Book of Life: Poems for the Journey

By Amy Sue Adams

Book of Life: Poems for the Journey is a book of poetry that tells a story—a human story and a divine story. Many themes are visited, including writing, creativity, nature, relationships, loving ourselves, purpose, surrender, soul, change, grief, awakening, empowerment, and more.

The poems showed up as the poet stepped into a life that allowed room for them. Difficult decisions were made so as to keep the pen from running dry. Grief and growing pains made way for risk, newness, adventure, and spontaneity, and these things subsequently made for something to write about.

The writings are fueled by the poet’s fire and are intended to light the divine spark within the reader. Often, the poems show up as a pondering and then come full circle to a resolution of sorts, one that can potentially serve us all as we journey, always, Home.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781664140004

Amy Sue Adams

AMY SUE ADAMS is a poet, lyricist, writer, mother, teacher, and facilitator. She enjoys traveling, dancing, hiking, swimming, bicycling, and amateur photography. In 2008, a Dark Night of the Soul experience brought Amy back to herself, back to her writing, and back to her purpose. Humaira, a wise spirit guide of sorts, showed up just about that time to infuse both Amy’s writing and her life. Humaira’s words have bookended both of Amy’s books to date, and She continues to make Her presence known to this day. It’s a little unorthodox, to say the least, but it is what has occurred, and honoring what has occurred has become life-saving, life-enhancing, and life-giving for Amy. While all has not been peaches and cream, even in Georgia where Amy was guided for a bit, all has been Alive, and that Aliveness is what Amy has learned to follow. This book; Amy’s first book, Book of Love: Poems to Light Your Way Home; all of her other writings; and her life lived have become the fruits of her labor. Through various means, Amy supports others as they follow their own—at times elusive—pull toward answering the call of Soul. Amy’s website is travelinglightpoetry.com.

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Also by Amy Sue Adams

Book of Love: Poems to Light Your Way Home

(Humaira~Amy Adams)

Book of Life

Poems for the Journey

Amy Sue Adams

Copyright © 2020 by Amy Sue Adams.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 03/02/2021

Xlibris

844-714-8691

www.Xlibris.com

820019

To Life, my Ultimate

Lover,

with gratitude for our Journey through these pages

and with unbridled commitment to our Eternal Affair

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.

~Samuel Johnson, English writer, 1709–1784

Creativity is the greatest form of rebellion.

~Osho

You only need small wings to fly.

~Me

~~~~~~~~~~

descend: v. to go down, to go or move from a higher to

a lower place or level, to slope or lead downward

ascend: v. to go up, to rise or move toward

the sky, to slope or lead upward

fluctuate: v. to shift back and forth uncertainly, to ebb and flow in waves

dance: v. to move your body in a way that goes with the rhythm

and style of music that is being played, to

move with and guide (someone)

as music plays, to dance with (someone)

~Merriam-Webster

~~~~~~~~~~

CONTENTS

Foreword

Introduction

Prelude

This Poem Wants to Enter You

Who You Are to Me

I Might

Why Did You Run?

Am I Too Much?

Reflections

Farewell

Writing Desk

The True Release

I’ll Never Be the Same

They Carry Me Home

Before

Torn

Neon Sign

She Can Decide

Irreconcilable Differences

What Does It Matter?

Moon on the Lake

One and the Same

Glory

Nothing Can Stop Me

Church Bells

By the Wayside

Not From . . . Toward

Savored

The Creation Story

How IT Came to Be

The Big Bang Theory

Circle

Come . . . into Me

Be Danced, Be Written

It Is Enough

To Follow You

Do They Know?

Before I Fall

I Know the Dance

Concrete Backdrop

Life Goes On

Winter’s Poem

Can I Hold This?

The Voice of the Prisoner

Present on a Holy Night

The Life I Came to Live

I Can Only Be Me

Here I Come!

Wild and Free

How Then Shall I Proceed?

The Reason for Which I Have Come

What’s Next

Nothing More, Nothing Compared to This

Just Exactly What She Means

What You Don’t Know

Worth Every Single Last Cent

To Greet the World Anew

I Am So Very Blessed

Love, Love, and Only Love

Very Special Art

Where the Dolphins Sing

Loud and Clear

This

Unknown Lands

Truth Dance

Just as Spiritual

How It Went This Morning

I Am Eternity

Welcome to Life

Porch Swing

He Asked

Conquered

Do Not Tell Me

So This Is Life

On the Boat

I Have Fallen

Life Said

Candy Apple

Coffee Shop Kid

My Pillows, My Blanket, and My God

Back on Track

What Have We Done?

The Question

A Day in the Life

She’ll Keep on Coming

Walls

Your Dull Idea

There’ll Be a Goodbye

Color My World

Remnants

You Make Me Smile

For This Particular Walk

The Blue Dress

Pineapple Cake and Pine Trees

Morning Commute

She Will Rise

Some Days

Date Night

We’re on Our Way Home

Small Wonders

Serenade

What Is Strength, Really?

You, Me, The Ocean, and The Moon

These Words

Wildflowers

I’ve Never Really Loved My Body

The Blessing of the Unknown

I, Too, Shall Reign Divine

Jaded

Kids Playing in Grass

Tempt Me if You Dare

Could Be the Wine

My Own Little Place in Georgia

The Rocker

Every Experience

Oh, What a Glorious Song

Deliciousness

OMG

In Grief

Gratitude, Like, For Real

And I Climb Yet Again

Soul Lightning

A Poem to My Poetry

Travelin’ Home

To You, My Brothers and Sisters, Surely We Are One

That’s All for Now

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

About the Book

Foreword

Dance, when you’re broken open.

Dance, if you’ve torn the bandage off.

Dance in the middle of the fighting.

Dance in your blood.

Dance when you’re perfectly free.

~Rumi

Amy Sue Adams is a true seeker, a soul journeyer, an open heart, and a creative spirit. I met Amy at a Let Your Yoga Dance teacher training at the Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health. This is a program of dance as a spiritual path, a vehicle of true expression that brings healing, integration, and transformation. In the dance, we open to feeling and come together as a tribe to share in community this beautiful revelation of self. We awaken in the dance and let our authentic nature pour through our bodies to express our joy, our sadness, our elation, our grief, our beautiful humanness. I have been blessed to connect with such brave and willing people in Let Your Yoga Dance and count Amy as my dear tribe sister.

What Amy brings to the dance—fullness of curiosity, brave authenticity, and depth of feeling—is also infused into her beautiful and heartfelt poetry. In this collection of poems, she honestly and powerfully articulates her full range of feelings, she openly shows us her questions and inquiries, and she gives us a full view of her journey leading home to love. Amy takes us to many places in her poems and dives deeply into many realms of both light and shadow, but she keeps pointing back to the universal principle of love.

Now more than ever, it is clear that we need the voices of poets and the movement of dance—we need all the art in the world—to keep us connected to the deeper truths of life: that it is a gift, that its richness requires the full range of human experience, that it is the journey that matters most, and that we don’t travel alone. These poems are here to be received as an invocation—a call—to fully step onto the path of life. Here is an invitation to a deep exploration of self, to go into the fire and feel all that life calls us to feel. Book of Life: Poems for the Journey gives voice and validation to this exquisite human condition. It extends a hand and lets you know that you are never walking alone.

Jean Jyotika Skeels

December 2016

Introduction

It’s an interesting thing birthing a book, particularly one that is so personal, so soul-infused, so permeated by vulnerability. Just as with the birth of my first paper child, I have felt a plethora of emotions with this, my second paper child, as she prepares herself to be released into the world. Yes, her due date—the one set by the Divine Author herself, the one written in the stars even before a single poem in this book became a thought in my mind—is approaching. Life says it’s time—time to let go of perfectionism, procrastination, excuses, and justifications; time to release people-pleasing, control, manipulations, and distractions; time to trust my metaphorical midwife, my symbolic doula, my Inner Wisdom, and the birthing process itself; time to say, Enough is enough already . . . and push.

The book of poetry you are holding in your hands does not belong to me; it belongs to Life. Over the course of several years, I experienced it as a Gift forming within me—a Gift that, one day, would share itself with the world. The pregnancy has been all kinds of interesting—tumultuous on one hand and smooth sailing on the other, disciplined and healthy on even days, haphazard and craving-indulgent on odds, the only thing in the world I could ever really dream of wanting to do with my life at times and the oh my gosh, am I really going to do this at others. The one constant is Joy, and Joy is my barometer. When I am writing, I often get lost in a perpetual state of Joy. The writing itself is rarely stressful; it’s simply writing doing what writing does, with no or at least very little interference from me. All other aspects of this process, however—including the life experiences that feed it—are a roller-coaster ride, to say the least, some parts of which I enjoy and others of which I simply cannot wait for the ride to be over. What I continue to learn, time and again, is that a beautiful dance between acting and allowing is key. Resisting and fighting get me nowhere; cooperating and accepting do.

I was reminded of just that a little over a decade ago, after moving through a period of intense darkness, and it was at that time that Life began speaking to me in the form of poetry. The poems were like a healing balm, one that brought me Home to my Self over and over again. So I shared the poems, which had culminated into my first book, Book of Love: Poems to Light Your Way Home, with the world. My intention in sharing them was that they might light the way Home for others as well. The words continued to show up even as I was in the midst of publishing my first collection, and those new poems, which stopped coming in 2015, have become the collection that you are holding in your hands. These poems have supported me on my journey in a life that has come so Alive. The experience that originally led me back to writing—and in a whole new way—also led me back to Life . . . and in a whole new way as well. Outer changes began to reflect inner changes. Guidance, dreams, synchronicities, prayer, and a whole lot of Grace became my lifeboat. None of it was easy, even amidst what began to feel like love notes dropped from the sky. Yet I have no doubt that all of it was purposeful. At the very least, it fueled the fire for the words contained within these pages. As you read these words, I hope you’ll find pieces of your own journey in mine and that, in doing so, you’ll feel supported, validated, comforted, and loved.

The final preparations before this book’s birth had me back and forth around all kinds of decisions, one of them being how to organize the poems. In my first book, I chose to separate the poems by theme, and that felt right. However, no matter how many times I attempted that approach with this book, it simply did not feel like the way in which the poems wanted to be presented. So the poems in this book—minus a few which merited placement elsewhere—are offered in the order in which they came to me. I think this is because they tell a story of sorts—a human story and a divine story—one that wants to be shared just exactly how it showed up, both inwardly and outwardly. I’m choosing to trust that this approach to presenting the poems this time around is the right way to go while also trusting that your Soul knows just exactly which poem might serve you at any given moment in time.

I have offered glimpses of the pregnancy along the way as I compellingly shared what felt like sonogram pictures while the book grew into itself; the poems always seemed to wish to be shared just when they were needed most, both in my own life and in the life of our collective. Now I offer you these poems in their wholeness for the very first time. I say wholeness, not completion, because it has been my experience that, as with babies, a book enters the world to change it and simultaneously be changed by it. In this way, I do see the book’s unfolding as eternal. She is my Soul, and my Soul, I have learned, really is navigating an everchanging, eternal journey.

So it is with pure intentions and a humble, grateful heart that I extend the continually unfolding, everchanging, eternal journey of this book—this Soul— to you. I love her unconditionally. Yes, I embrace all of what she’s made of and more. I love her contemplations and her quirkiness, her serious and her silly, her inspirations and her naughtiness, her boldness and her vulnerability. I love her truth and her contradictions, her courage and her creativity, her ponderings and her mysteries, her clarity and her confusion. I love her mistakes and her misfortunes, her triumphs and her failures, her provocations and her perceptions, her funkiness and her sobriety. I love her instigations and her invocations, her playfulness and her considerations, her depth and her simplicity, her nakedness and her real. I. Love. Her.

I must say that this Introduction feels like a birth announcement of sorts. In these perpetual words, I continue to be born, again and yet again, and it has been my experience that, as each of us touches our own Soul, we touch the Souls of each other and