Poem: December 5, 2019

The Writing Life

There is a good bit of irony
in writing to be mindful.

The nature of writing
is not being present.
The nature of writing
is being past.

To write about experience
is to be present
in the writing
perhaps, if one is
conscious of the pen,
the paper, the pause,
the gathering and planting.

More likely, writing is
an act of being present
to not experience,
not even memory of experience,
but to meaning
strained from memory
which is its own
filter of experience.

Writing is distilling
and steeping
and playing with the settings,
cropping and combining,
layering and stripping away
and saturating,
separating the wheat,
as they say, from the chaff.

Writing is the long way
to mindfulness.

We take the orange,
extract the juice,
strain the pulp,
and drink what's left
to experience
the orange.