A lot has been said about finding one’s voice. I have been honing the process for years. I have been quietly going to writing workshops and classes and writing poetry in my notebooks for a very long time. Somewhere in storage is a box that contains years worth of journals chronicling my life and my writing path. The first one is one I started in grade nine at the age of fourteen. I am here in my Seattle condo surrounded by boxes of books, papers, and weird little mementos that I have saved. I am slowly working on making this place one I can comfortably live and work in. It’s going to take a while.
Last week I read publicly for the first time in a long time. I was pleasantly surprised by the reception I received. It was at the Seattle Public Library as part of the “It’s About Time” series. It’s a long running series founded by one of my teachers, Esther Helfgott. I was fortunate to stumble into becoming one of her students because I was hanging out at a coffee shop where her students were giving a reading. One of her students saw that I was writing and said “You should take this class” , some how she just knew that I was in need of a teacher, so I did. I spent many evenings writing and reading and learning about poetry from Esther and her students.
The reading last week had a small enthusiastic audience. One of the other readers is a director and I was spurred on by her encouraging smile and nods. It was almost as if she was directing me. I felt her approval and her appreciation from the front row. When something I said resonated with her she would nod as if to say “Yes, that’s right, that’s the way you want to say it “ she is someone I hope to have in my life as a friend and fellow creator. I was given encouragement by others in the audience and that was like medicine. It was just what I needed.
I returned home from a writing retreat in Santa Fe, NM last May and I wrote an email to a friend telling her that my life’s purpose is now to keep poetry flowing, in my life and in the world. My life’s purpose includes other things like eating as many blueberries and as much watermelon as I can for breakfast and wearing flip flops as often as I can. After years of being a nurse in a setting where “Business Casual” wasn’t as casual as I wanted it to be I am ready to splash on cologne, wear blue jeans every day, and wear open toed shoes. I am ready to begin again. Pulling out a fresh notebook and writing my life is another one of my life’s purposes.
My retirement from the nursing profession has given me the opportunity and time to use the voice that I have spent so many years developing. I hesitate to call it finding my voice because it wasn’t lost. It’s been here waiting for me to use it with the skills I have been honing for so long.
It took me a while to recover from the trauma of being a nurse and to get myself on a path of self caring and one that serves my creativity, but I’m here for it now. I am open to what wants to be written.