By Lauren Martin, author of “Forgotten Lands: Poems of the Ancestors”
How does my spiritual or shamanic journey inform my poetry?
My first poetry collection, Night of the Hawk, was a book I finally compiled after a long and arduous shamanic journey. At that moment, I had been forced into bed by a spinal cord injury. Left with limited access to the world, I had only my connection to my faith, my clients, my dog, the birds I could hear from my window or the occasional hawk that flew by, and words.
Often my poems arrive formulated after a night of working them out in my dreams. I believe that these poems are gifts from the unconscious and the spirit realm, potentially communicating messages from the other side. I have certainly had a long journey. One in which my life sits at the razor’s edge of the living and the dying, both in my medical symptoms, but also in the metaphysical manifestations of my life, and ultimately, in my spiritual destiny. That intersection of spiritual access is a place of profound divinity: where the veil is thin and you exist in both realms. I also believe that if you live in that space, it is fracturing of the body. As a child who saw the dead, my spiritual journey has always included intense, physical fragmentation, and complicated—and often terrifying— metaphysical manifestations. To me, that is what true shamanism looks like. Whatever the tradition. Whichever the region. It is the medicine person who protects us, who is negotiating these outside forces, which in turn makes their life complicated. It is not a life chosen. It is a life that is destined. And for me (and most shaman I know) one that you go into kicking and screaming. Desperate for something—absolutely anything—other than this.
I grew up in a dysfunctional home that required the cultivation of specific skills for survival. That kind of hypervigilance forces you to become a keen observer of this current realm and also, the metaphysical realm. Simultaneously negotiating the psychological and the spiritual allowed me to work through my own pain and become more available.
Writing and the imagery within my work feels like an expression of catharsis that helps carry me through that transition to resolution. Particularly this new collection, Forgotten Lands, which moves through a grieving process. I truly love the beauty that exists within the pain. Learning how to tolerate the coexistence of those two polarities is both the psychological and spiritual process of development. It is reflective of the same extremes one is managing in shamanism. Life and death. Good and bad. Impulse and regulation. Reaction and kindness.
In my psychotherapy work, I am responsible for guiding people through the place in which their soul has been altered by trauma. When people execute shameless behaviors on children or adults, it leaves an imprint on the very identity of the person. To purge that from a person’s sense of self, one must be able to go with them into that inner realm and disconnect from who they really are, or put differently, from the distortion caused by the other person’s abuse. To me this process is profoundly sacred and should be treated as profoundly sacred. I take it very seriously. You must be able to exist in that kind of deep and hollow despair yourself to do this kind of work with others. I think that my faith has allowed me to do that well. But I also think that the depth of my psychological, physical, and spiritual pain is where I feel God the most. And in that place is where creation and imagination is most potent.
I believe that most people create because they must. There’s something deep in their essence that is begging to come out. And for me, writing is what allows me to process some of those deep core experiences.
In Forgotten Lands, the expression of the other side —the realm of the ancestors—continues through death and the change which accompanies aging, my parents’ vulnerability, and the challenge of loving a world where so much of it is actively threatened. I seek spiritual understanding in ordinary moments. How can you manage your own pain while still expressing kindness towards another? How can you find representations of God in nature (or, what Ifá names the Òrìsà) while having doubt? How can you feel the anguish of death of a parent and then witness the magic of their expression of themselves in the spirit realm? All these dichotomies exist in life, and in my understanding of things. It is where, despite suffering, I feel beauty and hope.
I see the questions laid out above as guides, or how to continue with healthy spiritual steps. I hope they and their presence in the poems make room for a reader’s own experience. People may come to these poems through faith, skepticism, bereavement, illness, or a love of language. They do not need to share my spiritual beliefs to recognize the longing for connection, or the bewilderment of finding that your life has changed beyond recognition.
For me, writing a poem is an act of attention and relationship. I turn toward something—a memory, a wound, a presence, a beauty—and stay long enough to discover what I can hear, feel, see. My spiritual journey has taught me to value that encounter. It has also taught me that I cannot control everything it will reveal. I bring my experience, my questions, and my willingness to listen. The poem begins there.
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