Coming into My Wisdom

By Kaya Kamins

After the break up of a long distance relationship, Kaya began to write from the depths of her soul while struggling to become empowered and grounded in her own life.

Who I had become was someone I didnt really know. This woman didnt fit the stereotypes I had grown up with. I had not been raised to have a voice, nor to know my truth. When I began to write, floodgates began to open. I developed a new clarity about my emotions. This replaced the space in my heart and life where there was once only confusion and uncertainty. As I began to write and share my words with other women, I developed more courage and began to overcome my fears about creating my own unique path to follow.

Kayas poems about her journey of self-discovery and transformation at midlife have common themes for all women struggling to give birth to their own voice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Sep 2, 2010
• ISBN: 9780595629916

Kaya Kamins

Born Karen Kotzen in Boston, Massachusetts, Kaya moved to the Midwest at 21 and has lived there for 38 years. In her working career she has assisted individuals with developmental disabilities and has had a passion for helping them to become more independent and to lead more fulfilling lives. Kaya has been on a spiritual quest for most of her adult life. Her journey has taken her to Scotland, Israel, Thailand, Hawaii, Peru , Egypt and Mexico. Kayas spirit name was birthed in Zion Utah while camping with friends and consecrated in ceremony there. When she is not working, her passions include her love of the Southwest, traveling abroad, being in nature, camping, kayaking, sitting around a campfire, writing, reading, womens music festivals, and theater. She has one son also living in the Midwest. She resides with her beloved four legged companion Toby and her two parakeets and continues to write as the spirit moves her.

Book preview

Awakenings

I Want to Write the Silence

I Have Missed the Silence

The Stillness

Why I Write

The Unfolding

What I Have Lost

What I Am Missing

On My Soul

The Deepening

The Words

Change

The Year I Was Most Myself

Cravings

The Woman in the Mirror

Being in Idle Mode

The I in Me

The Wee Hours

Thoughts

My Real Life

Running from Loneliness

Measuring My Life

This Summer

The Tides of Change

Celebrate the Feelings

The Kingdom of What Is

Honor the Waves

Ode to Painful Times

The Fertile Void

Holes

Tears

Maybe

If I Met You Again

What I Didn’t Know

Don’t

Waiting

On Being Raped

To the Memory of My Parents

Poem for My Mother

If I Had One More Day

To My Mom

Where Are the Words?

Perspective on Death

The Final Journey

On the First Anniversary of My Father’s Death

Remember When

When I Die

Stages of My Life

Growing Up

The Child in Me

Flowing

Spring

Riding My Bike

The Rise of Summer

On Aging

Seasons of My Soul

If I Had my Life to Live Over

Tapestry of Sadness

Questions

These Feet Still Hold me Up

What I Would Say to the Men in My Life

Walking the Line

On Getting Older

Practicing Retirement

On Grieving

Dreaming of Retirement

When I Retire

On Turning 80

What If?

The Women in my Life

Ode to Margie Adams

Being Free

Love

The Pain of Loving

What is Love

On Love

My Body Remembers

What I Have Learned

Blankets of Love

Love Like a Flower

Love

Nature, Peace, and Fear

Pfeiffer Beach

Wishes

Sacred Times

The Zen Zone

If

On Peace

The Tides

Loneliness

Sunsets

The Rise of Summer

Florida After the Hurricane

Clouds

What is Fear?

The Smell and Security of Comfort

On Flying

AWAKENINGS

I Want to Write the Silence

I want to write the silence in my life.

I want to fill it up with words and song.

I want it to fill me up and make me whole.

I want to use it, to let it be my earpiece

to hear the heartbeat of my soul, my inner longings.

I want to write the silence.

I want to write away my fear,

to allow my heart to open wide enough

to let a new love into my center.

I want to share the sunsets and sunrises,

the late night hours when I cannot sleep.

I want the noise and joy of a heart in love

to burst the bubble of silence that hovers over me.

It has been a good teacher, but I am ready to move on.

I want to write the silence.

I don’t need to live in it all the time anymore.

I want to write about life now-

my life, your life, everyone’s life.

I am a writer

and silence has been my tool.

I Have Missed the Silence

I have missed the silence as my friend.

As of late, I have feared it when it seemed to look big

in the middle of the relationship dance I am in.

When I heard it as loss, as abandonment,

as a parting of the way,

then I feared it.

Tonight, with the music off, though I cannot sleep,

the silence comforts me.

It brings forth these words.

It waits for me to know what lies within.

Mornings when I am with my love,

I often cannot hear the silence at all.

Most of the time, that is ok,

but sometimes, I crave it and the ability

to hear and know myself that comes with it.

Silence is not like a lion to fear.

It is like a pussycat slinking in

to be coddled and caressed, to find comfort from.

I have missed the silence in my life

as I have missed the tune of my own soul.

Only in these late night and early morning

moments of my own,

can I really truly hear it at all.

The Stillness

The stillness has taken hold of me tonight.

It follows me wherever I go,

into the dark of the night, into my waking dreams.

It is haunting me now when I am trying to sleep.

It is probing and searching, for what, I do not know,

but it has startled me awake.

I have wrestled with the stillness in the night

for far too long.

What do you want of me I ask?

It doesn’t answer, I just feel it in pursuit.

The stillness is inside me now.

The quietude, it stalks me.

Why now, with expectations of a long day ahead,

with worries of where to go?

I awaken because of the stillness.

It calls to me deeply,

and my soul, it hears the invisible voice.

I shall remember its sound when I awaken again,

but for now, I am hoping it will let me sleep.

Why I Write

I write to find out what I have to say.

The words seem to come tumbling out from nowhere

and from everything.

With pen in hand, the words just flow

like rivers gushing, the dam burst open.

I never really know how I feel, it seems until I give it a voice.

Most times, I have been afraid to do it aloud,

but I am becoming that much braver and bolder

with my pen in my hand.

My pen is a tool of power for me.

It forges ahead,

cutting the overgrown weeds of emotion with its scythe,

clearing trails in this wilderness of wild and untamed emotions

which keep me awake at night and whom I often cannot name.

I’m surprised at how they sound and at what they have to say,

at the power and strength of passion I hear in them.

Did they come from me? I ask myself, meekly sometimes.

Most certainly, I answer, unashamed and proud.

I have never been good with making small talk at parties or

with political discussions but I am good with pen in hand.

It seems to just flow freely like paint running on a canvas.

I am learning what it is my voice has to say

and I will keep talking with pen in hand until I’ve said it all,

but for as long as I live my life, I will speak with

warm hearts and women’s souls embracing my written words,

cushioning them, nurturing and encouraging them

to be spoken aloud and shared.

It is a new language I am learning, this language of the heart.

I have struggled with this for all of my young and adult life.

Earlier journals were always full of what I did.

Hardly any entries were really about who I was,

at least that is what I remember now.

This is a different kind of writing.

It allows my spirit to speak.

It affirms and validates me to the core.

I write to find out what I have to say and oh, so much more.

I can never stop now,

I have only just begun.

Spring 2005 - my first course with Women Writing for a Change

The Unfolding

This disconnection from my soul has frightened me.

It is a huge, cavernous wasteland I need to wander,

as big as the desert and sands in the wilderness of Chaco Canyon.

I have longed to be with it all of my life.

I never knew how until now.

I am working hard now, to grab hold and understand it,

unravel it, define it.

It keeps me awake in the middle of the night

and in the wee hours of the morning.

It ravages my heart.

I cannot NOT hear it anymore and that, indeed, is a good thing.

It is speaking loud enough now so I have to hear it

and I have turned up the volume and my capacity to hear.

It calls to me, the loneliness, the solitude, and the essence of my soul.

I cannot hide from it any more.

It is what will make me whole, my missing piece.

It is full of ‘I didn’t know’, ‘no one really cared’,

‘no one really saw me’ and me who didn’t dare rock the boat.

It is full of passion and despair, wisdom,

and long since buried memories of loving times past.

It speaks loudly in my writing.

It is my writing that has unleashed this flood of feeling,

of remembering, of understanding,

of the will, the need to survive this hollow pit