Words that inspire

What I Know For Sure

Oprah Winfrey’s What I Know For Sure is a compendium of lessons learned.

Here’s one of my favorite passages from the book, an email she received from a poet friend, Mark Nepo, that says:

You want to look for poetry in your soul and in everyday life, as you search for stones on the beach. Four thousand miles away, as the sun ices the snow, I smile. For in this moment, you are the poem. After years of looking, I can only say that searching for small things worn by the deep is the art of poetry. But listening to what they say is the poem. For me, poetry is the unexpected utterance of the soul. It is where the soul touches the everyday. It is less about words and more about awakening the sense of aliveness we carry within us from birth. To walk quietly till the miracle in everything speaks is poetry, whether we write it down or not. I confess, I started out wanting to write great poems, only to be worn by life to wanting to discover true poems, and now in the second half of life, I feel humbled and excited to want to be the poem.

Brilliant.