Rediscovering Poetry: Creative Inspiration for Your Life and Business

I’m delighted to have business expert and author Dr. Minette Riordan as my guest!

January 1^st is a few short weeks away. Many people, including me, are already turning our sights to the New Year, putting plans into place or dreaming about what is possible. Planning can feel fun or it can feel intimidating and overwhelming. Dreaming, on the other hand, is fun and open-ended. Creativity has a place in both planning and dreaming. When we tap into our innate creative spirit, suddenly the light shines brighter and new avenues of possibility are illuminated.

I want to stake a creative claim for the power of poetry to provide creative illumination for your life and your business. I have never been a big fan of setting goals in January. Too often those goals were really just tasks I thought I should focus on, not heart-centered experiences or achievements I was working towards. I have found that poetry can inspire both dreaming and planning for the future. The questions posed by some of my favorite poets over the years have helped me to break my heart wide open and experience a new level of clarity around where I want to be and where I want to go.

You may be thinking: “Poetry? Are you crazy?” Perhaps you are remembering your high school English class and the embarrassing task of being asked to interpret one of Shakespeare’s sonnets or decipher Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.” I am here to encourage you to try again. There is something about reading poetry as an adult that is a completely different experience than reading it at 13 or even 21. Suddenly it seems accessible and relatable in way it didn’t in school.

I have always been a lover of poetry. I love to read poetry and would rather receive a complete anthology of Robert Blake’s poems for my birthday than flowers. I still find Shakespeare’s sonnets obscure and prefer modern poets like Mary Oliver and ancient mystics like Mirabai and Rumi.

What I love about poetry is that it takes me by surprise, reminds me to breathe and inspires me to create. I love to illustrate poems. I write them in my journal and use them as writing prompts. I incorporate poetry into many of my journaling and creative programs. Poetry helps to set the mood and to open people to the possibility of their own creativity. I share poems with my clients when they need a lift or reminder of their own brilliance. Poetry is a beautiful mirror of reality seen through the lenses of personal metaphor as captured by the poet. We all see life through the lenses of story and history, place and time. Poetry reminds us of our natural tendency to see the world in metaphors and highlights our natural creativity.

I want to share a couple of my favorite poems with you here as well as a process of creatively connecting to poetry. I invite you to just play. There is no pressure, no one will be graded on their work. Trust in the possibility that a poem will break your heart wide-open to the potential that 2015 holds.

The Black Cat

by Kenneth Collier

We try to find a silent black cat in an empty, dark room. We blindfold ourselves –
maybe blindness will help us see in the dark.
We grope madly this way and that and finally
Declare with conviction, there is no cat.

Then we sit, still and silent,
and the black cat crawls into our lap and purrs.

The creative inspiration process:

1. Read the poem silently and then read it out loud. Read it again, savor it.
2. Take out your journal – write the poem in your journal.
3. Add some doodles or illustrations or even collage. Tell your inner critic to take a break! Be playful.
4. Now write about the poem. Write anything that comes to you.
5. Finally, answer this question as you think about planning for 2015: where in your life are you seeking a black cat in a dark room and would benefit from allowing the cat to find you?

The Journey

by Mary Oliver

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice–
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do–
determined to save
the only life you could save.

Repeat the creative inspiration process:

1. Read the poem silently and then read it out loud. Read it again, savor it.
2. Take out your journal – write the poem in your journal or just write the lines that strike you.
3. Add some doodles or illustrations. This would be a beautiful poem to create an entire collage about. Tell your inner critic to take a break! Be playful and intentional.
4. Now write about the poem. Write anything that comes to you.
5. Finally, answer this question as you think about planning for 2015: what can you do to connect with that new voice that is uniquely yours? who might you need to let go of in 2015? what do you need to do to save your life? Take your time, maybe connect with a friend as you reflect on your answers. Remember to be playful and curious with your answers. Allow your own words to illuminate new possibilities, new connections that you want to make next year.

Images Creative Commons via Pixabay