Bliss Born of Pain: A Poetry Collection About Transformation, Wonder & Becoming Fully Alive

For a long time, I thought I had written a book about pain. The title certainly didn’t help my case: Bliss Born of Pain. There it was, right on the cover.

And pain is undeniably present in these poems. There is grief here. Loss. Motherhood. Longing. Anger. Inherited stories. Love that hurts because it matters. The strange undoing that happens when a life changes faster than we can make sense of it.

But now, looking at the collection as a whole, I can see something I couldn’t see while I was writing it: pain is not really where this book is going. It is where some of it begins.

The destination is aliveness.

I Didn’t Want to Stay in the Wreckage

I don’t believe suffering is inherently noble. I don’t think we need to go looking for hardship in order to become interesting people, and I certainly don’t believe every painful experience arrives bearing a perfectly wrapped lesson. Sometimes terrible things are simply terrible.

But I do know that pain changes the landscape. It strips certain things away and exposes others. It can make our assumptions about ourselves, love, safety, belonging, God, the body, and the future suddenly impossible to maintain. And then we are left standing there, changed.

The question becomes: What now?

That question lives underneath much of Bliss Born of Pain. Not, How do I get back to who I was? but rather: Who am I now? What is still true? What deserves to come with me? What can be released? And if I’m already here, in this strange new life, how completely am I willing to inhabit it?

Becoming, Then Descending

The collection begins with becoming. The first section, Grown To Know, holds many of the questions that come with realizing you are no longer the person you once were. There are poems about youth, the body, friendship, home, motherhood, inheritance, and the identities we grow into almost without noticing.

Then comes Muck & Mire. An appropriate title, I think.

This is where the collection moves downward. There are fires here. Grief. Anger. Old wounds. Family stories. The feminine. The body carrying what it was never meant to carry forever.

It is the messier part of becoming—the part where transformation is decidedly less butterfly emerging gracefully from cocoon and considerably more creature dissolving into goo.

Nature is less sentimental than we are about this. Forests burn. Leaves fall. Bodies decay. Things end. And still, somewhere beneath the soot, something begins pushing upward.

That image appears again and again throughout the collection: not an escape from destruction, but life continuing directly through it.

Remembering What Was Already There

The third section is called Seeking / Remembering, and I think that slash may contain much of the book’s philosophy, because perhaps those two things are not as different as they seem.

We spend so much of our lives seeking peace, love, purpose, God, belonging, joy, or some perfected future version of ourselves who has finally figured the whole thing out. And then, occasionally, we have a moment in which we realize that what we were frantically searching for was not necessarily somewhere ahead of us.

It was underneath us. Inside us. Around us. Waiting for our attention.

One poem asks us to move at “the pace of appreciation” rather than the pace of hurry. Another asks what destination could possibly be more precious than this moment.

Again and again, the poems began returning me to the same place: here.

Not the enlightened future. Not the person I might someday become. Not some distant spiritual realm.

This body. This breath. This person I love. This patch of earth. This life.

The Body Is Not an Obstacle

I spent years being much more interested in transcendence than embodiment. The spiritual sounded sophisticated. The body was inconvenient. It wanted food and sleep and touch and pleasure and tears and occasionally chocolate. Very distracting.

But somewhere in writing this collection, those two worlds began collapsing into one another.

In Body of Clay, I found myself writing about grief, pleasure, frustration, beauty, awe, wonder, indulgence, and spirit as parts of the same human experience. That realization became increasingly important to me: being fully alive requires being fully here.

Not floating six inches above ourselves trying to become spiritually impressive. Here. In the animal body.

Feeling the cold. Eating the peach. Kissing someone we love. Crying when something hurts. Standing dumbstruck before a mountain. Resting when the sun goes down.

The fourth section of the book, Animal Body, moves deliberately into this territory—nature, instinct, mortality, landscape, movement, wildness.

The body stopped feeling like something I needed to transcend. It became one of the great ways I could experience wonder.

Nature Kept Showing Me the Answer

The natural world runs throughout Bliss Born of Pain: rivers, mountains, fire, birds, forests, sage, wind, seasons, death, and returning life.

Living in Central Oregon has only deepened this way of seeing. There is something about the high desert that refuses unnecessary ornament. A juniper twisting against the sky does not seem particularly concerned with whether it is becoming its best self. A river does not stop to wonder whether it should have chosen a more impressive route. Mountains are built by upheaval and remain magnificent evidence of it.

Nature is constantly demonstrating something we humans find considerably harder to accept: change is not evidence that life has gone wrong.

Change is what life does.

Everything is becoming something else.

Once I began to see that, transformation felt less like failure and more like participation.

From Pain to Wonder

The final section of the collection is called Living Heaven. That title tells me more now than it did when I first assembled the poems.

By the end of the book, I was no longer particularly interested in escaping the human experience. I wanted to know it more intimately.

The sacred, to me, had moved much closer. It was no longer somewhere above. It was in dirty feet climbing rocks, water disturbed by touch, the body of someone loved, the warmth of the sun, a child’s face, and the astonishing fact that any of us are here to experience any of this at all.

One of the shortest poems in the collection, Simple, eventually asks:

“How many ways will the world whisper, ‘I love you,’ until we realize it’s been true the whole time?”

I think that may be where the whole book arrives.

Not at the conclusion that pain was good. Not at the conclusion that suffering was necessary. But at the recognition that, somehow, after moving through difficult things, my capacity to notice what was beautiful had expanded.

I loved more. I noticed more. I inhabited my body more fully. I became more interested in the lives unfolding around me. Wonder became easier to access.

The world felt more alive because I was more alive inside it.

What Bliss Born of Pain Means to Me Now

If you had asked me while I was writing these poems what Bliss Born of Pain was about, I probably would have told you it was about healing.

I would answer differently now.

I think it is a contemporary poetry collection about transformation and the return to aliveness. It is about grief, love, motherhood, embodiment, nature, spirituality, impermanence, beauty, and wonder. It is about what happens when the identity we thought was permanent begins to dissolve, learning that surrender is not always defeat, discovering that the body can be sacred, and becoming curious about our own lives again.

And mostly, it is about paying attention.

Because there is a tremendous amount of beauty happening all the time. A tremendous amount of love. A tremendous amount of life.

Sometimes the experience of pain simply clears enough space for us to finally see it.

Perhaps bliss is not what arrives after pain has disappeared.

Perhaps it is what becomes available when, despite everything, we are willing to open our eyes again and look.