thank you, Preeta. So that poem you were just listening to is entitled “The Worst Thing” and really exploded Chelan’s poetry out into the universe. She woke up one morning after sharing that on Facebook, and the number of shares had just gone up astronomically. Normally, she gets 5 or 10 likes/shares, and suddenly it was like, I don’t know, 20, 30,000 or something.

And so it’s just one of the beautiful ways that the universe has supported her work and reverberated out. So I’m going to hand the mic over to Pavi, to field some, or to pose, perhaps, some questions from listeners. Over to you, Pavi.

Pavi Mehta: Thank you both. It’s been so lovely to just follow the slipstream of this conversation. It’s had such a natural flow to it, and I’m going to begin with a question of my own and then start to pass on some of the questions from listeners. There are several already.

I was just thinking, listening to the different poems that have already been shared, that so much of the body is brought into your writing, Chelan -- the heart, the hips, the breath, and the ways in which we’ve straitjacketed the body. And I’m wondering, what is your relationship to the wisdom of the body and how has it ripened through this process?

Chelan: Oh, what a fantastic -- it sounded like you were reciting one of my poems while you were saying that. Yeah, oh my gosh. Well, thank you. Wonderful question. So through this initial hypnotherapy experience, which we didn’t get to go into too much, it was an experience of finally feeling so safe, creating such a comprehensive experience of safety and peace in my nervous system that my consciousness really was able to get out of the trappings of my mind and settle into, well, just a much deeper connection with self that was more associated with the body than with the mind.

And that journey has been everything to be able to bring my consciousness deeper and in, and so often for me, poetry flows through after a deep cry. I feel that that really clears a passageway, creates a channel for poetry to come through. So it does feel like a very kind of embodied experience.

Also as I’m writing, there are times when I wonder, should it be this word or that word? And I really actually listen to my body and there’s a contraction if it’s not the right word and an opening if it is. And so these poems are really just tracing these open energetic spaces and writing the information that is there.

And then also, yeah, my hope really is that these poems do kind of transmit energy, actually, that operates at the somatic experience level that can unlock energies. So I really appreciate you tuning into that, because my process is a very embodied one and that’s also very much my hope.

And beyond the body too -- our body is this incredible energetic temple of consciousness and as we unlock these energies, we can really connect with something so, so much beyond ourselves.

Pavi: It’s beautiful. Because I was just thinking about -- I pulled these lines out of one of your poems: it starts with, “I can’t distinguish between the heart of what’s said in the New Testament, the Old Testament…”

Chelan: Oh yeah.

Pavi [reading]:

Scripture all just looks like arrows to me
pointing in.
But I can tell you what it feels like
when God crawls up my spine
or when She lights a fire in my heart
to warm Herself on.
I know the pound of Her gavel
when She says “No” in my gut
Or when Her “Yes” pops a cork in my soul
and She drinks and drinks.

I just really appreciate the visceral way in which the body is included and allowed to speak.

Chelan: Nice. Yeah. And thank you. And really, another hope is to just create a bridge for people to experience life and self and spirituality that isn’t purely conceptual but that can actually be leaned on for real support, you know, through our struggles and to also unlock joy and what not, so yeah. Thanks so much.

Pavi: We have a question from one of our listeners who asks if there are any particular conditions that are more conducive to poetry coming through you. Is there any inner preparation or life preparation or physical space? Do you try to get yourself into an open space or does it just happen?

Chelan: Yeah. Great question. Thanks so much for asking. So I never sit down to write. For better or worse, I don’t have any organized, structured writing time. Really, my main consistent practice, or it’s more of a lifestyle really, is just, when I feel pain arise in me, I just really try to tend to it. I’ve created a relationship of knowing that it’s something to steward and it’s a gift for me to understand more deeply and that there’s more self to understand there, and more energy and life force. And when I relate to it with love, that’s the key for it to open into being energy in motion rather than just a stuck, contracted place in myself. And then when I’m not moving around these obstacles of stuck energy in me, that’s when this creative flow flows and opens, if that makes sense.

So that’s really my only intention, but then yeah, other than that, things just sort of strike at random when I have done the work to be in that more open space.

Pavi: That’s an eloquent response. Julian asks, “I wonder how you deal with the fear of success. One of T.S. Eliot’s poems has the line, ‘how dare I disturb the universe.’ That speaks to me, I suppose I’m a sensitive man, but it just feels normal to me. And I feel you might know what I mean. Do you have a response to this? How do I have the nerve to show others what I can do?”

Chelan: Oh, that’s such a fantastic question. So one of my deep fears or assumptions was of seeming grandiose or something, or that I thought I was too special, or other people thinking that I thought that, in bringing forth this poetry. So that has been something to encounter -- this fear of success. And also, along with that has been working with this fear of really asking for what I want. I actually really do want to be successful. I want this to be financially viable so I can dedicate myself to it full time, so it can be sustainable.

I deeply delight in expanding connections, and this poetry almost feels like it has a mind of its own. It really does want to reach the people who it will connect with and who it will do something for. And so there really is a deep, genuine desire for, I guess, what you would call success or expansion in this way.

Mostly I’ve needed to work with obstacles to owning that. And then, reaching out to people, asking for help or asking for connections and overcoming a lot of obstacles, letting go of the idea that that means arrogance to do that, when it’s really just an advocacy for our joy. And when we can connect with that and unleash that, that’s where sustainability is. That’s when it resonates and unlocks other people’s joy. So it’s been a lot of reframing around that. I hope that answers your question, Julian.

Pavi: We have another question from Momo who asks, “What happens at the moment of a great apparent human ‘mistake,’ leading to great loss for you? Have you had that type of shock? Do you have a poem or some means of response to when you destroy something you found great value in that you were feeling entirely connected to, by a crazy mistake of your own making? Something like this happened for me today. So thus this question.”

Chelan: Oh, how interesting. What an interesting question. Well, with each poem I put out, every time I show up, including this time, there’s always the risk of, “Oh, maybe this time or this poem will be the fall-on-the-face moment. This will be the great mistake that destroys everything that was built.” That is always a possibility that feels very alive in me.

But I also think that our real fear of making mistakes is that we’ll encounter uncomfortable emotions that we won’t be able to move beyond. And that somehow we’ll just get stuck there and we’ll collapse in on that. And that will never allow us to rise and try again. I’ve really had to track this because I have had so much fear of that -- of making mistakes.

So I’ve really committed to a dogged dedication to whatever kind of humiliating slip-ups I get into, to get the tools around myself to be able to move through those inner obstacles. I have had some very embarrassing moments and all kinds of those things.

But realizing that those things don’t necessarily need to be ultimate obstacles but can actually be entryways into even more compassion for our hilarious poor selves. And then they can become great medicine and stories to share with others later, to encourage others in a more resilient process of moving forward and not letting those fears of mistakes or those experiences keep us back from sharing our wonderful gifts that are meant to be shared. Great question, Momo.

Pavi: And it strikes me that in this conversation, the word “judgment” has come up often. The word “encouragement,” the word “affirmation.” And it reminds me of another poem of yours that opens with these delightfully provocative lines.

When I opened my heart,
I caught God kissing the devil
in the bedchambers of my heart.
It was quite the scandal.

And there is almost this mischievous, thrilling delight in toppling these assumptions, these dualities between wrong and right, between good and bad, god and the devil, and it brings up this question for me: What have you experienced in the process of channeling these poems? The difference between judgment and discernment?

Chelan: Oh, what a fantastic question. Well, I feel that judgment is fear-based for me, almost every time. It’s coming from a disconnection with inherent worth. If I’m judging something, it usually is an attempt to feel better when I’m feeling like a loser and to somehow make myself seem more morally righteous or good. It draws a line that usually favors me in some kind of way. And that stems from really feeling insecure and scarce and disconnected, whereas discernment -- it’s more of this experience of wisdom, I suppose, that I actually think arises as we grow in sensitivity to our incredible inner guidance system, which we have. Discernment is a big theme, but I feel it has to do with listening to our inner wisdom and following accordingly.

Pavi: Yeah. I guess the way I hear it, it’s sort of like an inside-out blossoming perception versus something that is imposed.

Chelan: Yes. Beautiful.

Pavi: And it feels important because while no judgment is a beautiful thing, no discernment can get us into some gnarly places. And I think your poems really have discernment in them rather than judgment.

Chelan: Thank you so much.

Pavi: We have a couple of questions that came in from two different listeners who were curious about and touched by the process that you had as a young child, with your mother transcribing your poems. And they were wondering whether those poems still exist somewhere. And whether they will reach the light of the publishing world some time.

Chelan: Oh, that’s so sweet. Yes, my amazing mom. Every night she would create an environment for me to pray from my heart -- which is what I wanted to do when I was little. I would spout off these three-year-old mystical poems that she would write down. And she did. I wish I had them. She sent me one recently. I thought, actually, last night that they would be fun to have, but I forgot to get it. And so there’s one in particular. She might have more. I’ll ask her to find it and I’ll share it on my Facebook page today. You can find it just using my name and find it there if you’d like.

Pavi: Yeah, that’s wonderful. Those questions were from Rebecca and Sheila.

And then we have another question from Christina, who says, “You mentioned creating a space of safety and peace in your mind. I’ve been trying to work with strong feelings that come up around fear and worry, and would like to create that safe place and be able to be kind toward these parts of me so that I can heal and share my gifts. How has that process worked for you?”

Chelan: Oh, what a good question. Yeah. Well, I really needed a lot of help in being able to move into these feelings. We have a lot of protective mechanisms around going in because it’s an unknown journey. It can feel really terrifying. And so I want to honor that it’s been hard, to whatever degree there’s been resistance. There’s been wisdom because we really need support around ourselves. We need the the right tools. We need wise helpers to steward us. I really was very fortunate to find some incredible tools and practitioners that were extraordinary. And without them, I wouldn’t have been able to do that. So hypnotherapy for me has been really my mainstay tool, which created such a safe environment in me that it felt like I could absolutely go exploring all of these old pains. Now it became more of a curiosity than a terror. And then certain tools have worked more at that somatic level, certain energy work and different healing modalities like that.

So I really urge finding help because a lot of these pains are rooted in early childhood when not only do we have this experience of the pain, but we also feel so helpless on top of that. So that helplessness can be activated when we try to go into that and we can really enter a terrified child state. And so we really do need this beautiful co-regulating support often of another being, and to just really own the need for that, if that’s true for you, and allow yourself that. I’ll just say a prayer that you find exactly the right people for you, and that all the right doors open for just the most profound process of healing and transformation.

Pavi: In your response and in so much of your work, there’s such a play of paradox, and what you just spoke to speaks to this seeming paradox between safety and vulnerability. And these lines from one of your poems, I absolutely loved, where you declare:

I am a poet and I will not stop plucking you

from the small boat of your safety.

And tossing you into the thrashing sea of your light.

And I was wondering about that. How that experience -- safety being such a necessary thing for moving through trauma.

Chelan: Yes.

Pavi: And yet there’s also -- it seems like an imperative to move beyond conditions of safety into that thrashing sea. And if you could speak to that a bit from your experience.

Chelan: Oh, thank you. What an intelligent and nuanced thing to put your finger on, Pavi. Well, I just am so grateful to have really had an experience. And when you have these experiences, they just can’t be denied. It’s kind of like how when a child learns how to walk, they can’t unlearn how to walk again.

So I’ve really been so incredibly fortunate to have had a real experience of inherent worth and light that is unshakeable. And that absolutely, it was just so obvious that this is a universal thing. And so having felt and experienced that, there is so much safety and that experience of original innocence, inherent light, inherent worth -- connecting with that frames these other more relative struggles in a different light -- as parts of a process to steward rather than ultimate conditions, if that makes sense.

So I guess what I often try to do in my poetry is to affirm the truth of that light, and in so doing, hopefully encourage people to do all they might to figure out how to move through this old limiting conditioning that we also have on the path to this true light, and to take up the willingness and the courage to set foot on that journey.

Pavi: Do your poems ever startle you? Do you feel like they are a little ahead on the road and you’re running to meet them. Or do you feel like they’ve already settled into you and they’re just arising?

Chelan: It’s such a great question. Yeah. So they feel that they’re very much for me as much as for anyone. So there was a time when I had some definite imposter syndrome, like, “Oh God, that doesn’t represent where I’m at. Can I share that? Is it an integrity to share that?” And I realized, oh, it absolutely is. And it’s a reminder. These poems are reminders. They’re lights to focus on, on this winding path of being a human with all of these different parts of ourselves operating. The poem that really shocked me the most was “Say ‘Wow!’” which was the first one, which was “What was that?” It was such a new experience. But now they just feel like these wonderful reminders and messages, and like an inner chiropractic experience, too, of just getting things back into alignment or awareness of what alignment even could potentially look like one day.

Pavi: We are so close to the end of the call, but I’d like to try and squeeze in a couple of brief questions from listeners, before asking our final question. So I’ll read the two questions and then you can answer them together.

This is from Janessa. “Have your children been a source for your poetry and how do you balance motherhood and your calling?”

And then the next question is from Kate and she asks, “Do you record your poems in longhand or on your computer?”

Chelan: Great questions. Janessa? Is that Janessa Wilder? Hi Janessa.

Oh my God. Parenting, right? Whoa. Yeah. Parenting is a whopper. Parenting is such a crucible for the mind-body-soul psyche, because we love our children more than anything. And so then we’re forced to encounter every limitation to relation. This deep soul love is activated, and then we need to encounter every limitation and relational wound in terms of creating a relational environment where that incredible love can be channeled and can reach our children. And so it’s the most humbling journey of my life without a doubt. And it’s the one I’m most dedicated to, and it’s the hardest.

So actually my kids are the primary inspiration for the heart and healing work that I do, which then leads to the poetry, but I don’t write poems about my kids. But they definitely have activated a more accelerated process of just deeply wanting to integrate and heal and be more accepting and be more present.

In terms of integrating or finding time for the calling amidst parenting, there’s a quote from the Bahá’í writings that I love so much that says, “Where there is love, nothing is too much trouble and there is always time.” And I feel that that’s really been true for me with poetry. It has somehow felt there is an abundance of time. Whereas if I was doing something else, it might feel very crammed and untenable. And so, I think because it’s so nourishing and it’s so driven by genuine love and excitement, somehow that just works.

Pavi: And what about how you record your poems?

Chelan: Yes. Good question. Oh my gosh, I’ve got this hilarious pile of envelopes and paper coffee cups, and receipts and things with scrawled poetry all over them. It’s absurd. So I’ve got a pile of that. Just whatever I can grab at the moment. And then also I’ve got a whole stack on my phone too. It’s really whatever is around that I can grab quickest to put the words down on.

Pavi: Wonderful. Well, we are at the end of our call, but if you don’t mind, we’ll just go a little over to ask a question that we ask all our guests. And then I’ll invite Mark to do our closing gratitude.

And if there’s anything that you’d like to share before we close, whether it’s a poem or just anything that comes up spontaneously, we will close with that.

The question that we ask everyone who’s a guest on this podcast is, How can we, as the broader ServiceSpace and Awakin Calls community, be of service to your work and your vision in the world?

Chelan: My God. You all, I’m just continually blown away by you all. And just the quality of honoring and support and encouragement. Wow. It’s just like cherry on top after cherry on top with you folks. Thank you. Goodness. Specifically, I don’t know the specifics, but this is such an incredible joy to me -- being able to connect with these platforms to connect and share my work. And so if there are any other spaces or opportunities for that, I would be so, so honored and delighted to show up. Or if there are any places to share my poetry that feel like they would be of benefit that would be such a fantastic honor as well. And, that’s the primary thing, just finding avenues for this work to be shared. It’s such a joy for me. So thank you with all my heart.

Pavi. Wonderful. And over to you, Mark, for closing us out here.

Mark: Wow, wow, wow.

Chelan: Can I interrupt? Can I say something tiny before you go?

I just need to honor in that recorded poem of mine with the beautiful music in the background -- I just need to honor the musician that I’m doing an album with right now. His name is Jacob Mateo Houk, and he’s a Danish composer and he’s extraordinary.

So I just needed to say his name.

Mark: And I would also like to give a shout out to Mary Reed, who’s been very influential, and I know you absolutely wanted to touch upon that connection, but we just unfortunately ran out of time. So Mary Reed, if you’re listening, you mean so much to Chelan.

So I would like to encourage anyone who’s been touched by anything that Chelan has shared to check out her Facebook page. There’s a real thriving community there of other poets, Chelan fans (which I count myself among), but also, she brilliantly reaches out to all these artists to accompany a visual piece of art with each of the poems. And some of those are just spectacular.

Rumi famously wrote: “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” Chelan is hanging out in that field and she’s saying, “Come on over. It’s really cool.” And she’s just throwing the most epic picnics.

So my expression of gratitude, Chelan, would be to ask if you might share one closing poem, which is so remarkable, about the improbability of this one-in-30 trillion-chance of us existing at all.

Chelan: I’d be delighted. And that this poem -- just pretend it’s written for you, whoever’s listening to this right now. Okay. Thank you all so much. This has been an incredible gift and honor. All right. This one’s not yet titled, so I’ll just dive right in.

They say there’s a one in 30 trillion chance of you existing at all,

But I think that’s a conservative estimate.

When you factor in that a universe happened to explode from something the size of a marble or a pinprick,

We immediately move beyond incalculability, and adding the unlikelihood that the destruction of that blast would have created a vast city of stars with a place tucked into it called Earth

That would be soft and fertile enough to accommodate the holy and mysterious concept of mother that could recreate and birth life,

The odds become wilder yet.

And then that the waves of this mighty thing we’ve come to call the sea had some great tidal moment that washed your sea-born squid-like prehistoric ancestors into each other’s arms or tentacles or fins to procreate the possibility of you.

Or consider all the phenomena that led a later ancestor out of his cave to follow a trail of pheromones toward your hairy, very great, great grandmother to grunt at her in some alluring way,

Or simply that your mother held a magical jewel inside of her that carried half of the potential of your DNA, which is just scientific jargon for the scripture of you.

And that a magnetic force called love is here that pulls us toward each other.

What is the equation for water existing to quench your longing for it,

Or that an asteroid crashed into the dinosaurs at just the right moment to give mammals the possibility of ascendance.

Or that each ice age froze and thawed timed just-so

To create the propitious conditions for life’s waters to flow in your direction.

How might we sum up the truth that you would not be here

Were it not for every other luminous pulse and beat and song and swell of this magnificent wonder-drenched system of stars and death and wombs and the great explosion of life?

What exponents would suffice to express that every minute and magnificent happening throughout the eternity of beginningless time has necessitated your life?

There is no number we could give that could equal the astronomical mystery of life’s grand total of you.

You are unbelievable,

As unlikely as God.

Dear one, we just have to round it all up to miracle.

Mark: Thank you so much, Chelan.

Chelan: Thank you so much.

***

For more inspiration you can read Chelan's poem "The Worst Thing" here, and follow her unfolding dance through her Facebook page.