My Dharma

It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!

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It’s possible to go wild again, says the woman sitting next to me
over breakfast this January morning at the monastery. 
There are neurons in our hearts and guts, 
she says, and we fail to heed them because we’ve filled our minds 
with language. I’ve just met this woman 
sitting here at this table by the ox-herding pictures. 
She tells me she’s a farmer and that she speaks to the earth. 
Getting messy is my dharma, she says. The soil is alive 
and it wants us to listen.  

I live in the city, where my fingers never touch the soil. 
I have to seek the wilderness inside, I say, among 
our cups and bowls and my children’s many 
miniature cars and trucks. My dharma is simple. 
I wake in the dark to write poems by hand, and the words 
rise up from inside of me, unbidden. 
They want me to listen.

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Rachael Nevins’s poetry, essays, and book reviews have appeared in Brooklyn Poets Anthology, Literary Mama, Hazlitt, the Ploughshares blog, and elsewhere, as well as in her newsletter, The Variegated Life. She expects to complete her degree in Library and Information Studies at Queens College of the City University of New York in May, and her chapbook, Only Provisional, is forthcoming from Ethel in March. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.