No Pause Between
Hello all,
Welcome back to our beautiful, chaotic, and messy shores. I hope you’re feeling healthy, happy, alive, and overall, everything positive. It’s been quite some time since we’ve connected through a journal entry, and I’ve missed it with everything in me. Truthfully, over the course of these last few months I have been so caught up in life. Between school, work, my first poetry book “Upside Down”, and writing my second book… which I’ve already written 50+ poems for (although I doubt all 50+ will make the cut). I decided to take this summer off from writing to immerse myself in this beautiful yet fucked up reality. However, reality hasn’t been totally fucked… this summer was actually one of the most beautiful summer’s I have ever experienced. I found myself on white sand beaches, drinking margaritas with the love of my life, partying under the most beautiful, bright city lights with the most ravishing friends you could think of… with a few being some I had just met that night, and talking to the birds and trees that are outside of my second floor apartment, routinely, while I wait for my coffee to brew at seven in the morning. In these moments of living out the beauty, I have also been met with a feeling of discrepancy…
Since I am in school and majoring in psychology, most of my classes revolve around the field. However, to meet the full credits and requirements for my degree, I have had to pick up a few elective classes, in which I chose writing and poetry classes. Before learning that I had to pick out a few electives, I had just started getting into some of the “pioneer” poets works, such as Sylvia Plath, Robert Frost, and Walt Whitman (just to name a few), so this had a great influence on my decision. As the time came to start these writing and poetry classes, I started to realize that every week one of my professors was giving us the same prompt over and over again for an assignment: “What can I do to help you become a better writer?” Me being a writer in real life, I took this as an opportunity to really see what works in my own writings and what doesn’t. After I’d submit my assignment, my professor would review and leave feedback comments to show areas that need more developing, areas that are easily convey the theme to the reader, etc.… However, within the last two weeks of this specific writing class, my professor left a comment on one of my writing assignments that hit me a lot harder than I expected… she said, “your writings are strong, but I can tell that you separate your heart and your mind when you write, and you shouldn’t. You must let them collaborate when it comes to writing certain genres, poems, etc....” As I read this, I felt my world stop for a minute. I felt figured out, yet somewhat uncomfortable in the best way. How could a stranger, whom I’d never met in person, figure me out by just my words? After pondering this thought in my mind, I opened my journal to read a few poems and writings back to see if I could find what my professor pointed out for myself… and I did. Within each poem there it was, my heart written on one line and my mind on the other, with the only thing separating the two being a comma… a pause.
So, this summer I learned to remove the comma out of reality. I learned that if you remove the pause, the line doesn’t break, it flows. Maybe that’s what reality really is: not choosing between heart and mind but learning how to let them speak in the same breath at the same time.
Thank you so much for taking your time and energy to read this week’s journal. It fills me with gratitude more than I could ever honestly express. Make sure to sail these beautiful, chaotic, and messy shores back here next week for more…
Until then,
With great love always,
M.H. John