La Vita Bella...

I’m working on sharing more TED talks and developing some ideas about them, I promise. Funny thing about working fifty plus hours a week: You don’t have much time to write blog posts. And generally when you do have time, you don’t want to do much of anything at all, including push your brain to think and create coherent writings.

In the mean time, I really wanted to share an amazing experience I had last night. Rendezvous, the coffee shop I work at, houses a poetry slam. Poets from the Springfield area come in every third Wednesday to recite. There range of art and artists is vast; everything from Whitman to e e cummings, from eighty year old men reading to twenty year old girls. It’s a beautiful collection of life, really, and they all gather to open themselves up to each other and their audience.

I had never been to a poetry reading before last night, and I was taken very off guard. I wasn’t prepared for that kind of intimacy, that level of depth, the power and emotion I was confronted with. People who appear fairly average on the exterior are actually storehouses of experiences which they have tamed and put into beautiful, beautiful words.

I sat in the audience and listened attentively as these artists poured themselves out to me through poems they’ve crafted, toiled over, and perfected. I’ve read poetry for years now and have enjoyed it, but listening to the writer actually read a poem—putting emphasis on certain words, picking when to slow down and when to speed up, looking you in the eyes—changes the experience a lot. It makes it more alive, and in turn you feel more alive.

I told my friend Sean that the night made me realize how wonderful art is. There are moments as a spectator of any art form, be it music, poetry, painting, theater, dancing, etc, when your defenses are rendered helpless. When someone truly passionate about what they’re doing to the point that they have mastered themselves and their trade stands up and performs for you, something beautiful is created. I can’t really describe it, but even if you aren’t a connoisseur of that particular art form, you feel it. You can’t resist it.

I think the thing that made it all so wonderful was the fact that I got to talk with them all. The night wound down, people got up and left, and I got to go over and bus all their tables. The poets hung around a bit to chit chat, so I went over and bantered with them a bit. You know what? They’re no different from you or me. They’re just people with a talent they enjoy. That struck a certain chord with me, because it made me realize that it isn’t that these people have something I don’t have that makes them experience life in a more colorful, more poetic way than I do. Rather, they just look at the world a bit differently. They simply take the time to synthesize it into something meaningful and to express that view to others so that we might experience that beauty too. It made me realize that the world is poetic, I’m just not paying attention. Everything is dying to tell us a story, to speak to us, to participate in life with us, but often we’re too thick and stuck on ourselves and our worries to open our eyes and see it all unfolding. Life is beautiful, my friends. Enjoy some pictures of the evening.