Wisdom from Ta'Om the Poet: Life is poetry
TA’OM THE POET
Ta'Om the Poet (from Brian Froud's Faeries' Oracle) came to me as my life lesson card. A while ago, I was having a spiritual crisis: the culmination of my spiritual and personal journey and an explosion of conflicting ideas about my own identity and my worldview. It's a long story to type in a blog post, but basically, ego started me right in the face and I mistook it for spirituality. My spiritual crisis arose when I saw through that mask and began to question how I saw the world and how I approached my own life. I was always searching for meaning; always digging deeper and deeper into my own shadowscapes, trying to find the root of the problem, trying to solve the puzzles in my heart. In doing so, I wanted to transcend the realm of the mundane. I claimed to be a spiritual person and I think deep down inside, I wanted to become some kind of spiritual guru. I wanted to know everything. I wanted to figure out the Universe. I wanted to know.
Well, of course that didn't go well. Wanting to figure out the Universe is a daunting task to say the least. Most importantly, the Universe is never fixed; it is always in flux. You can't pin it down with a solid definition or a set of definitions. That's not the reality. That's not how it works. Thinking about it now, I can almost hear the cosmic matrix chuckling at my silliness--and indeed, it was silly of me to be so obsessed with meaning. That's when I met Ta'Om the Poet.
In many ways, Ta'Om is much like of The Fool from the tarot: spontaneous, adventurous, youthful, energetic, and lusty for life. He is also a poet: creative, expressive, and deeply romantic. When he came to me as my life lesson card, somehow I wasn't surprised. As I got to know him better, my worldview shifted and evolved into what it was meant to be.
LIFE IS POETRY
Life is like poetry. Living life is like reading a poem. Trying to find the meaning of life is like trying to find the meaning of a poem. You can't pin a poem down with just one meaning. Poetry isn't about singularity; it's about dynamism and perspectives. While there are universal lessons, symbolism and archetypes, each person is going to perceive the poem different depending on their knowledge, background, and personal understanding. So many factors come into place when you are trying to understand a poem.
And most importantly, there are no "wrong answers" when you read poetry. What you come up with is your interpretation at that particular time, under a particular understanding and a particular mood. When you realize something different, or when you wake to the "true" meaning of the poem, it won't be the ultimate truth of the poem either. It is true, but only at the time. A poem can have many different facets and tastes. It is never just one thing. It is always changing and shifting. It is shapeshiftingly multidimensional.
TO SEEK MEANING IN LIFE IS LIKE READING A POEM
To seek meaning in life is like seeking meaning in a poem. There are no wrong answers. There is only the truth that is important to you at the time. The insight that you find useful to you is always going to be different, because *you* are always going to be different. That's the beauty and nature of human kind. We are always evolving. We are not the same people we were a few minutes ago.
We, the liver of life, the perceiver of our own divine poetry--should never settle for just one meaning. How boring life will be if that's the case, and how rigid and dull if the Universe is that simply solved.
That's the lesson brought to me by Ta'Om the Poet. He truly changed the way I looked at my way life and my "seeker" attitude. Instead of looking for rigid, one-dimensional "answers", I am now looking for "insight". Not facts--but truths.
Thank you, Ta'Om, for showing me the way to Truth. xoxo
