“The Journey” Into the New Year

As I write this blog post, I’m sitting, tired, in front of my laptop, thinking about residency and how soon it will be coming to an end—just in time for Christmas and the New Year. Reflecting back on this year with its ups and downs, I cannot help but feel a sense of blessing to just be able to write. Most people in my cohort cannot believe that at one point in my life I was unbearably scared of reading in front of a crowd of people. I had convinced myself that I would not be able to complete an MFA degree because of the public speaking it entailed.

Somehow, deep inside of me I felt that if I gave up on my dreams of becoming a writer it would be wrong. Yet, at one point I did, which made me feel like I had betrayed myself. I moped around, traveled a bit, felt lost as to what I wanted to do with my life. When all of these things and more did not work, I ended up enrolling in a children’s poetry fundraiser. It was happening all over San Francisco in order to raise money to throw a literary event in El Salvador’s main library with the writer Manlio Argueta. I fell deep into a cause that I felt passionate about. I was working one day when a friend asked me if I was ready to start reading my poetry aloud at different venues. This would be a way to attract more people to our events and perhaps donate money. I immediately looked up with a blank expression on my face. This was a test from God, the universe, fate, whatever you want to call it, to see if I was really the chickenshit I had believed I had become or if I had the cojones to follow my dreams. I replied with a hesitant “Okay,” and dreaded the idea of reading such personal work out loud.

Then I remembered a poem that I had read a long time ago by Mary Oliver called The Journey. I had read it when I was twenty and was no longer happy being a physiology major. I  needed to change my major fast before I drowned in a sea of facts and unrealistic expectations. The poem read:

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice —
though the whole house
began to tremble
And you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do —
determined to save
the only life you could save.

That poem had saved my life when I was twenty, and I did change my major from physiology to psychology. That poem saved me again when it gave me the courage to read my poems out loud in the different venues in San Francisco, and now that poem gives me satisfaction. A comforting satisfaction because exploring the house we have rented for this residency, I came across this poem simply taped to the side of the refrigerator door. And now I know, I am certain, that I am on the right path as I enter into my third semester. I am looking forward to what the new year will continue to bring.