When I start a new diary for a new year I like to take a moment to reflect on the coming year and my hopes and desires. I don't believe in setting new year's resolutions, but I do find it powerful to reflect on my new year's intentions - not a commitment, but a starting direction.
One of the themes of reviewing last year's diary is that 2022 was a year of *big feelings*. Big joy, big disappointments, and everything jumbled and in between. Much more vibrant than ever, thanks to my ongoing progress in inner work, trauma healing and emotional processing learning. It was a complicated feeling of satisfaction for me to look upon my summary of everything I felt in 2022, and notice how much more I was in touch with it all than ever before.
For my new year's intentions of 2023, one of the themes is to express more of these feelings: in songs, in dance, in writing, and in poetry.
I’ve been partial to writing poetry since I was a kid, but it's a refrain of my inner critic that writing poetry in public as an adult, particularly the mediocre, unpractised poetry I am likely to produce, is pretty cringy. My inner critic is not as loud as it was before working on my healing though, and it no longer runs an inner dictatorship over what I choose to do. In the collaborative clamor of my inner free-for-all, the winning faction's voice now declares: “I hear you, inner critic, but we now enjoy enough self-esteem between us 15 inner children in an adult-human-suit that we can do cringy things if we think they're fun. So we're posting our poetry on the internet.”
So to break the ice, here's what January 2nd, 2023 offered me.
Past
Show me where the past is
can you point it out?
If only I could see it so I would not be in doubt
When I look around me, all I see is now
You tell me you have seen “before”?
Please, show me how
How do I hear a song of yesterday
How do I see a face that's passed away
How do I walk a road that's now a lake
How do I fix a younger me's mistake?
If the past exists
why does it hide
out of sight
If the past is real
why can't old wrongs
be put right
I don't know what to do
is a moment still enough
with the seconds that we count
the clock ticking steady
So tell me what to do
when the memories fill me up
and the feelings weigh me down
like rocks in my belly?