I Wrote A New Poem. It Opened A Door

The mind is a cage. Here's the key.

Hello Sweet Community,

Recently, I have been navigating the most challenging part of my journey through cancer thus far. I faced the difficult decision to leave a clinical trial that had become too toxic for my body, and have been actively seeking new treatment options that feel right for me. I am so grateful for how patient you have all been during this time. I haven’t posted as regularly as I had hoped. It was a necessary and nourishing silence, but the call of my pen has been loud as of late. I’m excited to share a poem I just finished writing. As you’ll see, the piece speaks to the inner conflict between my calculating mind—relentless in its pursuit of logic and proof—and my boundless spirit, which moves with intuition and wonder.

Throughout my life, my mind has often been a misguided machine—gathering evidence, preparing arguments, keeping score. It can cling to every warning from a doctor’s mouth, every headline flashing catastrophe. My spirit, though, which has led me through most of these years, doesn’t speak that language. It moves through the world like wind through tall grass, believing in what can’t always be measured. Lately, I’ve needed to listen more closely to that part of myself, the part that doesn’t need proof to know what’s real. When I listen to it, I feel the whole world expand.

I know I’m not the only one whose mind wants to trap them right now. The weight of everything—personal struggles, a world in pain, the fear that nothing will ever change—can make it hard to breathe. But I believe that there is another way. That loosening our grip on what we think we know will be exactly what saves us. Not just as individuals, but collectively. Imagination isn’t an escape; it’s an act of liberation, a door flung open to something wildly new. The freer we become inside ourselves, the freer our world will be.

Whether you’re a writer or not, I encourage you all to lean into your imagination in the way I have played with in the poem below. The world needs imagination now more than ever!

WHAT’S REAL?

I garden in the soil of a song.
Walk barefoot through rows
of sheet music, picking strawberries
from the low notes, peaches
from the high notes. I feed myself
a chorus, and for the first time
in many months, I am full.

But that’s not real, my mind demands,
trusting the seedless machine.
My mind repeats the newscaster’s
teleprompted panic. Repeats
the doctor’s doomsday speech.
There’s no time to not be real, it begs.

I point to my left lung–a satchel full
of tumors. Point to a pantry full of pills
that haven’t helped, a bed I have
hardly left for weeks.

Is this what you mean by real? I ask.

Yes! my mind screams, frantic
in its mission to make matter
all that matters.

But how
is that more real, I say,
than the first time I was breathless
from holding a stethoscope to my pain
and hearing the heartbeat of the whole world?

My mind argues like a seasoned lawyer,
all objection and rebuttals.
But I, an artist, stretch my heart out
into canvas, hand one brush
to joy and another brush to grief,
grinning as I watch them paint
the exact same rolling meadow
the same hue of emerald green.

That isn’t real, my mind insists
as I take off running through
the pasture, stopping only to do
a cartwheel beside a lonely windmill
who has always wanted a friend.

I fly up the solemn staircase
of a billionaire’s lifeless mansion
to replace the diamonds with raindrops
I found huddled on a leaf of a Birch
tree beside my home when
I was nine and a half years old.

It’s not real that you still have those!
my mind protests, as if everything
that ever was isn’t forever here.
As if I’m not still a giggling child
hiding in the place I know my mom will
look first, because I want to be found.

During my CT scan last week
I couldn’t find myself inside of myself
because my mind was louder than I was.
But then I gave up all control, unfurled
like the petals of a pen blooming
poems on the sterile walls,
for the next worried patient to water.

But that’s not real, my mind contends.
Real is provable. Googleable.

Then google this, I say, —

The chemo that kept me alive,
the chemo cold men in white coats
take credit for, is sourced from the bark
of the Pacific Yew tree and was first
discovered for its healing properties
by Two-Spirit Indigenous people
in the Pacific Northwest, who were guided
by the voices of moss and the mist.

Is that real? my mind asks.

I don’t see the point in answering
because my mind can’t hear the language
spoken by the moss, has never
picked the sweetest fruit from the saddest note
of a song and planted every seed
to feed the joy of those to come.

What’s the worst thing that ever happened
to you? my mind asked me long ago.

I said, Not believing in what I couldn’t yet see.

What’s the best thing that ever happened
to you? my mind asked me long ago.

I said, Learning that you are not me.

Lately, I’ve been listening to the podcast “The Telepathy Tapes” and feeling more tapped into than ever to the fact that the materialist paradigm is keeping us stuck in the mind—and there is so much more out there than we even know. More ways of knowing, more ways of being, more worlds within this world.

Wherever you are, whatever you’re carrying, I hope you find a moment today that reminds you: there is more to this life than what the mind insists.

With love,
Andrea 🖤