Perhaps it can be said that poetry is a wedding of external stimulus and internal investigation. To unearth pure pearls of language, an alphabet of heart, we must first dive deeply inwards and trawl through the riches of our interior, witnessing how life experience manifests internally. By turning the gaze inwards, away from the world, by tuning into the silent wisdom of your heart, an idea, a phrase, a line may bubble up and stir the beginnings of a poetry of knowing, of Truth. By allowing the intuition of your heart into the driver’s seat, the mind may follow and between the two, a necklace of words effortlessly cobble themselves together.
The poems that endure over time, like the mystic poets of old, Hafiz, Rumi, for example: these are poems wrested from long pilgrimages into the wealth of inner knowing, daily life a reflection, a mirror guiding us back home to our true selves, if we are willing. Trusting the silence, that quiet space inside, to integrate what appears to be outside can lead to all kinds of surprising magic.
Ana Ramana sprung from the surprising union of an Irish international rugby player father and a Yorkshire nurse. This hybrid fusion – “The Anglo-Irish Treaty,” as she calls it – has fed much of Ana’s early poetric leanings. She earned an M.A. in Poetry from Johns Hopkins University and taught at universities around the world. However, seventeen years of sustained internal exploration has shapeshifted her work into a meditation on the deeper meaning of life, on a call to others to journey home to their true, beautiful, natural selves. She now offers intimate, heart- and soul-centred spiritual writing workshops and retreats around the world.
If one word were to attempt to approximate Ana’s life and writings, it would definitely be love. Not the standard coupling of two separate, lonely island selves, hewn to the daily grind of “don’t upset me and I won’t upset you.” When Ana speaks or writes of love, she is leaning into the fullness, the wholeness, the wonder of love without condition, love without borders, that fathomless ocean of eternal love that created this entire existence, that ushered us into being, that is ever present, if we just conjure the courage to commune with our true, joy-drenched and perfect nature.