Tami Simon: Hello, friends. My name’s Tami Simon, and I’m the founder of Sounds True. I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge. I also want to take a moment to introduce you to Sounds True’s new membership community and digital platform. It’s called Sounds True One. Sounds True One features original, premium, transformational docuseries, community events, classes to start your day and relax in the evening, special weekly live shows including a video version of Insights at the Edge with an after-show community question-and-answer session with featured guests. I hope you’ll come join us, explore. Come have fun with us and connect with others. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com.
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This conversation has been many moons in the making, and I’m so happy that it’s happening now as Andrea Gibson has been named the Poet Laureate of the State of Colorado. What a joy to be able to have this conversation so soon after that appointment. Andrea is one of the most celebrated and influential spoken-word poets of our time, best known for their live performances. Andrea has changed the landscape of what it means to attend a poetry show. Andrea is a truth teller. Their poems center around love, LGBTQ issues, spirituality, mental health and social justice. The winner of the first Women’s World Poetry Slam, Andrea is the author of seven award-winning books and seven full-length albums, most recently, a collection of poems called You Better Be Lightning. The Poet Laureate of the State of Colorado, Andrea Gibson. Hi.
Andrea Gibson: Hi, Tami. Hi. So good to be here.
TS: What was it like for you to receive that appointment? How did it happen? How did you respond inside?
AG: I knew that I was in the final. I got an email about being in the final four of folks that they were looking to select. And then I had a meeting with Governor Polis and he asked me if I was up for it. And I said, “Absolutely, I am up for it.” And so here we are. It was really exciting and it was really sentimental in lots of ways, because I’ve spent a lot of the last 20 years on tour, just traveling around, but I learned everything I learned about writing from the poets of Colorado. So to have this opportunity to just be back in the heart of it again and to be able to help create some magic for other writers in the state just feels wonderful to me.
TS: Now, Andrea, you and I started corresponding when you shared with me that a cancer diagnosis that you received—now something like two years ago—created a profound transformation in your life and that you wanted to talk about it and let people know, really, what’s possible in terms of inner transformation, inner sight. And I wanted to start our conversation by learning more about what happened. In reading carefully your letter to me and then also watching, now, some of your more recent video performances and poems—this is my language now—I would say you had something like a “spiritual awakening” upon receiving your cancer diagnosis, and I wonder how you relate to that term. Yeah, share with me your experience.
AG: Yeah. So two years ago I was diagnosed with a very aggressive form of ovarian cancer. And it had been my fear my entire adult life, because my aunt died of ovarian cancer and my grandma, who I was very close to, died of a broken heart soon after. I had lived my life with so much fear. And I feel like maybe everybody can say that, but I was having chronic panic attacks for over a decade. And when I was a child, my life was just ruled by fear. I think I was probably the most fearful person I ever knew, and I was an extreme hypochondriac. I would get de-boarded from airplanes having a panic attack. It was just a giant part of my life.
And so when the thing that I had feared my whole life happened, I remember I woke up from surgery—where they didn’t know if what they had seen on the CAT scan was cancerous or not. But I woke up from surgery and they told me it was, and almost immediately I could feel something changing. For example, I was in that room and, granted, I was on drugs, but even as they started to wear off, I could feel that the texture of my life was already different. For example, whereas a day before I might’ve been annoyed by my father, suddenly he’s in the room and I’m thinking, this man is the best father in the world. Suddenly my partner and I had been having trouble, and suddenly I just felt so much love for her. And I was overcome with this sort of sense of being adored and cherished by the universe. And also a sense that every living being was. I just felt more at peace than I could ever imagine feeling, even on a great day in my life where everything else was going right.
And so here was this thing that was supposed to just be my biggest fear come true, and suddenly I was there. I was just there. And I guess that’s the way of putting it. And I still don’t know exactly what happened. I describe it as feeling that I was just graced with a sudden experience of peace, but I had also had people in my life prior. I had just watched a friend die of cancer in the most graceful way, and I had also witnessed my therapist go through chemotherapy for colon cancer in a way that I didn’t know was possible.
But I felt—and I had read years prior Michael Singer’s book The Untethered Soul. And so I had a sense that what was happening was, I was surrendering. And I don’t think at that point there was an option not to, and I think maybe that was the gift of it. It was so serious, it was such a serious diagnosis. There was an expected two-year life expectancy. And suddenly I just stopped fighting with my life. And so sure, I think that in many ways, yes, in contrast to where I was before, certainly I was 99 percent happier than I had ever been, and I stayed in a state of that peace, for probably about the first 11 months, 98 percent of the time.
TS: Now, someone could of course get a diagnosis like that and crumble into some type of state of self-pity or just terrible woe, anguish, suicidal thoughts. And here, the opposite happened for you. We could say something like the opposite. How do you understand or explain that? Did you do anything inside? Did you consent? Did you agree? Did you say, “I’ll say yes to this,” or what?
AG: Yeah, sure. All of those things. My therapist actually visited me in the hospital. And my mom and I, I was holding my mom’s hand, and I asked her how she did that time with so much seeming ease. And she said that she had made the decision that she was going to find joy in every instant she could.
But for me, as she was saying that, I almost felt the sense of the deciding having been done for me. But I just suddenly knew that everything that came my way came on behalf of the evolution of my spirit, came on my behalf, and I could feel that cancer had come on my behalf. And I could even feel that when death came, death would be coming on my behalf, that those things were not my enemy. And as soon as those two things stopped feeling like they were against me, how could anything else in life feel like it was against me? Nothing felt like it was against me anymore. And I just want to speak into the thing that you said, because also I think that sometimes people can navigate an illness like this with a lot of rage, for example. I don’t think that my way is necessarily better than that, because I’ve had plenty of rage in my life. Maybe that other person didn’t ever express anger or feel rage, and that could be the waking up for another individual.
TS: Now, I want to talk to this notion that challenges, in your case here, this challenge to your very mortality, but for many people it’s other kinds of challenges that might be happening in their life—financial challenges or challenges in their family. What we can say to ourself is, the spiritual part of me, “I know this is happening for my own good, for my evolution. This is helping me grow.” And maybe even 51 percent of us believes it. But there’s this other part of us that’s like, “Oh my God, I wish this wasn’t happening. This just is terrible and I hate it.” And I feel somehow like, yes, I’m being asked to grow, but it also feels like a bad hand or something like that. I’m being dealt a bad hand right now. What would you say to that person to help them?
AG: I actually wrote something about that, because everybody was saying that I had been dealt a bad hand, as if they’ve never seen God and the Joker smile. Or I also wrote another thing about it… Well, I’m not going to keep quoting myself.
TS: You can. I like it when you do. I hope you do. Please. I hope you share some poems with us too, Andrea. So if any of these questions—no, I’m very serious, bring forth a poem. I hope you’ll just hit it.
AG: Well, the line that’s coming up right now is, “I’ve not needed rose-colored glasses to see my life this way. I simply had to stop ignoring the thorn’s loving heart.” And the thing that was lucky for me, which has been the wall up in trying to communicate this to my community and my friends, because I’ve so badly wanted to communicate it to them, hoping it will loosen up their grief a little bit. And also so that they could have a more gentle experience with moving through the grief that they’re feeling or anything that’s happening in their life. But I think when that was an idea for me, the words you say, when they existed as an idea, it didn’t do anything for me. It just didn’t get there. And because I had experienced it, and after I experienced that initial day with cancer, then I started watching myself do it with everything.
So something little would happen that was annoying, and I would just say yes and surrender to it. And the thing that I didn’t know about it was that saying yes in a moment that everything else is telling you not to say yes to this, everything in your being is resisting it. If you can manage to actually surrender to it and say yes, it is a portal to bliss. And that was the thing that I never understood.
I lived in Boulder for years, and so I always had exposure to these ideas. But what I thought it would do was just minimize my suffering. I thought it would just make me suffer a little bit less, make me a little bit less anxious, a little bit less depressed. I didn’t understand that all of life was under there, that all of life existed if I could do that, if I could surrender. And that life is the most incredible. It’s hard to talk about without getting teary, but it is the most incredible feeling I’ve ever felt in my life. And I know it to be our birthright. I know it to be all of our natural states, and it is in there. And so I think that’s it. It’s like if somebody felt it once, if you surrendered to one difficult thing and you feel that, I think at that point you understand, “OK, this is worth doing,” and it becomes easier to do.
TS: You mentioned Michael Singer’s work with his book The Untethered Soul. And with Sounds True, he’s created program called Living from a Place of Surrender, and what he talks about is the shakti, the energy in the body. And I’m curious, is that what you’re pointing to here? And when you say the most incredible feeling when you say yes to this unwanted thing, can you describe, oh poet, describe the feeling to me. Tell me what it’s like.
AG: It’s almost like feeling the entire life force of the universe is within you. Or I’ll speak for myself, I’ll say what happened to me. It was like I felt the life force, just the whole universe was within me. I suddenly stopped feeling separate from anything. For the first time in my life, I felt this intense sense of deeply loving myself, and I also understood self-love in a new way, where I recognized self-love as loving the whole world, that those things just went hand-in-hand. Feeling into that love for myself. And it wasn’t an idea. I think for many years, I tried to get to a place of self-love. I considered myself an authority on the topic, but I was always trying to think myself there. I was trying to get myself there with words and thoughts, and it wasn’t that at all. And so, yes, what you’re talking about is just this, and I think Michael actually talks about it, moving upward, and that’s how it feels.
And almost like my jaw is dropping, like wow. And the teary thing about it is how simple, how simple it was. And I think that I felt a little bit lucky to have not really been on a spiritual path, because I could recognize that what got me there was the not trying. And so later, like a year later when I started to feel it, sort of where I would have more moments of it not being there, I realized that I was trying so hard to get back there. And there is no way to try hard to get back there, trying softer maybe. So that was it. It was just like, wow. And I felt a sadness for people on the spiritual path, and I don’t know if that makes sense. But as soon as I sort of got on it, I then started trying hard whenever I would lose my way. And I couldn’t ever get there trying hard.
TS: What does trying softer look like? How do you do that?
AG: Well, I think one of the most potent things Michael talks about is just relaxing your entire body. I didn’t realize until I heard him say that, how much of my life I was tensing. And specifically relaxing your hands, so you’re letting go. But also I have something that I call a keychain. And well, what I felt was that my heart had just completely blown open. But then, when I would hit these moments where I would feel my heart closed, I made up a keychain for myself, which I think is a beautiful thing for anyone to do, which is, what are the keys that open your specific heart? Because not everything works for everyone. And I think I made a list of 18 keys, because some days one would work and one wouldn’t. I could give some examples of those if you want.
TS: Please. Yeah.
AG: Let me see if I can remember. So one was a simple shift of my attention off of what I could get from the world, which I didn’t even realize how much of my focus had been on what I could get from the world. I didn’t think of myself as that kind of person. But after I could see that I had that focus a lot of the time. And so taking my focus off what I can get and putting my focus on what I can give.
Another thing that would often do it was focusing on unknowing the people that I am around, specifically the people that I know the most. I started to, I would say, let this person be a mystery to me. And what that would do is it would take me out of the past, where I was thinking of and thinking that I knew who this person was, and it would ground me in the present moment. And then, what was a miracle about that is, the other person then got to show up new, because my expectation that they be who they were yesterday was no longer there.
Another one of my keys would be hunt out fear. Go find fear, do something that absolutely terrifies you. So yeah, lots of them like that.
TS: Let’s talk about “hunt out fear.” So you hunted out—in some cases, for some of us, it’s not that hard to find. It’s a short hunt. Now there I am, me and my fear. OK, now what? Successful hunt.
AG: That’s OK. OK, so there you are. So for me, a hunting out of fear might be calling up someone, having a difficult conversation that I’ve been putting off for years. Maybe I’ve been holding a grudge against this person, or I feel like they don’t like me, something like that. And so I would make the call. And as I made the call, I would relax in my body.
And this is the other thing, I started with a foundation of faith in the process. And so what I knew was that if I could relax in the fear and stay with the fear, thinking of every cell of my body as a door or the front door of a house. And it also had a back door. The more I opened, it was almost like the fear would come into me and then move quickly through. But then I could almost feel the fear taking with it old fears that were hanging out. And so it was a selfish goal, in a way, because it was also this cleansing of myself. And so each time I could do that, it felt like a cleansing.
TS: Now, Andrea, you mentioned that for 11 months after the diagnosis, you were in this state of exquisiteness, feeling cherished and cherishing others, but then it shifted. What caused it, do you think, to shift? And now you’re back more, I think, where many practicing softer spiritual practitioners find themselves. Or maybe you’re not quite there, but like, “I had it, I lost it. It’s sort of here, it’s not here.” Or did something permanently change? Just trying to understand your experience.
AG: Yeah, so I’ve thought a lot about that time. So one of the things that happened that I’m not going to go into is there was a trauma of a friend in my personal, close community. And it was really upsetting, and I found myself having a difficult time surrendering in a way that I hadn’t. And I realized that I was struggling to surrender to other people’s pain.
And also at that time, I was getting involved more politically. And I could tell that it was pulling me back to the land of my beliefs. And you would think that not having beliefs would make me stagnant and no good for the world, but it turns out the fewer beliefs I had, the more capacity I had to show up in the world in a way that I respected and that I thought could actually help.
So I was entangled politically. I was struggling to surrender to other people’s pain. And then, right around that time, I had a recurrence and I also had… So I can talk about that later, but I think that was what happened. And I didn’t have a practice the whole first year. It wasn’t like I was actively meditating. There was not something that I was doing. If ever there was a day that I lost my way, I could listen to something, I could listen to Sounds True, listen to somebody talking, and somebody would not say anything for 45 minutes that would click. But then one word and I would click back. And suddenly I’d be seeing clearly, and I could tell by, honestly, my thoughts, how many thoughts I was having, but also the shape of my thoughts and if they were negative about other people, if I was tending to judge, if I was judging my own life, if I was feeling sorry for myself. Since then, what it has been has been in and out, in and out, in and out.
I can get triggered in ways that I couldn’t the first year, but my baseline is something that I never imagined would be possible. So to update you, in April, I got word, my cancer came back and it had kept coming back after chemotherapy. And so in April, I went into the doctor and, at that point, the doctor said that my cancer was considered incurable. And she gave me some treatment options that could potentially save my life. They all came with really harsh side effects and a very low chance of them prolonging my life for any amount of time.
And then she also gave me the option of just living out the rest of my days as not a cancer patient. I took some time, I did some alternative treatments, and then I ultimately decided to do a sort of chemotherapy, which is more mild, which is why I have my hair. But it was a treatment that had just come out of trials. I could talk about my hesitance to do that. One of the reasons was it was supposed to take a lot of my vision. And so that was a lot to work with initially.
But the point is, I went on that med and so, right now, it actually worked. My cancer markers are back down to where they might be when I have no evidence of disease in my body. It doesn’t mean I go in for an infusion in a couple of days, it could very well go back up. But this is what I’m navigating right now. I’m navigating I could die any day, and I am still more at peace, happier, just feel clearer and so good about life—just so good about life and so grateful to be alive and to be on the planet.
And so that is the difference. It doesn’t mean I’m just constant bliss all the time, but my baseline, it’s—so little surfaces compared to what used to.
TS: Andrea, one of the things I want to talk to you about, and you referenced it, you got back involved, for a period of time, bringing your beliefs with you and politics and how there was a way that you could get all caught up in that, but also not get all caught up in that. And I’m curious if you could speak directly to the activist community that you’ve been a part of for so many years. What have you learned about how to be open-hearted, caring, bringing this sense of how loved you are and how much you love the world into your activism without getting caught in some kind of positionality that shuts down the energy that can flow through all of us. How do you do that?
AG: A great question. And I actually think I figured it out. Well, what I have figured out about it, I figured out in a place that I never thought I would have. So one of the places in trying to figure out how to surrender to other people’s pain, one of the things that I did struggle throughout to surrender to was the idea of my parents’ grief. Because I had so much fear about the same thing happening to my mom that happened to my grandma—that I would die and then my mom wouldn’t survive it. And so I could feel that holding onto me, and I could feel it holding onto me. And it became activated more after my recurrence, because I thought, “OK, the end is in near.” That’s what I felt.
But I was feeling so much pain about my parents. And then I think that I figured out, I figured out I can’t save them and they have their own path, but what I can do is love them. And so I’ve translated that to my political life. I used to think—and I’ll still talk about it that way like, “I want to change the world.” I think all of the poets that I know have not grown out of that feeling of, “That’s why we’re still poets. We want to change the world, we want to save the world.” That was always the texture of it. But it’s since changed for me in that I think of saving and changing as the way I might think about a codependent relationship I was having with my family or with a partner. To say I want to save or change a partner—that you can recognize that immediately is toxic. But to say you are going to love a partner isn’t. And so I think of the world that way. I’m no longer here to save the world or change it. I’m here to love the world.
And I don’t know if I’m answering your question at all, Tami. Will you remind me? My memory can be a little bit choppy from chemo.
TS: You are, because you’re talking about loving the world. It sounds to me not taking a position or a belief system against as much as speaking your heart about what you’re for. The question had to do with, how do you bring this new surrendered consciousness into the world of social injustice? How do these things meet inside of you and that can help your activist community and all of us who are people of conscience at this time?
AG: Yeah. So I often think about the fact that in fifth grade I started trying to do something about climate change. And so say I had attachment to that, say I was deeply attached to that. Look at how miserable I would be right now. Probably so deflated that I’d give up and I would have nothing more to offer to the world. And so a lot about it is loosening up the attachment, loosening up the attachment to outcome, and just to have continued for all these years to love the world and do what I can. The other thing is, I have shifted my attention in my writing and in what I want to try to do, whereas I’ve said so many times, even when the truth isn’t hopeful, the telling of it is. And so I used to do shows where I would tell the truth about all of these political topics, and I almost made hankies a merch item, because everybody just sobbed through the whole show.
That’s all we did was cry through the whole show. And since my diagnosis, I’ve been wondering, is that the most potent thing to do? Now I know the necessity of telling the truth, but there is another thing that I can do as a writer, and that is, I can imagine the world that can be and I can start helping other people imagine the world that can be. I heard somebody, and I don’t know who said this, but we can only go where we have first imagined. And so if we can’t imagine it, we can’t create it. So my writing has changed, and what I talk about has changed. For example, if I want to talk about climate change, I’m not talking about the mountains burning. There’s an importance to talking about that. But right now, the things that I would talk about to try to get that to shift is, bees fall asleep in flowers when gathering nectar. Whales commonly follow their injured friends to shore, so their friend won’t be alone when they die. And all of these beautiful images about our world.
Why is our world worth saving? When I was, I don’t know how old I was, 24, I wrote a poem and the last line was, “Everybody knows what you’re against, show them what you’re for.” And I don’t think I did that in my writing for all of these years. I think that I was so focused on what was wrong with the world that I almost lost track of what I was for. And I lost my capacity to articulate what I was for. So those are some ways I’m seeing all of this come into my politics and my desire for social justice.
But the other thing at the heart of it is being in the chemo room with people of very different values. I was sitting in the chemo room next to a man wearing a MAGA hat, and on the other side was… I don’t want to give details of people away, but in that space, while we’re all navigating our mortality, I felt that we weren’t separate. And I could understand our lack of separateness in a really big way. And so I don’t tend to box myself in anymore. I try to be in the moment and just see what my heart wants to do.
TS: There are a couple of questions that are really important to me personally, Andrea. So I’m going to go ahead and just bring them up right now. One of the things that I really admire about you is that you seem willing to be something like wholly yourself. And I think a lot of us feel we want that and maybe we’re mostly ourselves some of the time, something like that. I’m 85 percent of myself occasionally. What do you think enables people, what has enabled you, to whatever degree you are, to be fully ourselves, not holding back some portion, not keeping some part hidden, tucked away but no, I’m actually going to be the supernova of me, whatever that is?
AG: I love that phrase. That’s beautiful. I think the first thing is just the gift of mortality. And I keep trying to talk about this. I keep trying to express this, and I can tell that it can be difficult for some people to grab. But knowing how brief my life is or how brief all of our lives are, it’s so difficult to give a crap about what doesn’t matter. I wrote a love poem for my partner shortly after my diagnosis where I said, “I had no idea how much would change when all that mattered became all that mattered.” And so, that’s what happens when you feel into mortality, the brevity of your own existence, the brevity of everybody’s existence that we’re going to say… And if you feel into the enormity of that, it’s very difficult to keep carrying what everybody thinks. And I’ve been watching it, so I’m fascinated with this. Because I also, again, did not think of myself as somebody who spent a lot of time caring what people thought.
And now, I watch it and I can see it all the time. I can see it in myself often, where I’m like, “Oh, there it is. There it is.” And things that I think have no idea. For example, a few days after chemo, I was doing a walk around a lake, and I said to my partner, “I’m not feeling well, I’ve got to go back to the car.” And so we went back to the car. And then later, I realized we didn’t go back to the car because I wasn’t feeling well. We went back to the car because I was afraid of somebody else seeing me collapse and what they would think about me— so all of these things that I didn’t even think were me caring what other people think. And just to pay attention to it just shakes it up. It’s hard to keep caring once you see it.
And for me, one of the most vital parts of that was, yes, I could see where I was caring about if people thought I was doing something wrong. But one of the real quick ways to nip it in the bud is to pay attention to when you’re caring if somebody is telling you you’re doing something great, you’re doing something right. And as soon as I could just start shaking that off myself, I felt far more myself.
TS: So when somebody tells you what a great poem or a great compliment or a great whatever, how do you react inside now?
AG: I think it’s beautiful, because if it’s a poem, it was an experience of me just being in the creative place and being loving and the other person being loving. It’s similar to with the Colorado Poet Laureate thing. I could very distinctly feel what the me three years ago would’ve felt, and I could feel the ego attachment I would have to it. And I know this is going to be weird to say, but there’s part of me, sometimes, that wishes I still had that. Sometimes I wish that I would have that a little bit more, because there are ways that I sometimes just feel a little bit in another realm. I don’t quite know how to explain it, but there are a little parts of it sometimes that don’t feel human. And I can almost think, “Oh, I would love to have called…” I don’t know. It’s hard to explain, Tami, but I could just feel the distinct difference. And it doesn’t mean that energy isn’t just loving and it feels nice to me. It’s hitting a different part of me.
TS: Well, I’m interested in this different realm. Would you say that now, at this point, you have one foot in the human realm and one foot someplace else? And if so, can you describe to me more what that someplace else is?
AG: Well, for the first year I couldn’t say, because I would have lots of people in my life who were very much into manifesting and things like that. And I couldn’t get myself to say, for the first year, “I want to live.” I could not say that, because I was trying to be impeccable with my word and I would feel into myself, and I couldn’t find that wanting in myself. I lost my train of thought. Again, remind me of what you’re saying, Tami.
TS: I asked you, do you have one foot in this world and one foot in, quote unquote, “another world,” and what is that other world? Yeah.
AG: Yeah. And so that was it. And I think part of it was I felt neutral about both. I felt neutral about dying, because it was weird, because I loved my life so much. And you would think that that would be not what happens—if you love your life so much, you don’t want to leave. But I suddenly loved life so much that I felt like I understood that it was ongoing, that I wasn’t going to end somewhere. And so it wasn’t like a wall you hit at death, it suddenly felt like, OK, you’d keep going. But yeah, for that first year, certainly. And then I have tried to do some work about getting more back into this world and also trying to learn how to speak in a way that doesn’t make what I’m talking about sound so impossible and foreign to people.
And so I’m in that process of being a writer and also wanting to be able to reach people, of trying to get my feet back into this world or trying to get on into the ground and then playing around with saying “I want to live,” which I can say now. I can say I very much want to live. I want to live. I would love to live to be a hundred years old. And it feels like a joyful thing to say that. It doesn’t feel, like, icky in any way. It just feels lovely to want this life, because so much of my writing for years was about suicidality and my own struggles to want to live. And so I want to live, and that’s a new thing for me to say.
And I do feel. Yes, I feel like, for example, I’ll look out at the world and I’ll see people, and I can tell that they can feel a future. I can see on other people in my life that they are feeling a future. It feels like part of their world. And I no longer have that. I don’t feel a future. I don’t have that experience ever anymore. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I don’t know if it’s a good or a bad thing because I think of the future as a sort of thief in that it’s… You know what? Because you told me to, I’m just going to say it.
TS: I want you to. I’m ready to get you to just open up your books and start reading some poems. So please do not be shy about quoting.
AG: Yeah. One of the lines I wrote was, “Warming up to the idea of a promised tomorrow is the surest way to give today the cold shoulder.” And I can see that on folks. And I could certainly look back and it was all over me. It was all over me. I was always giving the moment the cold shoulder, because I was in the future all the time, or I was holding a grudge of some sort. It’s hard to hold a grudge and hold anybody else well, hold the world well, hold yourself well at the same time.
TS: Andrea, the other big question I wanted to ask you, besides how can we be fully ourselves, is what do you know, at this point, from your own experience about what continues after physical death? What can you say? Oh, I’ve seen this. I’ve felt this. I have some sense of knowing about this?
AG: Well, one of the things that really shocked me was, I started using the word God. And I didn’t think that I would ever… I’ve used God casually in poems, but I left the Baptist church sometime in my teens. When I came out, I figured I had to leave at least that religious idea of God behind. But I always longed for a connection to something greater. I didn’t think that I would find it in this. For some reason, I didn’t think that surrender would lead me to having God fly out of my mouth all the time. And by God, I mean source, the divine consciousness, whatever connects us all. But suddenly, when I could feel the love of God—I know that word can be hard for people—but when I could feel the love of God, I just felt so radiantly loved, and I knew that was always. And I can’t say anything about what’s next, but my sense is that abundant feeling of being a loving energy and just feeling an overwhelming amount of peace. My guess is that that’s next.
TS: All right. What would you say to young writers who are inspired by you, who look up to you? What’s your advice to them?
AG: It’s really funny, because yesterday, I posted something online for young writers, and what I said was—I was doing a writing workshop for youth. And a young girl raised her hand and she said that she didn’t feel like her life had been hard enough to be a writer. It really broke my heart. I felt so sad hearing that because I know, especially in the spoken-word movement, which tends to be political, social-justice-oriented poetry, we’re typically writing about pain. Or a lot of us are writing to try to use the page as therapy of sorts. And so we’re going into really heavy stuff. I’ve written about, yeah, like I said, suicidality, sexual assault, the massacre at Pulse Nightclub, all of this stuff. And so there’s so much importance in that. And also writing from a place of contentment, writing from a place of joy or peace or awe, the idea that what’s wrong with the world is that there’s too much joy in it is so sweet to me.
But that is not the problem with the world. And so I think what I would say to young writers is honor wherever you’re at. The most important thing is to be authentic. And that’s another thing on my keychain is be authentic, be true. Is there a way you can be more true in this moment? And so to be true. And then the other thing I think especially, which I’ve been trying to talk a lot about this for us on the left, because I think this tends to take us out of presence, is there seems to be right now an idea of a pressure for a homogenization of thought—that we all think the same things. If we even vary a little bit politically, then we’re terrified of getting called out or something happening of being told that we’re awful for having a different thought.
And I think each young writer should try to think like an inventor, not be a product of a thought assembly line, of being new. And I give myself this pep talk all the time, and especially lately, which is, be brave enough to make art that no one loves but you. Make art that you love and that love will come through. And what will happen is other people will love it too, because you do.
TS: There’s a quote from your work that I picked up on. “Picasso said he’d paint with his own wet tongue, and it was the passion behind making art.” And I wonder if you can comment on that.
AG: Yeah. He said, “I’d paint with my own wet tongue on the dusty floor of a jail cell if I had to.” And it’s the idea of just creating. And I remember I had a professor in college ask me if I had to write. He said, “Do you have to write?” And I also was doing a lot of visual art at the time. And so I sat with myself and I thought, “No, I don’t have to write.” And he said, “Well, then don’t bother. You should stop now.” And I thought, “OK, OK.” And then I sat with myself and I was like, “I don’t know that I agree with him. I don’t know if it has to be a ‘have to.’” But the pull is so big in me, and it’s annoying at times. It’s annoying because it finds me at 3:00 AM or it finds me at midnight.
I now have a rule with my partner that I can’t listen to anything or watch anything creative after 7:00 PM, or I’ll be up the entire night. But I would say it’s biggest for me right now, because right now, I think it’s the first time in my life that I’ve felt called. I’ve felt called to share creatively the truth of what’s been happening for me. And I don’t know if I’ve ever felt that call before. I just feel it. It’s almost loud in my ear like, “Experience life, tell the truth about it, and then let it be.” And it’s weird, because I also have lost my attachment to being the one that tells it, in a way.
I have a friend, Ethel, who just always is offering me so much insight. And right after my diagnosis, she said something to me, that the art that you came here to make, you might make after you die. And I think of it now, that I don’t own anything. I don’t want to occupy language. What I mean is, I don’t think I can die and take anything with me. I don’t think there’s anything I got in me that if I die, the world is going to struggle. I think it’s just going to scatter like a seed, bloom in somebody else’s typewriter, somebody else’s paint brush. And I think that’s how energy works.
TS: Yeah. I’m glad you’re bringing this up, because I pulled a quote from one of the things I read about you that I thought was really curious. “Almost all art is made by the dead, and we don’t know it.” And I thought, “I don’t know if I fully understand what Andrea is saying here.” So is what you’re saying that our experience in life force still inhabits the universe even if it comes through another person or that people are channeling spirit presences? What do you mean by that?
AG: I think that, well, first of all, say I leave, say I leave tomorrow. And I have so many ideas in me, I don’t think I’m going to bring those ideas with me. I think that they’re an energy that will just be handed off to others, like either somebody who knows me or somebody who doesn’t. But my grandma, my Grandma Faye, who was the one who died after my aunt’s death, when she died, I inherited her thimble collection. And when I got them in the mail, I put one on all ten of my fingers, and I started typing poems. And it was like we were making art together. And that was years, years and years ago. But I’ve felt it, in a way, ever since. And maybe that is what people are doing when they’re channeling, but maybe even when people aren’t conscious of channeling. Because my whole life, as I’ve written, I will bust out of my writing room and tell whoever is home. I would say, “I just wrote a line I didn’t write. Somebody else wrote it for me.”
And I think that is the experience of being a writer. You’re opening, and you’re opening to energies. And I feel all of it that those of us informed are probably just plagiarizing the ones who are not informed.
TS: Andrea, can we end with a poem? Any poem. Your choice.
AG: OK. OK. Let me see.
TS: Any poem.
AG: All right. Do you want a short one or long?
TS: I think I want a long one. I just like listening to you.
AG: OK. So I’ll tell you, this is the first poem in my book, You Better Be Lightning. And I’m going to share it with you because, and I don’t know why this was, but I always thought I was going to get cancer at 45 years old and I got it at 45 years old. It was so wild. But right before I got cancer, I wrote this book. And I didn’t always write—I do now, but for many years I didn’t write where I was. I wrote where I wanted to be. And I tried to use the poem as a road map for living. And so this one, I just wanted to touch into my astonishment, and it’s called, “Acceptance Speech after Setting the World Record in Goosebumps.” And this is a great writing prompt for any writers listening. Write an acceptance speech for a fictional award.
I wasn’t, by any means a natural.
Was not one of those wow-hounds
born jaw-dropped. I was tough in the husk.
Went years untouched by rain. Took shelter
seriously, even and often especially
in good weather, my tears like teenagers
hiding under the hoods of my eyes,
so committed they were to never falling
for the joke of astonishment.
When I was told there were seven
wonders of the world, I trusted the math,
believed I had seen none of them.
Of course, beauty hunted me.
It hunts everyone. But I outran it, hid
in worry, regret, the promise of an afterlife
or a week’s end.
Then one day, in a red velvet theater
in New Orleans, I watched Maya Angelou
walk on stage. Seventeen slow steps to the mic.
She took a breath before speaking,
I could hear God being born in that breath.
My every pore reached out like a hand
pointing to the first unsinkable lotus in the bayou
of the universe. I’d never felt anything like it.
Searched the encyclopedia for the feeling’s name
when I got home: “Goosebumps.”
Afterward I thought—I can do this.
Started training morning to night,
crowbar swinging like a pendulum at the wall
of my chest. Tore the caution tape off
my life and let everything touch it:
Alan Iverson on the television in his first season
with the Sixers, crossover sharp as a v of sparrows
flying to the paint like Michelangelo’s brush:
333 goosebumps.
My baby sister, sober for the first time
in thirteen years, calling to tell me she just noticed
our mother’s eyes are green:
505 goosebumps.
One day my friend scored tickets
to a Prince concert. Tiny venue. I was right
behind the sound booth. Prince’s entire band
that evening—women. At the end of the show,
the sound person turned around and whispered,
He didn’t play one song on his set list the whole night.
I live on stages. I know what it is to scratch a plan
but not the whole trip and still arrive to your destination
two hundred years before your time:
421 (artists formerly known as) goosebumps.
But that’s just the fancy stuff.
Some of them came from simple facts—
it rains diamonds on Jupiter.
Blood donors in Sweden receive
a thank-you message when their blood is used.
One night in Michigan, my friend,
still undiagnosed, could not uncurl her fingers
to strum her guitar, so she sang the chords instead.
It was the first time in my life I’d seen pain
become an instrument:
10 dozen goosebumps
for each and every note plucked
from the string section of her refusal to silence
her dream. After that, nothing in the world was gray.
Even the movie of my past was released in color.
The oldest man in my hometown could not
get to the door to listen to our carols,
so we went inside and sang at his bedside instead.
Twenty-four boots on the front step catching snowflakes with their tongues:
776 goosebumps.
At one point, everything started doing it:
A sincere apology.
An enemy’s love poem.
The moon rising over the continental divide.
My love and I thought it was a car
driving off a cliff, and suddenly nothing
in the world was dying. You ever felt that?
A split second when nothing in the world is dying?
888 goosebumps
and the next day I sharpened a tiny ax
so I could split the seconds myself.
Too much lives in a moment
to not feed it to the fire in the heart, slow.
A Missoula treehouse filled with candlelight.
The octopus documentary.
The biggest dog in the shelter
hiding behind a teacup chihuahua,
and the woman who came to adopt a cat
taking all three of them home.
There is no escaping the magic now.
Beauty caught me and never let me go.
And the thing about the world record
is—if someone breaks it after me,
oh, and they will break it after me,
I will love that so much
that without even trying,
I’ll just break it again.
TS: Andrea Gibson, Poet Laureate of the State of Colorado, truth teller, big-hearted friend. Andrea, thank you so much. Thanks for being with us here.
AG: Thank you. Thank you so much, Tami. I loved being here. Have a wonderful day.
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