I’m so thrilled to have the opportunity to partner with Tarcher Perigee to help promote Tyler Knott Gregson‘s latest book Miracle In The Mundane. I have loved Tyler’s work since I first stumbled across his iconic typewriter series and was incredibly excited for the release of his latest work.

Miracle In The Mundane offers something a little bit different. Still filled with Tyler’s signature style of poetry, in this volume each poem is accompanied by a challenge: a way to take the message of the poem out of the pages and into your life. I love it! As this isn’t a book to read all the way through and write up a review of, I’ve decided to do something a little bit different. I’m going to write up some of my responses to the challenges and share them her in my own #mundanemiracle mini series before doing a review.

This is the second post in the series and is a response to the ‘chapter’ take an ache, make it sing – I hope you like it.

We all have aches, more than we sometimes feel we can carry, and now we must give them a voice, give them a melody and a sound all their own.

Tyler Knott Gregson – Miracle In The Mundane

In the opening of this chapter, Gregson writes about how both his aches and his poetry have brought him to this place: the place where I am reading his words on a page. It is a simple reflection that the good and the bad, the courage and the vulnerabilities in our lives shape us into the people we are and bring us to different points in our journeys. The challenge for this chapter is both simple and incredibly difficult: write a poem. Write a poem to give voice to your aching. And don’t edit.

So here goes. My unedited aching on the page:

I am all fear

And unbridled hope.

My joys and terrors

Tangled together

Like wind ravaged hair

Until I can’t tell the

One

From the

Other.

Why does the core of my

Longing

Ring like the blast of a starting gun

In my ears

Telling me to

Run, run, run

For my life?

I mistake my role

Again and again.

Instinct to flee: a rabbit in headlights.

I forget

I am the greyhound

Waiting in the slips.

And that resounding boom

Is my signal to run

Towards

Not

Away.