Poetic Will & Choosing the Impossible
Choosing to awaken what is beyond choice
When something is poetic, it awakens what is beyond its medium.
In poetry, words awaken what is beyond words.
In painting, the visual awakens what is beyond the visual.
In music, sound awakens what is beyond sound.
When I investigate will inside myself, I find that the medium of will is choice. To will something is to choose, to decide on it with your whole being.
In poetic will, choice awakens what is beyond choice.
There are many things you can't just choose. Sleep, for example. Enlightenment, for another. Love. Kundalini awakening. The Perfect September Afternoon.
They can't be planned or engineered, you can't flip a switch and attain them. It's not a matter of arranging things correctly or just putting in the legwork.
There's a degree of grace, of surrender.
There's a dynamic where the universe lets you have everything you want, but only after you no longer crave it.
There are many ways for a thing to be beyond choice.
There's choosing and there's choosing.
I'm used to choosing meaning that something is available, and it's up to me to say yes to it. At which point, it is of course mine.
Then there's choosing, the choice of poetic will. A choice that is completely yours. It has nothing to do with whether the thing you choose becomes yours or not. You can simply choose it. You can choose it once and for all, and keep choosing it every day, and you can stay entirely free of any expectation that anything will ever happen. That it will ever come to you. That you could ever reach out and get it.
You can just choose, with your whole being.
You can let that choice do its work on your whole being.
The choosing is not quite its own reward — reward is the wrong frame entirely. But the choice is something alive. It is a way of being immanently, defiantly Present in your self and your life.
What else is there?
I'm a big fan of doing the impossible. I keep meeting impossible people, watching them do impossible things. I keep absorbing their casual fulfilment of the impossible, and throwing my own impossibilities back at them.
It's a trip, I love it.
I choose the impossible, again and again. What else is there?
The word want invokes a lack. To be wanting of something is to not have it.
There's something graspy about wanting; a vacuum, a hole to be filled. Wanting is for children — children lack so much and it must be given to them. Their lot is to want and want and want.
Until they can choose.
Choosing is for grown-ups.
Choosing has no lack. Choosing from poetic will expects nothing, nothing beyond the solidity of being one who chooses.
Poetic will is an acknowledgment of what wants to be present, rather than of the feeling that something is absent.
To choose is to take responsibility.
You can want and want and want, forever and ever, and hope someone will bring you what you want. In wanting, you don't have to think about the consequences. You can want a gallon of ice cream and not think about how sick it will make you.
But when you choose a gallon of ice cream — before the words have left you, you already realize what you're saying. What you're taking on. What will happen if you complete this choice.
Maybe you just choose not to choose stuff like that.
When you choose, the world gets clearer. You sort out your wants and realize how many of them you can drop.
And the ones you don't drop — they stop being hooks and become simple realities in the back of your chest. They are simply choices you've made. You may or may not ever have the fruit of that choice, but no one can take the choice itself from you. The choice lives in you and drives you.
Poetic will bends reality.
I'm sorry if that doesn't fit your world model, but you should get a better world model.
Choosing bends reality. You open a portal. You tap a future on the shoulder and watch it turn towards you.
I choose trust. I choose stewardship. I choose liberation. I choose poetry and peach-pink glow and Home. I choose metis. I choose worship. I choose prayer. I choose trust. I choose Kali and I choose Shiva and I choose magic and I choose Aion. I choose Shoshi. I choose ambition. I choose the cathedral between Time. I choose wyrlding and gravity. I choose (oh god don't say it don't say it don't be cringe) love. I choose love.
I choose the mammal and the serpent. I choose eros. I choose the vast riches all around me, all around you. I choose impossibly good mentors and teachers. I choose peerless peers and friends. I choose collective awakening and awakened collectives. I choose writing and art and transmission. I choose terma. I choose intimacy with Reality, intimacy with intelligent energies, intimacy with my own being, my own rasa.
I choose to wake the gods.
I choose to make whole the goddess.
I choose to renew the sacred.
I choose resonance.
Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.
Wake up, wake up — don't waste a moment.
We’re putting together funding for my primary teacher, Rosa Lewis, to run more retreats. Retreats with her have been some of the most impactful events on my life and path — if you resonate with the path I’m on, and/or with Rosa’s work, please consider giving a gift to this fund.
Someone restacked this article… just so I could land on it in my feed #grateful
so good! this piece is poetic. it’s message goes so far beyond the words.