Stepping into poetry

As I continue to seek ways to co-become as nature, I have stumbled upon poetry. I was reading Eugendup by Giles Watson recently at the beach, and came across this passage:

Poetry is not “therapy”, or a way of holding onto self, as it is often marketed as being: it is an end in itself. But when we write poems that grow out of direct, specific experience of nature - in other words, out of unsolicited encounters with completely other and unexpected beings - they can become the spell we weave that dissolves our sense of self and sets us free from constraints. We lose ourselves in place, and find ourselves dissolved and re-formed, like the utterly liquidated caterpillar which is reconstituting its being inside the chrysalis.

Reading this text encouraged me to pen something, there on the beach. I had a notebook, as usual, and so I did. Here is what I wrote, just to try out this way of dissolving the sense of self.

Neptune’s necklace coats the rocks

Where water pools, it floats

Beyond, the kelp swirls in the waves

Nearby a seashell slides down a rock

The rocks still puzzle me

So easy to experience

So hard to draw

The kids return

Scrambling over the rocks

Their feet toughened from their sharp edges

I wonder if my daughter has found cowries

Her mood will tell me so

It feels good. To enter this moment, of moods, and wind and sounds. Halting the thinking in my mind to just sit with, and wonder about, what is present. I would like to do it more. Not to perfect anything, but to practice being, in the moment, in relation. To let the pen flow and see what it reveals.