Hi @carolkean

Thanks for stopping my to check out my work. Yes, I have been quite prolific to be honest, especially the last three months, and with poetry (I did a whole month of poetry... and not all of them haiku 😂) both on and off hive. I've started reading my poetry out at poetry performance nights here in Liverpool and so far the response has been fantastic. I even had a few people ask where they could buy a book of my work... which means I'll have to get together a catalogue of my poems in hive much like the one I did for my fiction and then put them to word documents and sort them by theme/quality etc to start a proper editing process. I would guess there is at least 3 collections, if not more, of poems I can polish and then self-publish.

but censured, criticized, or unrecognized (which of the three is worst?).

Hard question to answer, but my opinion on what would cut me worst as a writer would be censured, quickly followed by unrecognized 😂

As to Blake's Tyger Tyger poem, it sounds like we love it equally for its simple beauty and exploration into the mystical through the comparisons he makes

Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

among other aspects of that poem.

It is a poem that is so much easier to read to the modern reader than many of his day, which speaks volumes to his genius. I've said it before, good poetry has to be saying the most important things in the least amount of space and in the most enchanting way you can. Imagery, rhythm and sibilance is the way I try to achieve that lofty goal, sometimes I feel like I achieve it.

The eternal, spirit, God, whatever you want to call it, can only be experienced - the mystical defies explanation.

I’m glad that spoke to you in some personal and helpful way. I am not religious, and like Blake have a strong distaste for organised religion. The cause of more and bloodier war than anything else we humans have dreamed up to date, and yet it stems from people who very obviously had mystical experiences themselves. Found ways to divorce themselves from the ego and the internal stories/drama that goes on in most people’s heads 24/7. So many seem to walk blind to the world because they are reliving past trauma, or creating narratives of a perceived better future that will most likely never come. Right here in the moment is where the truth lies, and I think that organised religion most often simply builds a narrative (made up from the collective unconscious of thousands of arguing humans) around a person of insight Buddha/Jesus/Mohamed and other ‘so called’ saints, creating this insane dichotomy that an organisation is created that tries to standardise (the lord’s prayer being one of many examples, mantras maybe from the Buddhist tradition) something that can only be experienced, can’t be enforced, can only be gently pointed to…

A finger pointing at the moon is not the moon.

_{Quote: Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh}

I guess that passage you highlighted is an admission, a final realisation, that I'm not an atheist (as I thought for many years) but some strange type of agnostic. I came to this realisation through so many different experiences, but most recently it has been through meditation, coupled with having moments of Satori out in wilderness areas, and sometimes with writing. When something flows through me and the keyboard keys I’m typing are unrecognisable as thoughts I’m thinking, my mind is clear and empty, where does that come from? If not a form of mystical experience I don’t know what is… it only happens like that very occasionally.

P.s. yes, I have dreamt of being a tiger many times in my life, and also of being attacked and eaten by a tiger. I have a very strange brain 😂