You see, a funny thing happened on the way to being a poet. At first, I was excited to bear witness to the mysteries of life. But, feeling chronically insecure, I kept returning to an unspoken need to be recognized for my efforts, and out of this, I grew an ambition to be great, the way a camel grows a hump. All of this twisted my journey to one of getting attention instead of giving attention, to seeking recognition instead of recognizing the life around me. I wanted to be verified for every poem I wrote, when the vitalities of life only reveal themselves to those who verify what is living. When most needy, I wanted to be great instead of being true.

All of this changed for two seemingly opposite experiences which stretched my sense of autobiography beyond just writing about my life to tending the ongoing relationship between writing (the life of expression) and living (the internal search for meaning) and how one continually affects the other.

The first experience was a vision for an epic poem that seized me when I was twenty-six and which took ten years to birth and create. This resulted in my second book, Fire Without Witness, a poem that explores the mythic and biblical voices that inhabit Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling. This has been my deepest dive into the Unconscious. The whole enterprise was not about my life at all. I was called to explore a symphony of voices that I turned myself over to, putting my heart and mind and all my sensibilities into those characters. It was like pouring the water of my self into different shaped glasses. Yet, quite unexpectedly, doing so formed me inwardly and guided my life.

The voices and lives of these characters, when I could listen, became wise teachers. Turning myself over completely—by writing my way into the life outside myself—transformed me, enlarged me, humbled me, and healthfully broke my image of myself.

In fact, the unearthing of this material was even, in moments, prophetic. At one point, I imagined a tired Michelangelo tending a knot on a rib in his back, sore from hours of painting overhead; this, three years before I had a tumerous rib removed from my back.

This brings me to the other seemingly opposite experience that transformed me, my experience with cancer. Interestingly, as a poet, I was devoted to retrieving and surfacing my material, following the model of Michelangelo, who carved to release the statue already waiting inside the stone. But mysteriously, as life happened, I became the figure waiting in the stone, waiting to be carved and released by the hard sculpting of experience.