Noetic

Like the full moon rising
whole and complete,
all at once, it is there

—this is true.

We can think we worked it out,
show a logic that proves it,
point to the pulleys and levers
that hauled this new surety
into the sky

but that isn’t how this works.

It arrives and we receive it,
gifted, wrapped and ready,
offered by a silvered hand
in the night.

If we could do it—
receive with grace what is given
without busying ourselves
in the name of deserving—

If we could trust
that, like the moon,
what is true will arrive
with beauty and ease

what might we know
what might we love
what might we choose to let go?

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Over the course of a couple of weeks, I wrote this poem and shared the process in instagram stories.

(If you're curious about the writing of a poem, you can find the full unfolding process in my Instagram story highlight ‘Writing Live’ - click here.)

This is not the poem I thought I was setting out to write. The original idea that arrived WAS about the moon, but a whole different concept.

Somewhere in the process of trying to catch the tail of that poem, this one popped up and the whole idea of it was pretty fully formed (although the writing of it was not).

The way the poem rose up as I stood and stared out toward the hills reminded me so much of standing in exactly that spot and watching the moon rise.

And so the poem was born the way the full moon appears newly born each month, and the moon itself is also the message—knowing arrives just as the moon arrives, without any doing on our part. Our one job is to be there to witness its arrival.

Also during this process, I discovered a new word—noetic. From the Greek noēsis, it means inner wisdom, direct knowing, intuition, or implicit understanding. I had been revelling in the wondrous experience of being steered to find nests, without any active looking on my part.

The beauty of this word, noetic, is that it speaks to not just the knowing, but the seemingly impossible understanding that the knowing is infallibly correct. It is a full-bodied, complete, assured knowing.

With love,

Mary xx