‘We must let go of the life we had planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.” — Joseph Campbell
Joseph Campbell also said something to the effect, that if you’re on the right path, a force he called “helping hands” would guide and teach you along the way. This month’s poem describes a series of experiences that caused a turning point in my life.
Joseph Campbell was a professor of literature at Sarah Lawrence College. He was an author best known for his work on mythology.
I believe my experience at Lincoln Elementary in Kalamazoo was a gift. It made me a better person and prepared me for my path as a poet.
I wasn’t intentionally raised to be prejudiced, but it was the prevalent attitude of most locals in rural communities back then. I remember our high school world history teacher mocking Mahatma Gandhi’s civil disobedience movement against British colonialism in India.
I’d read the essay “Civil Disobedience” by Henry David Thoreau in eighth grade.
Thoreau’s message was, if your government or people in power are doing something wrong, then rebel, but always behave more civilly than those you’re rebelling against.
The essay made a huge impression on me.
I’d never been in jail like Gandhi or Martin Luther King, but I’d spent time in the principal’s office.
I’d also been paraded around the school hallway in the fourth grade with a grocery bag over my head for a small infraction.
I decided I wanted to be a writer like Henry David Thoreau. I wanted to disobey civilly and become a poet.
I used the essay a few years later in my stand against the Vietnam War.
Martin Luther King was using the same civil disobedience tactics against racism in the United States. I think our history teacher by criticizing Gandhi was making a veiled attack on King.
My college career only lasted through the second semester of my sophomore year. I ran out of money, and because of my long hair, my father wouldn’t help me financially.
The poet’s voice inside me was getting stronger. I supported it by working construction with a hippie-type crew in the summer, and working at the Western Michigan University library during the winter. I also used the library as a resource for studying poetry.
For seven years I self-exiled myself from the region where I’d grown up.
My construction boss helped me score a small, low-priced attic apartment where I wrote.
Surprisingly, a lot of my early poems focused on my hometown and surrounding area.