Never Change — Poem and Musings

Hi there.

This week I’m sharing another poem from my debut collection, Ego Killers (available for purchase on Lulu).

It emerged a few years ago while I was living in Seattle in my late 20s. During this time, I struggled to adopt regular exercise and spiritual practices, which simultaneously sparked my poetic sensibilities and forced me to accept aspects of myself and my lifestyle I had been unknowingly avoiding.

Astrology enthusiasts would refer to this time as one’s Saturn return, when the sixth planet from the sun orbits back around to where it was at the time of your birth.

On the personal level, this represents a major coming-of-age milestone when one must accept new levels of responsibility, obligation, restrictions, and disciplines that many of us — myself included — successfully avoid through most of our teens and early twenties. It also means facing the areas of life on which you’re hardest on yourself.

I didn’t know any of this at the time. I didn’t think of myself as spiritual back then, and would’ve scoffed if anyone else invoked astrology to explain what I was going through. It was a major leap of faith to adopt a regular yoga routine, which I took to extremes that most experts (not to mention my partner) would probably warn me against.

All I knew was, it was really fucking hard to follow through on my plans to exercise, meditate, and other mindfulness habits, even when it felt really fucking good after I pushed…