REFLECTIONS - 2006

I was searching for an Oil & Gas Insurance client file today and, in the process of going through several archives, i found something that I wrote 13 years ago! I read it and it still reflected me. I wonder what experiences have made us who we are and what defining moments we have had to record and go back to; and whether the journey back still reflects who we are. Please share your journey with me as I reflect 13 years back to me.

THE SOUL OF ALL REMEMBERING - WHAT POETRY MEANS TO ME

When my editor, Mr. Adewale Maja-Pearce, asked me to send in notes of what poetry means to me, I was lost. I hadn’t thought of poetry consciously or fancied myself a poet. I remember entering his office for the first time with mock-up books of poems looking for an editor. My journey to getting my writings professionally edited was also a way of looking for professional acceptance or denial of what private audience had enjoyed and had encouraged me to put together. These words where poured out without particular thought, at least not of the conscious poetic type. I did not sit to write poems, I did not say: Adetola, you are a poet! Words come into my mind at periods of great emotion or admiration. I simply had to submit to writing these down by just taking a pencil or a pen and any piece of paper or notebook or anything I could find to write on at any given moment. I never thought of my writings as poems, but words come, disjointed, in pieces, flowing one after the other and I could not avoid the rush. 

The rush was for me a way of not forgetting, of reading the words some time later and wondering how these came. Sometimes, not often, I’d imagine a big word and I’d still write it, only to find that the meaning flowed in context. Something was there, a voice, not maddening, some part of me; a silent muse. Now, thinking of it, it is life, mine, the relationship I have with the spirit of all things. God, my God, the spirit of Adetola in God. I’ve always had wild imagination, always sensitive to things, never sleeping easy, but leaving one world for another, conscious of both in memory. I never seem to find ugliness offensive, nor submit to the lure of some apparent beauty, even when I live it. I’d take the thing I see, usually in the act of knowing my own limitations for example, other’s pain, my own happiness or loves, every day circumstances, an event or occasion of loss or thanksgiving, joy or great sorrow, and my soul would either rise or sink. It never hangs in balance except on the act of following the mundane things of life. 

The acts of my soul are like the rising and the ebb tide. The rush to the shores of my mind and recessions in recall as the words tickle my being that, by surrendering to writing, I find the banality of balance once again. Poetry means “Me”, the soul of my remembering. The song I find inside when there is no song to sing or the soul I find, mad in the desire of the moment, when the drums of life are so loud and it desires to dance in invisible acrobatics.

I have a wonderful soul. I can describe it on its own terms because, sometimes, the vagaries of life carry my body to some other place and it is my soul that draws and moves me to what is important. I have always been conscious of it from when I was very young. It is my friend. From the days when I would watch chaos and still see a line of goodness in it and I would lie to protect a friend or to prevent a greater evil, from innocent definition, from occurring. I would make excuses for adversaries, seeing my weakness in them. People are never as they seem, I’d say. Life makes us who we are. Sometimes, we want to be nice, but find this an injury to ourselves because of past hurts. Sometimes, we want to have friends, but find being too close to a fellow an odyssey in betrayal, so we play games and make appearances more important than our true self. Sometimes, we mourn those we are happy to loose and pray to heavens when it gives us what we want. My soul offers me this and more. I have come to accept that I am not one person, but many personalities, each summoned to cope with different aspects of life in some orchestrated order. I have come to see that the dominant personality is the everyday person with others resting somewhere inside, awaiting moments to prove themselves worthy of existence in sudden crescendos. My soul made me to listen and not to fear, even when my mind drowns in tears and the strain upon my heart is heaved with pain, it is as if the veins surrounding it are busting with blood. My soul gives me rest and in rest I find a voice, an ordinary voice that reels out words addressing me, caressing me, inviting me to a world that only eyes that wish to be opened see. My soul is my eyes, when I am blind, my feet when I am unable to walk, my mind when I can no longer think and my body when I can no longer feel. My soul is my true strength, the bearer of all memories, the giver of all things, the existence within non existence. Khalil Gibran once said that “it should not be said that God is in our heart, but we should say that our heart is in God”. When I read his words, I felt as someone in the presence of a mate, one who knows the spirit of things as one sees it and I was home. Sometimes, I believe, we are drawn to writers that are like ourselves. All the books I have read, I have felt the need to read at any point in time and the subjects are very different but united, or should I say connected in my mind, fused. Each book, whether art or science, was not an academic engagement, but each left me with company of similar thoughts, of voices just like mine that I believe my soul is part of that Great Spirit, the Spirit that creates all things. So, whenever I write what is called poetry, I am merely remembering things as they occur or pass on by, remembering life whilst still yet living it, a sense of deja vu hitting me as I look beyond the moment. My soul, a light part of the Light, a being part of the Being, a soul part of the Spirit.

Poetry, if I must call what I write according to a label, then means what I am, my soul essence in God. Some may say life is all forgetting. For me, life is all remembering. Memories are the tassels we sew on our life’s edge, the dangling bits of colour, sometimes tattered, sometimes well attached, some dropping off, others staying on through our lives. Some say life is a patched garment, but for me, life is a large piece of cloth we sew tassels on as we choose, different colours for different moments of our lives. We choose whether they should hang loosely or be well sown and we move on.

Poetry means memories, life’s wonderful memories, my diamond tears, my secret place, the soul of all remembering!

? Adetola 2006