Episode 10: Let Us Dance--with Chelan Harkin

WeAwakening

www.patriciapearce.com/podcast

In this episode I speak with mystical poet Chelan Harkin, whose ecstatic poetry has been likened to that of Hafiz and Rumi.

Chelan set out to live a life of authenticity. In this conversation she shares her journey of healing and some of the remarkable breakthroughs and bold explorations that have opened her up to be a vessel for the poetry of divine Love to flow through her.

You can find out more about her work at www.chelanharkin.com

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Transcription

Patricia
Hello, beautiful souls and welcome to this week’s podcast episode.

Patricia
Today I am speaking with Chalene Harkin, who is a 33 year old, ecstatic, mystical poet, who lives with her husband and two young children in Washington State. Her last year has been an extraordinary ride of wondrous transformation and emergence, filled with claiming her deepest gifts and sharing them with the world with so much joy and gratitude.

Patricia
Her poetry has been likened to that of Hafiz and Rumi, and she has two books of poetry published, Susceptible to Light, and Let Us Dance: The Stumble and Whirl with the Beloved. Her poems carry the energy of invitation into our inherent light, while creating a deep accepting embrace for our shadows. Many also address the themes of redefining the things that matter most, and peeling back layers of conditioning to reconnect with the sacred beauty in all life.

Patricia
So Chelan, thank you so much for joining me today. It’s always a delight to speak with you. And you and I got acquainted through our mutual friend, Mary Reed, and we’ve had a chance to be on a mystics panel together. So thanks again, for taking time today.

Chelan
It’s such a pleasure. It’s an honor to be asked Patricia.

Patricia
So Chelan I would love it if you would share with our listeners what it is about poetry that really draws you. How did you even go down this road at all?

Chelan
What a good question. Thanks, Patricia. So it really wasn’t exactly poetry that I was I was seeking. More broadly, it was the path of authenticity. And within that was, I was so hungry for authentic connection. And I really kind of sensed that being able to access something that felt genuine and alive and real inside of myself when sort of, and then to be able to express that would be the healing for profound psychological and emotional and relational anguish that I was experiencing.

Chelan
So I was really hungry to be able to crack open to a deeper place of really, yeah, connection with an expression of truth. And, and I had, I had learned of poetry in a creative writing class, and I found a natural gift there. And I was sort of experimenting with wielding that as a potential kind of tool or key to open this elusive something up within me.

Chelan
And then there’s a neat story about how that eventually did just really crack open this whole channel of connection with myself and with expression and with the beyond.

Patricia
Is that a story that you’d like to share?

Chelan
I would love to. Yeah, right. Yes, there are a few pieces to it. So, um, so I just think this is interesting, kind of the inner and the outer, how they can sometimes, there can be a parallel process.

Chelan
So when I was 21, I was, that was really the hardest time of my life. Basically, I just desperately needed a new way in the world. And I was aware of that desperate need of my soul, but I didn’t know how to get there. I didn’t know how to let go of my patterns and move beyond them, and then I had a spontaneous brain surgery. I discovered an aneurysm in the central artery of my brain and I needed to have neurosurgery the next, like the next day. That’s how they operate with with that. And so they said, you gotta go home, shave your head, drop out of school. We’ve got to operate on this ticking time bomb immediately.

Chelan
So it was such a shocking and surreal experience because I had no medical history, I didn’t identify with having any medical struggles, and then all of a sudden, like, I had to have brain surgery, and they, they told me I would have been dead by 30 had I not found it. And so like I showed up the next day to have my head cut open and, um, and it was just that was sort of a fact a thing that just, whoom, like it, the the trauma and the pain and the cognitive dissonance that I was holding in my system. It just all surfaced to such a degree through that, that I just, it really brought me to my knees.

Chelan
And it really became unbearable, and I really needed to find a new, a new way. And so then I’m in that kind of state I, um, a month after the surgery, I had a, I had a plane ticket to go to Haifa, Israel for a high pilgrimage, go to the holy places there. And my relationship with the Baha’i Faith, which I had grown up in, was just as complicated as all my other relationships at that time and it felt there was love and there was shame, and there was complexity. And it was, it was fragmented, and unsatisfying.

Chelan
And there was one day where we were to go to Baháʼu’lláh, the founder of the Baha’i faith, we were to go to his prison cell. And I was most interested and attracted to that space. And so we got there, and I had this hope in my heart to have a minute alone in this space, but I was with about 30 others. And, and I’ve never had an experience like this before or since, but I entered this prison cell and I closed my eyes for what felt like seconds, and opened my eyes and everyone had left the space and I hadn’t heard any commotion, small room, and the door was closed. And I was alone in this prison cell, and looked around and immediately was really filled with a voice. And I, yeah, again, this isn’t common for me, this isn’t something I experience regularly at all in this way. But it was the words Let us dance. And those words that were just resonating from every cell of my being gave this incredible permission to the authenticity in my soul to, to open up and to have a dynamic and truthful relationship with the divine. And I just, this major cathartic grief passed through and then this incredible rejoicing. And also simultaneously, I knew that one day, Let Us Dance would be the name of a book of poetry. And then just to simply wind up. About a week later, after returning, poetry really just cracked open through me and, and began to flow.

Patricia
No kidding. So and you’re 21.

Chelan
Twenty one. Yep.

Patricia
Wow. So that experience in that prison cell, did you feel as though it was your own inner self who was speaking, and not that there’s a separation, right, but did you experience it as as a voice within yourself or as a voice that was coming to you from beyond?

Chelan
That’s a that’s a really great question. I and I Yeah, and I don’t know that it even I don’t know that it even necessarily matters who it’s attributed to. But at the time I attributed it to Baháʼu’lláh, that’s the spiritual teacher of mine, somebody who I had endowed with some authority and whether or not that was a trick of my own deep Self doing that, framing it that way, who knows, but the effect was truly and deeply and undoubtedly one of giving myself incredible authoritive permission to really let go of shoulds and fears and approval seeking and open my heart and be truthful and strive to be whole and and to express that.

Patricia
It’s like all of these things are aligning, like your your own sense of wanting to release these old patterns, and then brain surgery, and then this visit to Israel and it’s like all just like a lightning rod. Boom.

Chelan
Yes, absolutely. And the poetry opening the that happened about a week after I returned I, I always describe as a great cracking open, that’s how it felt. And just like just a month after this this other very physical cracking open experience is just interesting.

Patricia
Yeah, absolutely. So it was after then you came back and you started really, the poetry really started to emerge. So, so I know that your poetry has been likened to Hafiz and Rumi, and it is that it carries that ecstatic energy. And, and that is also another piece of this story, right? That that connection that you have felt with Hafiz. And how did that come in? And how did that play out? And what difference did that then make in the evolution of your poetry?

Chelan
Oh, what a good question Patricia. So I learned about Hafiz’s poetry when I was I think about 17. And I in a therapy session, I had this wonderful therapist who read me a Hafiz poem. And at the time, I just wasn’t, therapy wasn’t a tool that was really working for me that well because I needed something that would kind of crap crack me open on a deeper level and the therapy felt somewhat top down, but like, I had to work on the cognitive level. Um, but this poem that he read to me was the first time I really experienced this like, whoa, you know, something, something was able to pierce and penetrate the walls are on my heart with this Hafiz poem, and, and so I, I bought some of his books and just really began drinking it in.

Chelan
And then this last year, I published two books of my poetry and they’re both self published and I didn’t know the first thing about how to do that. So I, I bought these Hafiz books again, mostly just to really copy the formatting of the books, because they were, I remember them being beautiful, and I had this, another very strange experience just a very, very profound motivating inner nudge. I get inner nudges all the time and rarely follow through with them, or certainly don’t follow through with them all. But this one I was really motivated to do. And it was to do a prayer experiment, of just going on a night walk every night and chatting, very casually, but also very truthfully, authentically, with my favorite dead poet Hafiz and just to see what happened. So I began that experiment, and some wonderful things unfolded from that.

Patricia
Yes, and I’ve heard you describe it as like a cork being puffed from your head, and this poetry is flowing through and it comes quite spontaneously, doesn’t it?

Chelan
Very spontaneously, and that was, that was the way, that’s the way it has. It has happened since that experience at age 21. I really don’t write or share any poetry where I just sit down and try to make something happen. I just sort of wait for it to flow through but um, but it used to be somewhat of a consistent trickle. And after that prayer experiment, in which I just very directly asked for, you know, hey, Hafiz, you know, you’re, I love you, you’re the best, you’ve inspired me so much, if you have any extra inspiration lying around, can I have some?And then it really felt, yeah, like a cork was pulled, it became, the flow became torrential, so much so that it took me 12 years to really put this book out into the world, Susceptible to Light. And then the book that followed after that, after that cork yanking experience just seven months, and it’s bigger.

Patricia
Let Us Dance. Really interesting.

Chelan
Yeah.

Patricia
So one of the things that you mentioned, of this experience when you were alone in that cell in Israel, and that there was, there was both grief and joy. It’s like this, just this upwelling of the whole kind of complexity of emotions. And that one is one of the things that really strikes me about your poetry is its capacity to hold the whole spectrum of human experience. And before you really turned towards making writing your, I guess I’ll say your day job, but it’s like not a regular day job, but you were a hypnotherapist. So share with us what role hypnotherapy has played in your life and how it continues to inform you and what you write about.

Chelan
Oh, what a good question, Patricia. So, so, um, this this cracking open poetry experience, um, it predated my discovery of hypnotherapy. And it was, it felt like I describe it sometimes as like the silver cord, that of connection that I was just clinging to desperately, but all around me, it was still very dark and obscure. And so I had this one source of connection, but I was still majorly struggling. And those struggles continued to build and amplify, and I, until truly, I did not feel I could go on. And it was very much a darkest night before dawn kind of phenomenon.

Chelan
And one day really, it truly felt that I was just in the bottom of the pit of despair, and just the most acute place of loneliness. And I learned about hypnotherapy. And it was actually a method I’d heard of before, but was very closed to, just had no openness to alternative methods at that time, and thought it was weird and had all kinds of judgments about it. But that’s one of the gifts I think of being in such an acute place of crisis is that we become more open to new possibilities, anything that’ll help just give me anything.

Chelan
And so I called this person up. I was in Washington State, he was in Montana. And he was available that very night for a session and, and I had this idea that, you know, maybe this tool would work for everyone else in the world, but certainly I was beyond repair, all of these thoughts. Yeah. And in that first session, that first session deeply deeply changed my perspective in life. And it was so powerful and so simple. And really what happened was, I was able, through the use of this beautiful hypnotic tool, my consciousness was able to, my whole being was able to relax enough. So that the, the momentum of my painful thoughts that my consciousness was so so trapped in, that was able to relax enough for my, my consciousness or awareness to sink down deeper and truly experience, not conceptually, but very deeply and actually experience a sense of a true sense of self that I describe as inherently healthy and happy and whole, inherently worthy of love and acceptance. So just an unshakable sense of self really, an identity that was beautiful, and joyful and loving. And just accessing that, and as a primary sense of self, put me on a path of not identifying with all the stories of pain that I had.

Patricia
So it’s like you landed into a deeper place in yourself that was, that had always been there, but you hadn’t yet been able to access it. And that you experienced it. It was not an abstraction. It was a felt reality.

Chelan
It was a felt reality. That couldn’t be dismissed.

Patricia
Yeah. Yes, then that relativizes all of those stories that the mind makes up.

Chelan
Exactly Patricia. That’s exactly it.

Patricia
So yeah, at that point, you realized you didn’t have to identify with those stories because you knew a deeper truth about yourself.

Chelan
Bingo. exactly.

Patricia
Okay. Yeah. And in that, so as you then experience this deeper self that is already whole, already worthy. Always has been, then there’s also this capacity to continue to open to and allow and embrace the suffering. So how does that play in?

Chelan
What a good question. Yes. So when I realized I wasn’t the suffering, it became it shifted from “I am the suffering and I’m ashamed of that, and so I need to use all my life energy at all times to repress that or it’ll be too much too messy, etc.” When it shifted from that to, oh, I am inherently healthy and happy and whole and worthy of love and acceptance no matter what, I and I have this sorrow to steward. And, and there’s innocence at the root of this. This was learned, essentially this isn’t this isn’t essential this was learned and and I can steward this through so I entered a really potent process of for about a decade of daily just incredible catharsis and with the release of that energy or the recycling of it, each time it would give new wisdom and inspiration. And it was kind of a metaphor I like to use is, it’s sort of like, if the clouds thought . . . that if the sky thought all it was was the clouds, and it was afraid that if it opened, it would just never stop raining or whatever. And then it realizes like, well, there’s a sun, oh, my gosh, this exists. Then it just allowed itself to rain, and then you know, flowers and the verdant Earth began to blossom. And and it’s not like the clouds were done with or ever will be. But in understanding the wholeness of the ecosystem, it began to be a generative and beautiful process. Does that make sense?

Patricia
It absolutely makes sense. And and I love the way you express that, that there was sorrow still to steward. And yes, that like we and I think we each have our own sorrows to steward and they’re not always necessarily our personal sorrows. They might be generational sorrows. Or they might be sorrows about what’s happening in the world and, and how do we steward those sorrows? How do we welcome them rather than reject them or try to repress them?

Chelan
Absolutely.

Patricia
And I think so often, those of us who are, you know, who orient more towards a spiritual orientation, can carry this idea that we’re always supposed to be, you know, smiley face and joyous, blah, blah. But what wholeness is, right? Wholeness is, is welcoming the whole.

Chelan
100%. Yeah, that’s so I’m so glad you said that. And I used to really have that idea too, that to be spiritual is to be good. And to be good, “good,” is to be happy. But that’s not that’s a limited perspective. And it’s not a healthy one, I don’t think because then we, it ends up we end up rejecting and repressing parts of ourselves, which is, doesn’t help us.

Patricia
Right. Yeah. And we end up judging ourselves for. So there’s the sort of shame and judgment also gets woven in. So well along these lines of opening up to all of it, would you be willing to read this one, one of the many poems that I love, “Crushed into Wine”?

Patricia
Yes, thank you for asking Patricia. I’d be delighted.

Patricia
And this is from your book, Let Us Dance.

Chelan
Let Us Dance: The Stumble and Whirl with the Beloved. Okay, here we go.

Chelan
“Crushed into Wine”

Chelan
To the God who does not make all of us famous. To she who is not an enabler of the great dreams of the grapes, that instead they may be crushed into wine. To she who does not want to grant the coal deliverance from its suffering just yet, for somehow she sees within it the makings of unimaginable diamonds. To she who does not respond to the caterpillar’s prayers to be all that it can be, and instead makes it devour itself to bring forth the latent wings it never would have known To she who impoverishes every illusion, we thought was so precious To she who is so happy to dash any fantasy we’ve had of ourselves to prove our inner riches and nobility more magnificent and abundant than anything the external ever have crowned us with To she who steals every smallness I hang my name on. Thank you from who I will become.

Patricia
It’s a beautiful poem and I think so apropos not only for us personally but for the world right now because I think we can feel like we are that coal that’s being crushed. With everything that’s happening in the world right now. And to understand that there’s a bigger process at work here, of us being brought into our fullness. So what was it like for you to really come out publicly with all of this that has been going on for you?

Chelan
What a wonderful question.

Patricia
Oh, you say all my questions are wonderful.

Chelan
They are! You know, they, they evoke great reflection, and you’re able to pinpoint kind of the, like, the juicy areas where there’s just a lot of really rich things to share. So I really appreciate it. As someone who loves expression, I really appreciate the catalyst of your questions.

Chelan
So it was such it was such a journey. So it took 12 years, really. So poetry had been coming through me for 12 years, and I had a very big collection of it. And, and I would share them on Facebook, I had about 800 friends or something on Facebook and the same five would like a poem each time I shared it. And that was nice. And I had a real fantasy about publishing my work, but very much had what I call Fairy Godmother syndrome about it. I really wanted some benevolent, encouraging publisher to just somehow discover my work and find it and publish it and help it, you know, enjoy wild success. And really, that was the, at the core of that fantasy was both a deep desire to publish my work, and also an unwillingness to enter the vulnerabilities of the process, of which it turns out there, there were many.

Chelan
So um, along with this prayer request to Hafiz for inspiration, I then started asking for, for marketing support from my Dead Poets Society. And, um, so that was one of my prayers. And then really, it was framing moving forward with publishing as an experiment that allowed me to finally get moving along the path of forward movement. And I just, I set a goal for three weeks out to just like, it was like, I just got to claim this, and I got to do it. And I want to make a tight goal. And maybe I won’t reach it, but it’ll help me get activated. And it just felt like a window was open. And it really felt like it really had kind of a now or never feeling for whatever reason. And it’s interesting, sometimes the energetic circumstances are just ripe for something. So I began to set little, little manageable goals and try to accomplish them each week. And each step forward was just brutal. Patricia, it was so scary, because I had so many, I, this was something I cared about the most. And I had so many limiting assumptions that I was afraid were true. And I was afraid of being seen at this deeper level, which I had really, also very much locked down and protected my whole life because also have all kinds of limiting assumptions and fears that other people wouldn’t, wouldn’t resonate.

Patricia
Yeah, it’s so, I so appreciate your description of that the fear of being seen. Then there’s also the discontent of not being seen, like you can’t do that. Because there’s this thing in you that wants to come forth and share. So it’s like stepping into those fears.

Chelan
Yes. And it was the most transformational process of my life. And one of my biggest fears was that, um, if I gave this a shot, and it just sort of petered out, that I wouldn’t have this wonderful dream to lean on as a crutch. When my life became dull and mundane, I wouldn’t even be able to have my imagination about this possibility. But one of the interesting findings is that when these passions or these desire, desires of ours, these parts of ourselves that we want to bring forth into the world, they’re, they’re these kind of core or foundational energies, typically. And when we bring them forward, there’s really no way to do that without transforming the whole structure of our being, because they’re so foundational that regardless of what happens on the outside, what you know, how successful we are or whatever, we enter a profound processes of transformation.

Patricia
Yeah, so it’s, it’s more than whatever happens externally. It’s tapping into that inner knowing and allowing it to express itself, that inner core.

Chelan
Absolutely, and it’s so important to acknowledge that that is so much more important than whatever happens externally, because so much of people’s desire for fame and success actually can come from wanting to bypass discomfort and or, you know, fears in ourselves and thinking, Oh, if I can attain this, this will be a blanket over this, and it’ll protect me from it. But when we go through the fire of really moving through our fears, and testing them and seeing that they’re not truths, we just become so much more empowered, and we have such a deeper experience of self trust. And, and we’re not fleeing ourselves for you know, external things. And, um, anyway.

Patricia
Yeah, and in your case, so you you moved forward, you knew this needed, you needed it, you needed poetry to, to, to move out. And you took that step, you published it yourself, you didn’t wait around for someone else to sort of magically discover you, you took that step. And, and then you took another step with your latest book, Let Us Dance, and then you’ve got another book coming I understand. So, and and so you did that. And also things opened up for youon the external playing in terms of things have really accelerated for you over this past year. Can you share some of that magic with us?

Chelan
I would love to. It’s been the truly the greatest joy of my whole life. So I’m just one just juicy and super fun part of this story is that, you know, I was praying specifically to Hafiz for help, and specifically for marketing help. Um, I had a couple others on the team. Khalil Gibran was another A Team friend, and, and Brian Doyle, who’s this wonderful author who’s passed away. And um, but Hafiz was the chair, the chairperson, and and I would just I said, you know, I was just having fun with this, this wild, big prayer and I just said like, Hafiz and company, just tap all the spirit friends and all the resources in this world to to just really get things going. You know that this is totally based in just joy and my intentions really were just truth, and joy, and love and liberation for myself and others.

Chelan
And then so three weeks into this prayer, I just I get an email in my inbox from Daniel Ledinski who has done all the renderings of Hafiz poetry and has made him a superstar to the Western world. And Daniel Ledinski said like, basically, Hi, Chelan. I’m a reclusive poet, I rarely reach out to anyone. And I saw your book and congratulations. And it was so surreal. So I wrote back to him this very unfiltered message, just ecstatic, just sharing this whole story with him, and I shared a particular poem that I felt was very inspired by Hafiz, our shared muse.

Chelan
And then Daniel said, Whoa. I really never do this Chelan, but I think you and I need to collaborate on a on a book together. Which was so surreal. Okay, one more very surreal, just wild piece is that, um, I was just going kind of really experimenting with being too much, to give my with my prayers to give myself permission to get out of small smallness. And so I just wrote my biggest prayers that would, you know, would have been embarrassing to share with anyone, um, I wrote them down. And I’ll share this one though. One of them was that people would start to, like, consider me the female Hafiz, which could have totally an arrogant ring to it, but I just thought it would be fun. So in this relationship with Daniel Ledinski one thing that he’s done is he’s put me in his will to complete and publish thousands of unfinished poems that were inspired, that were inspired by his Hafiz work

Patricia
Wow, oh my gosh.

Chelan
Just wild experiment with findings from my experiment with with prayer.

Patricia
Well, as you tell this Chelan, I’m so appreciating the way that, just the energy you bring to all this. You bring this experimental curiosity, this just like go for it. You’re not, you know, you’re just like done with trying to tamp it down. And you’re just, you’re going with it. And also the specificity. I love the specificity that you bring, like help with marketing. Really specific.

Chelan
Yes. And thank you for saying that. And within all of that, yes, I, certitude or making any ultimate claims, I find that to be so deadening. So this is I share this, this is my story. And these are my findings. But I don’t, I don’t want to wrap it up as this is a how to, you know, this is the way it works. This is what worked and it was so alive. And it definitely inspires me, basically, to further experiment with possibilities of this sort.

Patricia
Yeah. Well, I’m you started off saying that one of the things that drew you to poetry was this desire to be authentic. And this has been your authentic path, like you’ve really stayed in your own authenticity. And it’s not like any of us replicates anybody else’s path. We all have our authentic, our authentic ways of being.

Chelan
Yes, yes. And we’re so we’re so interconnected. And I think as we that’s been another kind of experiment, it’s just been really seeing and really coming more and more to experience that as we move ourselves in this direction of authenticity, which has to do with I think energetic, emotional movement, beyond our old pain and toward our beautiful hearts’ desires, that, that it it does influence the whole because I, we are just, I believe I really feel that we’re all connected on this level.

Patricia
Yeah. Yeah. And I’ve heard you several times mentioned the heart and the role of the heart. Could you just speak a little bit about how you experience the heart in your life?

Chelan
Gosh, what a great question, Patricia. Well, it’s interesting, growing up in the Baha’i faith, so I’ll just share, just for the sake of context, that the Baha’i faith, it basically asserts that all religions are part of the same divine, they’re all divinely inspired. And they’re all part of the same ever unfolding path to help humanity grow and evolve, spiritually and socially, and to help our consciousness unlock to its full, full potential basically. And so I have some familiarity with religious scripture, and, and the heart is mentioned a lot as like the the seat of God and the, there’s just something important about the heart, right. And I think something that people in religious communities can do is, is think, is sort of resonate at a conceptual level with things and think, Oh, that’s nice, the heart is great. And sort of it stays at that level. And there’s, there’s, I think, not enough experimenting, actually, in some ways with some of these religious teachings to see how they actually work and feel.

Chelan
And so similarly, in the Baha’i writings, a lot is said about the the purpose of the, like that just the heart being really the center of everything. And the heart is about feeling. And it’s so interesting, because feelings are so rejected, societally speaking and marginalized. And somehow we’re just supposed to be good people. And we’re supposed to pursue our desires, just to get to the end of our goal. But we’re also supposed to like bypass, bypass the heart really. And it’s very, there’s a lot of dissonance in that way of relating to things. And my path toward much deeper satisfaction with relationship in general with myself with God with everything has just been through opening to the feelings in the heart. And and when we open the heart too, and the reason that we don’t, I think is because typically that what we find first is there’s a lot of pain that has been repressed. But as with my experience in that prison cell, grief is just followed by joy, and they’re just sort of different parts of the same song, the major and the minor notes, so you could say, and so to be willing to open to our heart’s desires and our joy and our connection, there needs to be a willingness to also feel into, that basically there are no selective, you can’t, there’s no selective. The heart, the path of the heart isn’t selective. And it’s not only about the joy it’s about it’s about the wholeness itself.

Patricia
Right. The heart doesn’t, isn’t fragmented. It doesn’t turn anything away. That’s the nature of love. Love just, nothing is excluded.

Chelan
Beautiful. Yes.

Patricia
Yeah, I recently read an advanced copy of a book a friend of mine is going to be coming out with and it talks about, one one quote that I love from this book, it talked about the heart center as the royal road to awakening.

Chelan
Absolutely. And it’s also the the path of the experienced knowing rather than the, the conceptual knowing. So it feels more resilient, and there’s no need, when you have an experience of the heart, there’s really no need to defend it as there can be with ideology. And it’s the path of empathy and deep compassion and tenderness and power. It’s all it’s all there. Inspiration.

Patricia
Yeah. And it’s and it’s feeling it’s feeling also at the physical level. Yes. And that it’s very difficult for the mind to contest something that you’re actually feeling in your body.

Chelan
Yes, absolutely.

Patricia
So would you be willing to read us another poem?

Chelan
Yes, I would be happy, so happy to. I’ll read the poem that that really went it went viral, went wild.

Patricia
And it’s from Susceptible to Light.

Chelan
It’s from Susceptible to Light. This was an old copy, but in my new copy of Susceptible to Light, Daniel Ledinski, the renderer of the Hafiz poetry, has written the foreword to this book, which is fun to have that in there. Yeah, this poem just uh came through in about a minute. And I was just on a walk one day, it felt very, it always feels great when poems come through. But this didn’t feel anything, you know, different than any poem does. And what for whatever reason, this one just really has spoken to many. And I’m so grateful for it. So here, here we go. It’s called the worst thing.

Chelan
The worst thing we ever did was put God in the sky, out of reach, pulling the divinity from the leaf, sifting out the holy from our bones. Insisting God isn’t bursting dazzlement through everything we’ve made a hard commitment to see as ordinary Stripping the sacred from everywhere to put in a cloud man elsewhere. prying closeness from your heart. The worst thing we ever did was take the dance and the song out of prayer. Made it sit up straight and cross its legs, removed it of rejoicing. wiped clean, it’s hip sway. It’s questions. It’s ecstatic yowl. It’s tears. The worst thing we ever did is pretend God isn’t the easiest thing in this universe, available to every soul in every breath.

Patricia
So beautiful. Thank you.

Patricia
Thank you. Chelan.

Patricia
So next for you. You have a third book that will be coming out at some point. People can visit your website, which is your name chelanharkin.com. And do you know when your next book’s coming out yet?

Chelan
Thanks for asking. It’s, um, it’s, it’s sort of on a hold. . . I wouldn’t say it’s on hold. But a few other things have come to the forefront for me as more immediate, exciting desires. So I’m really, really thrilled to just find more speaking opportunities. I want and I speak on a wide variety of themes. Typically, none of my presentations are, are really pre-crafted. So they’re very they have an energy of kind of honest and alive connection that comes through, but themes of grief and authenticity and unlocking expressive flow and all of that. And they’re always interwoven with poetry so I am just really exploring opportunities for speaking right now. And and I’m working on, working doesn’t even feel right. It’s so much fun. A dear friend and I are putting out a podcast together. And then one of my all time favorite authors who I’ve connected with through this poetry process, who wrote the foreword to this book, she and I are going to be creating a podcast. So those speaking events, and developing speeches is really the thing that is most exciting and alive for me right now. But my book, which I do hope to have completed in 2022, toward the end of the year, will be called Becoming the Full Moon: The Many Phases of Love, Creative Expression and Wholeness.

Patricia
What a great title.

Patricia
Well, Chelan, thank you again. I really have loved talking with you. It’s been a delight.

Chelan
Thank you so much. Likewise.

Patricia
And I encourage our listeners to check you out and and check out your books. So I’m sure we will be in touch and thanks again. Blessings.

Chelan
Take care. Thank you so much, Patricia. I really look forward to connecting again soon.

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