Taming the wolf anxiety

“We’ve known for a long time that anxiety shuts down creativity. But I believe it’s also true that creativity shuts down anxiety.” – Martha Beck, Telepathy Tapes S2E3: The Consciousness of Creativity: Are Ideas Alive and Do They Choose Us?

Photo by Joshua Freake on Unsplash

How to trick
my wolf anxiety
into acting like a lamb: 

Coax it onto the page,
turn it this way and that,
make it cross enough lines
that it tires itself into 
another soft thing
that at the end of the day
closes its eyes.

***

Do you feel it too? 
The resistance life puts up sometimes,
making even the simple task of frying four eggs
unnavigable.

Other days, 
one thing flows easily into the next, 
and the difficult conversation with the teacher feels 
inevitable. 

I’ve started to believe living 
has magic in it.
And direction too.  

Flow with the current, 
and even the hard things 
seem okay. But
work against it, 
and I lay my head down
at the end of an average day
feeling an offness and exhaustion 
I can’t explain. 

I make a little list
of the parts of my life
where I’m trying too hard
and the parts that feel easy
even when they aren’t.

If you make a list, 
does it skip off your keyboard too?
What shock 
what fabulous relief
to uncover
what we didn’t know we knew.