We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Chelan Harkin . We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Chelan below.

Chelan, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?

Near the end of 2020 I realized, with quaking terror, that I needed to publish my collection of mystical poetry. This realization was terrifying because it involved bringing forward a part of myself that mattered so much to me and that had been well hidden. I knew it would change the way people related to me and I was afraid I would be met with rejection or misunderstanding. I feared my poetry would included the theme of God too much for people outside of spiritual or religious circles and that that people inside religious circles would think it heretical. I feared people would think I was full of myself for prioritizing my gift and claiming the authority to say the things I said or that my poetry would be judged as childish and inadequate. This process involved moving through all of these most deeply held fears in hopes that value would be given to my life and to others through following through with this process. Having no experience and essentially no support with marketing or otherwise in publishing my book, Susceptible to Light, I decided to experiment with praying to my favorite dead poet and ask for assistance with the publishing process. Right after that prayer experiment began, I wrote a poem that went wildly viral called The Worst Thing We Ever Did. This exposed my newly published book to more than 50,000 people on social media. Not much more than two weeks into this prayer experiment, Daniel Ladinsky, the poet who has done the renderings of Hafiz poetry that has made him a superstar to the western world contacted me to congratulate me on my book, wrote its foreword, suggested he and I co-author a book and connected me with the most beautiful endorsements to some of the biggest publishing houses in the world. This whole journey has change my life inner and outer.

Chelan, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I discovered my love and gift for free verse poetry in my creative writing class in my junior year of high school. This poetic style offered me permission to uninhibitedly express truth without the need to conform to certain structures or rules. It unlocked something essential in me. Around the same time, my therapist read me a mystical poem by Hafiz. Though I hadn’t had much breakthrough with therapy, for the duration of that poem it was as though all the walls that had protected my heart fell away and for the first time in years I was able to make conscious connection with a part of me that felt real and true and alive. I was only 17 at this time and didn’t have language to categorize what I had heard as a mystical poem but listening to that piece was a destiny moment and I knew whatever it was I was hearing was what I was meant to do with my life. A few years later at age 21 I had a profound mystical experience in a deep meditation while visiting the prison cell of a spiritual inspiration. It was as though each cell of my body rung out with the message, “Let Us Dance!” This amplified through me as a divine invitation to let go of perfectionism and performance and judgments of myself and my life and embrace all of myself to live a dynamic life of learning, experiment, mistakes and whole heartedness. This opened a profound cathartic experience of grief and bliss and in that moment I knew I would one day create a book titled, “Let Us Dance, The Stumble and Whirl with The Beloved, which I have now brought into being. Less than a week after returning home from this pilgrimage something had been so stirred up in me that I knew I needed to find a way to re-open to the energy that had moved through me in that prison cell. With the intention of moving out of what I called the paralysis of perfectionism to give the authenticity in my soul more expressive mobility, I decided to conduct an experiment on myself. I gave myself permission to write a bad poem every day for 30 days. I would give myself one hour to write it and then no matter how I judged the quality of the piece, I would share it on Facebook. My hope was that embracing the bad rather than fearing it would allow something to crack open. Sure enough, on the second day I experienced perhaps the most profound creative experience of my life. A poem flowed through me and I had to scramble to write it down quickly enough to catch it all. It needed almost no content editing and unlike everything else I’d ever read, it had an inspired authority that I completely trusted. This moment carved a new channel in me and to this day, all of my poems flow through in this way and with this quality. Here is this first poem that came through:

Say, “Wow!”

Each day before our surroundings
become flat with familiarity
and the shapes of our lives click into place,
dimensionless and average as Tetris cubes,

before hunger knocks from our bellies
like a cantankerous old man
and the duties of the day stack up like dishes
and the architecture of our basic needs
commissions all thought
to construct the 4-door sedan of safety,

before gravity clings to our skin
like a cumbersome parasite
and the colored dust of dreams
sweeps itself obscure in the vacuum of reason,

each morning before we wrestle the world
and our hearts into the shape of our brains,
look around and say, “Wow!”
Feed yourself fire.
Scoop up the day entire
like a planet-sized bouquet of marvel
sent by the Universe directly into your arms
and say, “Wow!”

Break yourself down
into the basic components of primitive awe
and let the crescendo of each moment
carbonate every capillary
and say, “Wow!”

Yes, before our poems become calloused
with revision
let them shriek off the page of spontaneity

and before our metaphors get too regular,
let the sun stay
a conflagration of homing pigeons
that fights through fire
each day to find us.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

Yes! The first and perhaps most primary mission is to give people permission to redefine God. By God I mean whatever old, limiting assumptions have driven our lives to which we’ve given authority. I illustrate God as a dynamic process or an inspired force of acceptance of our wholeness. A primary message my poetry gives is that there is great beauty, insight and wisdom to be discovered when we accept our struggles, pain and shadows and that all parts of us are worthy of complete saturation in love and that acceptance rather than rejection is how satisfaction, inspiration and connection are found.

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

Society can encourage artists! We can look for the budding value, the potential, the gift in the artist and wholeheartedly express its beauty. We can say, “I see a gift that wants to emerge in you. It will be a source of light to the world. It is valuable. I hope you pursue it.” We can place higher value on encouragement than critique and we can deepen and expand our appreciation of the nourishment art gives to human life.

Contact Info:

• Website: Chelanharkin.com
• Instagram: @chelan-harkin
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com

Image Credits
The picture of me is taken my Shelly Peterson. Two other images are my book covers. The other images are my poetry collaged by Rashani Réa.