Poetry is like a crystal, seemingly timeless within our too short human lifespan, yet constantly changing. While the mineral stone transforms, a poem transforms its meaning depending on whom and when they read it. In whose mind the hands connect the tactile reality with the heart. A poem is an alchemy.

The Independent Human.poem

Jon Fosse, the Nobel Prize in Literature laureate, nailed it: “To compose poetry is about listening”. Whether you listen to an angelic voice, the light-bearer or echo the depths of darkness, it feels beyond one’s self. His Nordic colleague Erling Kagge in his superb book on Silence In The Age of Noise expressed my own experience while composing poems: “If you listen, there is something being said to you, and that is what you write down. That which is vital, which is unique, is already within you.” The Swiss co-founder of analytical psychology Carl Gustav Jung termed this phenomena the collective unconscious. The second part of Faust brought Goethe into a conundrum of creativity with reason.

Oneness of the union with the collective spirit

I knew that which came into my awareness now already, well before it happened in real life, it defies time’s linearity. Sometimes I am bemused, but never surprised by the synchronicity in some of my poetry. Synchronicity is a term designated by Jung through his real life experience and broad reading of literature, tantric scriptures and mythology. It means a meaningful coincidence. Once you are aware of it, suddenly synchronicity accompanies your life no longer surreptitiously.

breakfast in Provence

It fascinates me how life showers me with poetry if I just keep my eyes open, a receptive mind, heart trembling and spirit eager to fly. In that moment life becomes more exciting than anything else, my feelings connect with that void space beyond reason and I succumb to the adult play, focused, but almost never engaging the rational thinking. If I let it to flow, the muse whispers as the words mostly come from some other place. Sören Kierkegaard philosophically termed this experience “annulled succession“. Kagge simplified it to the more understandable “as if the moment and eternity become one”.

These meaningful coincidences do not cause each other physically, but we individually connect them though the mind. I assume that my poems mean a lot to me personally, like messengers from the underworld dictated by some master above and beyond me. I find and stumble upon each individually in different time and sometimes place.

The poem bellow coincided at the same place in different years. I found the connection during a recent visit of the place where the words were conceived — the contemporary art foundation, cultural centre, villa and winery in Provence at Chateau La Coste.

becoming by unloading

How lightness feels?

Exhaled weight of air

Clear mind like a spring

A feather basking 

In the cradle of breeze

Rocking — levitating — free

Less of all

Nothingness 

Just aware enough

Yet being whole

~

When, in which situations, activities, states of being do you feel the above? Reflect.

I wrote this feather poem in 2019 when blissfully lodging at Villa Lacoste. I found the beautiful feather luring me to be plucked off the grass ground in 2023 on the same property. The feather is on my desk. A metal ferryman on a river barge transfers it through intangible time-space. I did not connect them, not yet.

Puzzling synchronicity in my poetry

Then, in June, 2024 in the collision between my instinctive poetry with the future, the poem carried my present moment into past when I wrote it. I was searching for a certain art photo on my phone’s library while visiting the current exhibition with friends. Between the hundreds of images, the feather struck me, as if calling for my attention, and then I noticed I also took a photo of a scribbled poem while having breakfast there some years back. Et voilá! The two came together. I don’t often write poems about feathers, yet this one and only feather has been on my writing desk ever since I found it. As if it wanted to be the physical reminder, the material proof of metaphysical significance. Time in space merged across their preconceived boundaries.

muses in synchronicity

Some objects or subjects will find us no matter what. Life’s serendipity tantalises me! The feather I owned proves that any object found in nature can become the muse.

As I open myself to the creative sources, angelic or demonic, life gifts me with more nuanced meanings than I could have ever hoped for. The experience far surpassed the luxurious bed, exclusive spa, and the sublime Provencal view from Villa La Coste, the excellent pizza baked at one of its restaurants, the best Argentine meal in Europe also on the vast premises and the gastronomic starred cuisine by (currently) Helene Darroze. Only some of the art that I connected with on the extraordinary property levels up for me personally with my poem and the found feather.

I hope you find a depth of meaning in my poems as well as in art broadly.