I was talking to a friend a couple of days ago about my love of poetry, quotes, and pithy sayings because of how deeply it moves me when a complex idea is so brilliantly condensed and distilled into its essence. Life is hard, if you hadn’t noticed, so I absolutely love it when someone’s gift of communicating opens a door for me to get my head or heart around something important. I also just love the art of it. And, for better or worse, I play around with attempts at poetry myself from time to time. Not the rhyming kind. When I try to rhyme things it usually comes out sounding like a greeting card. But sometimes I do try to distill some thoughts down to their bare bones just to see if they work.Well, this morning I stumbled across one such attempt in some old notes and thought, “What the heck, why not embarrass myself by reading it on the air?” It is a piece I called “the box.” As you might imagine I spend a lot of time thinking about the lives we live and the boxes we live inside—both literally and figuratively. So in that spirit, here you go …the boxthis is the boxthe box has nice straight edges and a lovely flat lidthe box is easy to understandthe box has rulesthe box is comfortablethe box is reliablethe box is safemost of us live our whole lives here in the boxinside the box is the little we knowoutside is the lot we don’tthe box is smallfar too small for the universebut for those inside, the box is our universewhen the answers we need aren’t in the boxwe usually just change the questionbut sometimes that’s not enoughsometimes someone tries to climb outsidepeople who do this are often never seen againso we try to pull them backthen we laughwe call them dreamers fools heretics madmensometimes it’s truebut usually it’s just our fear of what’s outside the boxbut despite our feardespite our laughterdespite all the gravity inside the boxsome questions just won’t go awayso someone tries to crawl out againand if they doand if they surviveand if they find an answerwe all stop laughingand everything changes