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Poem: A Deeper Existence

Poem: A Deeper Existence

from our poet of the month, Deborah Anne Quibell

sara_winter/thinkstock

"Follow your fatigue. / It will lead you on a winding road / towards the truth you've been avoiding."

A DEEPER EXISTENCE

Follow your fatigue.

It will lead you on a winding road
towards the truth you’ve been avoiding.

Busy is not a way to be.

It is a condition that strips you
of meaningful pauses.

It whips you around
in a bowl of self-importance
and pours you out
as a thin layer
upon the surface of your life.

But you seek a much deeper existence.

You seek the substance of silence,
and a slow, simmering awareness.

So please, my darling,
Put down your knife,
Pick up your spoon.

And give your heart the apron.


Listen to Deborah read A Deeper Existence:

Quibell explained her approach to poetry to Spirituality & Health:

God, to me, never felt like a single, fatherly entity in the sky. Perhaps, the concept began that way, but it didn’t stick for very long. I grew up in the Catholic tradition, and would close my eyes a lot during mass on Sundays. Someone would usually nudge me thinking I was falling asleep, but I wasn’t. I was simply trying to tune in to some mysterious, holy presence that seemed to pervade everything, and never felt far away.

It wasn’t long before I stumbled upon the poetry and writing of the mystics, and fell in love. 

There was a casual intimacy with which they spoke to God, and with which God spoke to them. And when I read the exchange, I felt as if their words were slowly inscribed onto the walls of my heart. I wondered if they had been there as etchings all along—simply needing to be more deeply carved, noticed, and cared for. 

I began writing poetry—around the age of five but much more seriously in my teens—because I couldn’t not. It became my way of fostering a complex and often tumultuous relationship to some Voice within me. The V is capitalized here because it felt other-worldly and undeniably sacred.

Read more poems:

Deborah Anne Quibell's A Thousand Ways

Amanda Torroni's Little Lion, Roaming the Cold Golden

Tyler Knott Gregson's chase the light


Select poems from Soul Bird: Poems for Flying by Deborah Anne Quibell. Copyright © 2019 by Deborah Anne Quibell. Reprinted with permission of Mandorla Books.

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