When finding my way, I came home from college to have a classic argument with my father. Over dinner the first night, I declared to him with excitement that I was a poet. I hadn’t yet written anything but knew it was true. He was incredulous and frustrated and loudly asked, “How are you going to make a living?” I’m not sure where it came from in me, but I looked at him and said, “I’m going to live a making.” I confess that I’ve spent much of my life learning what that means. And it is living a making for so many years that has led me to the place of true meeting that waits under all our struggles.

I have learned that making a living is tending the assignments that come from “without” while living a making is tending the assignments that come from “within.” Making a living is how we survive, but living a making is how we thrive. We need the strength and resilience to do both.

Even if it takes years, it is important to heal the wounded places, so we can recover the full use of our heart. For the parts of our heart that are left wounded and unresolved remain preoccupied and not available for us to use in living. If unprocessed, the wounded places become dark and hard. Being vulnerable allows us to recover our heart, because being vulnerable and tender allows our wounds to soften and heal.

There was a particular moment of perception that transformed me completely. I had had a bone-marrow sampling and a spinal tap during the same hospital visit. Afterward, I was sent home a bit battered and told to lie still for six to eight hours, because moving before the spinal fluid had a chance to regenerate would cause a migraine. Well, it was hard for me to be still, and every time I moved, I was thrust back down on the couch in pain.

It was as if the force of life was insisting that I be still. When I was, I finally looked out the window to see an apple tree in my front yard. I had seen this tree a hundred times, yet never really looked at it. Now, unable to move without inducing pain, I was forced into a moment of indigenous perception. Seeing the apple tree freshly, it came alive, and I listened to the tree for the very first time.

Strange as it was, the apple tree spoke to me, not in words but with a bare presence that said, “When you survive this, there will be no more making things up. When you survive, you will only bear witness to the truth of things as they are.”

A tribe migrates west because they are being persecuted. They emigrate into the mountains. They settle on a plateau and, together, they clear that part of the forest and build their homes, creating a settlement, which the elder of the tribe names Crestview. In time, their children are born where they have arrived, into a place where they wake each day in a clearing with a view of the vastness.

The paradox at the center of this small story is that sometimes we have to make pilgrimage to live in the open in order to have a view of the vastness of life, and sometimes we are in debt to those before us for what we assume is a birthright. Sometimes, we have to stand on the commitment and hard work of others. Yet, there are other passages in life that everyone has to journey through by themselves.

Every life within every generation must struggle between the appearance of nothing and the appearance of everything. When hurt and unable to explain pain and loss, we are tempted to make a god of nothing, banishing all that is connective about light. Similarly, when touched by kindness and lifted by inexplicable grace, we are tempted to make a god of everything, wanting to exile the genuine difficulties of being alive. But the tides of life are always replete with both everything and nothing, as they mix within us and around us.

Poetry is a portal, a means of perception. All art is. And just as we can see the very energy of existence through a microscope, we can see the vibrancy at the center of all life through our heart or our mind, when we are clear of bias and noise. Under all the shaping of words, poetry is the threshold of perception through which we taste the shimmer of Spirit that informs everything.

The word “perceive” and the word “receive” have the same Latin root, percipere which means “to understand,” from per which means “entirely” and capere which means “to take.” To perceive, then, means “to take things in entirely, completely, in a way that covers us with understanding.”

But first, we must put down our screens and filters. Once life enters us, then it is useful to discern what has entered. But often we block the true gift of perception by sorting things before they reach us and touch us.

I take my time, looking for what [lasts]…

—Tao Ch’ien

We are constantly challenged to marry what is with what can be. If we only bear witness to the trials of existence, we will be weighed down by the burdens of time. If we only pine after what is possible and ideal, we will become airy, romantic, and completely removed from the embodiment of life. So these questions of practice remain: What are the tools by which you stay grounded but not buried in the ground? And what are the tools by which you are lifted but not removed from all that is real? Staying grounded but not buried and lifted but not removed is how we repair, reimagine, and rebuild the world.