It was 2018. After two years of maternity leave, I was ready to go back to my coaching business. But I had changed. No longer a maiden, motherhood had brought out in me an even deeper desire to make my world different. My business included.

Yet, I couldn’t find my feet. Still reckoning with the shifts my identity was undergoing, I felt disillusioned. Tired.

And so I sat, pen to paper and wrote a question down. The existential kind.

“Ushmi, who are you in your wonder?”

Desperately, I wanted to know myself beyond what I already knew.

And it seems there were forces out there that wanted me to know this too. For the question itself would spark embers of alchemy in the ethers and the words would begin to flow. Each line bringing me into a sense of connectedness, with her, my sage self, who sought to have me experience myself…in my wonder.

For two years the words would come like this. I’d ruminate and then feel her knocking on the periphery of my consciousness asking to be let in.

And when she was, she’d work through me, as words spilling out on to paper, transforming me and those who read them as they went along.

I didn’t write the poetry in my book from my mind. I wrote it from my wise.

Who danced me into a co-creation of possibility.

A co-creation that viscerally changed my experience of me and introduced me to my whole self.

And to me that is the ultimate power of creation.

For if we allow it, what we are called to create, creates us magnificently in return.