I woke this morning to the scent of the tropics wafting on the breeze. The tailwind of a hurricane blowing off Baja has been whipping the coastline, stirring up monstrous waves, and finally made its way over the coastal hills into my backyard.

I felt I was back at sea again, sailing on La Gitana: warm perfumed air, salty and musky, drifting in from some tropical island full of fruit and flowers and swaying palms, finding me where I sat on deck drinking my morning coffee.

I was there again. As if no time at all had passed. As if I could look out on the surface of the ocean sparkling with morning sun, hear my children stirring in their bunks, my husband hustling up breakfast in the galley below, the seabirds with their strange, mysterious cries as they dive and rise . . . .

Do we ever grow up? Do we ever get old? Or is some part of us still alive in the past, some of part of that youth still stirring our old bones, “still in love with life and full of beans” as Mary writes in her poem.

Self-Portrait by Mary Oliver

I wish I was twenty and in love with life
and still full of beans.
Onward, old legs! There are the long, pale dunes;
on the other side the roses are blooming
and finding their labor no adversity
to the spirit.
Upward, old legs! There are the roses,
and there is the sea
shining like a song, like a body
I want to touch
though I'm not twenty
and won't be again 
but ah! seventy.
And still in love with life.
And still full of beans

I too have written self-portrait poems. Ones that depict something of that inner spirit that never grows old, that speaks to a part of me that I think, I hope, is embedded in the world around me, the world I love. Like this love poem to myself blown in on a tropical breeze this morning to whisper in my ear: “Here you are my love and always will be.”

That age-old question “who am I?”

. . . haunts us from birth. We sense we are more than what we seem to be, more than the sum of our parts, more than this thread of life that spans so short a distance.

Sometimes a felt-sense of that “something more” emerges in consciousness with a ring of clarity–then fades just as quickly.

Sometimes if we are quick or lucky or persistent, we capture what we sensed in a word or image, a poem or song.

What we capture is always an echo of what we’re trying to get at, a finger pointing to the moon, not the thing itself.

The following poem tries to capture some of that. I titled it “entelechy,” which denotes both the perfect essence of an object or person, and that which propels it toward self-fulfillment. 

I could have better titled it “Self-Portrait,” I think.

Entelechy

I am spare.

I am clean uncluttered space.

I am a fine line curving inward and out.

I am a high sweet note wrung from the still air.

I am a cup of cool water drawn from the clear stream.

I am bone bleached and bare, tossed upon a windswept shore.

Taste and see,

I am spare.

In some ways, this poem is like a prayer. When I am confused or out of sorts, I turn to it to remind me of that something more or something deeper that I am at heart. Meditating upon these images brings me home to myself.

The Artwork by Sohan Qadri Featured Here

It captures for me, so beautifully, that same essence. I wrote about his artwork years ago.

“Art can have the same effect as meditation,” he tells us, “but only if we drop our constantly interpretating mind and learn to simply see . . . . This can happen if you grasp the painting at a subliminal level, let it filter in through your pores.”

“As writers and artists,” I wrote, “we are seeking to move beyond ourselves, dip our pens and brushes into the deep storehouse of the unconscious, the rich field of the imagination, where colors and forms and images and emotions flow.

“The best writing, the best art, for me is when we feel the presence of the creator behind the creator, and recognize, if only for a moment, the face of our larger selves.”

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I wonder if all the characters I write about carry a tiny piece of me?

I do see myself in Franny, Kay, Cal, and Walter, the characters I wrote about in When Things Go Missing, even while they are all so different from each other.

I suppose we writers do pull them out of ourselves: our subconscious, our dreams.

Although when writing the novel it felt more like they were visitations, whispering their stories in my ear, or shouting them in some cases. I became them for a while, that’s for sure. It was sometimes a lovely, intense, or even harrowing experience.

But I think you’ll like them: Kay, Cal, Walter, even Fran, Richard, Dawn, Ivey. Maybe even come to love them, as I did.

I hope you’ll give them a chance to steal your hearts as they did mine.

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