“The purpose of poetry is not to learn more about poetry, but more about life,” Robert Bly said, and I believe him. I tell my poetry kids that poetry is life, how they live their lives, how they share their lives. The study of it is the study of what it means to be alive. What ends up on the page is the least important part of the process.

Enthusiasm is a communicable disease. Lucy Bellwood at CreativeMornings Portland, October 2017. Free events like this one are hosted every month in dozens of cities. Discover hundreds of talks from the world's creative community at https://creativemornings.com/talks Don't miss a video. Subscribe! https://bit.ly/1jeJwut Follow CreativeMornings: https://twitter.com/creativemorning https://facebook.com/creativemornings

“Encouraging people is like the greatest feeling in the world.” And he did encourage people. One blogger recalls: “He was able to say …the things I needed to hear in a way that I actually heard them. [H]is support and encouragement changed my life. But this loss, like Dylan’s loss, feels like a smack in the face; a radical recalibration toward what brings us to this practice.

Piper Haywood wrote one of those very good posts last week — a cross-section of personal interests that manages to be both minutely specific and widely resonant.

I underlined this passage hard when I read it last year. Muddle. Yes. I know this state well, although I often refer to it as waffling. Here’s what I notice about waffling: I do it often, and it’s almost always to justify not doing something that I know, deep down, will bring me joy.

On the good days, everything feels connected—a giant wall of conspiracy string. But on the bad days, every gesture and thought sits in isolation. It’s like I’m looking at the same board, but someone has turned off the layer containing the string. Rather than an electric galaxy of potential I just see…a mess. ​ Those are the moments when I miss the drip-feed of social validation that comes from sharing things on public platforms. It’s a steady piping cry of “Yes! Keep going! This matters!” that can make all the difference between enthusiasm and despair. But I don’t want to rely on it. I don’t want to give away that kind of power.

I sent a couple tweets into the aether yesterday after not putting anything out on Twitter for about a month. Maybe it was because I’d just worked out and endorphins were careening through my...

Some of it is using an RSS reader to change the cadence and depth of my consumption—pulling away from the quick-hit likes of social media in favor of a space where I can run my thoughts to their logical conclusion (and then sit on them long enough to consider whether or not they’re true). ​ Some of it is just letting myself wander, link to link, through people’s personal websites and passion projects, seeing what comes up. ​ A theme of the past year has been trying to disengage from my attachment to what I think other people want or need from me, and to rekindle my working relationship with myself.

“If you’re not doing everything in your power to live in this electrifying pinball machine all the time then what are you even DOING WITH YOURSELF?”