The Four Layers of Truth: A Protocol For How to Write a "Great" Poem

Greetings Readers,

This missive is a follow-up to my last post, The Terms of Our Agreement: A Meditation on Innocence and Experience Inspired by William Blake and Maidenhair Ferns. Click on the red text to read it if you missed it last week, because this week’s essay will be an in-depth exploration of its genesis that I hope will offer inspiration to my fellow writers, as well as insight to all of my readers on how structure—known in ceremonial terms as protocol—can open the deep, wide spaces mystery needs in order to reveal itself in the material world. For my ideas about why mystery is important, read on.

In a time such as ours, defined by strip malls and overhead lights that negate physical shadows, leaving those tender places where darkness dwells with no place to reside but within each one of us. In a linear time that’s forgotten that time is in fact, circular, if it exists at all, mystery may be the one thing that could save us.

Now, you may not believe we need saving. Sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I think everything is going along right as it should, that everything that’s occurred and is now occurring, is a result of evolution, not just human and animal—but of our home planet Earth, and the entire Cosmos. Sometimes I am sure that everything we see, everything we do and don’t do, is a response to where we are (I’ll just speak for humans right now to keep this to what I honestly know), designed by a higher intelligence to invite us to expand and ascend through the spectrum of emotions that seem to define the human experience.

But I have to ask, is growing through our emotions something we need to be saved from? Isn’t growing through emotions the point of being human?

When I take an eagle’s perspective, I certainly think so. When I’m viewing things at ground level like a badger, this isn’t always the case. I forget, until some current flows through me, air or water, and I look at myself lost in anger or depression. Softened by water, through witnessing myself, I rise back to the eagle’s eye, and can see how this particular intense emotional reaction has softened or hardened my heart. Have I grown or have I contracted?

Thinking this way, always leads me to wondering about where the path of emotions ends. I used to say that I could only guess at questions like this, but now I know that I can prophesy.