Unshakeable

This poem explores what I mean by becoming unshakeable.

It is not the inability to be affected, changed, hurt, or transformed. It is the discovery of something deeper within myself whose integrity does not depend upon circumstances remaining stable or producing the outcomes I desire.

As what is false falls away, the poem turns toward selfhood itself as an unfolding encounter with something larger, clearer, and more enduring.

I don't think being unshakeable means that nothing shakes me.

Clearly, things do.

I can be hurt. I can become frightened, overwhelmed, uncertain, angry, grieving, or exhausted. My circumstances can change dramatically. Things I rely upon can disappear. My understanding of myself can be overturned.

So when I write:

“Unshakeable means
I have found something true
Deep in myself
Felt through and through”

I am not describing emotional invulnerability. I am describing a relationship with something I experience as more fundamental than whatever is currently moving through me.

This poem follows naturally from Indestructible and Power. In Indestructible, I recognize a center that has remained through an extraordinary amount of loss and change. In Power, I begin locating sovereignty there rather than in my ability to control circumstances.

Here, I am trying to describe the qualities of that center.

“Something incorruptible
That cannot be tainted”

“Something essential
That cannot be broken”

“Something clear
That cannot be muddied”

The language is deliberately absolute. I am reaching for something beneath circumstance, performance, identity, achievement, approval, success, failure, and even many of the stories I tell about who I am.

I don't know that I can define it precisely. Integrity is one word for it. Selfhood is another. Perhaps truth is another still. But I recognize it experientially as something that feels more me the closer I get to it.

And one of its defining qualities is this:

“It cannot be shaken
For it needs no outcomes”

That distinction feels central to me.

Anything that requires a particular outcome in order to remain true is vulnerable to circumstances:

If I am worthy only when I am chosen, rejection can shake my worth. If I am successful only when something I create succeeds, failure can shake my identity. If I am lovable only when someone loves me in the way I desire, their withdrawal can shake my lovability. If I am powerful only when I can shape circumstances the way I desire, reality can shake my power simply by refusing to cooperate.

But if these things are grounded somewhere deeper, circumstances can affect my experience without possessing the authority to redefine what is fundamentally true.

That does not make outcomes irrelevant.

I care tremendously about what happens. I have desires, needs, hopes, preferences, and things I am actively trying to create. But I increasingly want those outcomes to express who I am rather than determine who I am.

The poem then begins speaking in the language of death:

“Something alive
That cannot be destroyed
For death is transition
Skillfully employed”

I don't mean literal death here (though I remain open to the possibility) so much as the many deaths that run throughout Unbecoming:

• Beliefs die.
• Identities die.
• Expectations die.
• Relationships end.
• Old ways of organizing a life become impossible to sustain.
• Versions of ourselves that once felt permanent can become unrecognizable.

And those deaths can be extraordinarily painful.

I don't believe everything that dies was therefore false, nor that loss automatically improves us. But sometimes disruption exposes what cannot survive greater honesty. That is what I mean by:

“To bring what is false
Back into the light
To be shaken away
By profoundest insight”

Something can feel deeply embedded in me and still not be deeply true:

A belief inherited from someone else.

A role I learned to perform.

An obligation I never consciously chose.

A judgment about myself repeated so many times that it began to sound like fact.

An identity that once served me but no longer fits.

When those things are examined closely enough, sometimes they begin to loosen. And what is shaken away creates more room for what remains.

That is where the poem returns explicitly to the central idea of this collection:

“Something unbecoming
Of all that's dishonest”

Unbecoming is not, to me, the destruction of self. It is increasingly the opposite. It is the shedding of what obscures self.

The process can feel like losing who I am because so much of what I have identified as me may need to change.

But again and again, I have found that something remains underneath. And the closer I come to living from that place, the more joy becomes relevant:

“For joyfulness is
Authenticity's promise”

I don't mean that authentic living guarantees constant happiness. It clearly doesn't.

Authenticity can be costly. It can require grief, difficult boundaries, uncertainty, loss, and choices other people do not understand.

But there is a particular kind of aliveness available when I am no longer spending so much energy maintaining what is untrue. Joy, in that sense, is less a reward for authenticity than one of its natural expressions.

Then the poem expands outward:

“Something grander
Than all I've imagined
For selfhood is how
The universe gets examined”

This is one of the more metaphysical claims in the poem. I am interested in the possibility that knowing myself is not merely a private psychological project.

Whatever consciousness ultimately is, each of us encounters reality from inside a singular perspective. The universe, through me, experiences itself as this life. Through another person, it experiences another.

I don't know exactly what metaphysical conclusions I want to draw from that, and I don't think the poem requires me to settle them. But it changes the scale of self-exploration for me. Meeting myself becomes one way of meeting existence.

“And meeting myself
Is the grandest adventure
To know who I am
And to Me surrender”

The capitalization of Me matters.

There is the everyday self—the self with preferences, fears, histories, identities, plans, and changing circumstances.

And then there is the deeper Self the poem keeps reaching toward.

I don't necessarily experience those as two literally separate entities. The capitalization is an attempt to distinguish between the changing contents of my identity and whatever more fundamental selfhood seems capable of containing all of them.

To surrender to that Self is therefore not to surrender my agency. It is to stop fighting what I recognize as deeply true. To stop bargaining against my own integrity. To stop requiring external permission for my own existence. To allow myself to become more fully what I already am.

And that brings me back to the final question:

“So what can be shaken
When all that remains
Can never be taken
And truly sustains?”

I don't think the answer is nothing.

A great deal can still be shaken:

• My emotions.
• My plans.
• My relationships.
• My circumstances.
• My beliefs.
• Even my understanding of who I am.

Perhaps the point is that being shaken and being uprooted are not the same thing.

• I can move.
• I can bend.
• I can grieve.
• I can question.
• I can discover that something I believed was true is false and let it fall away.

Being unshakeable does not require rigidity. It may actually require the opposite: enough trust in what is deepest that everything else is allowed to move.

What remains does not need me to defend it against reality.

• Reality can test it.
• Experience can challenge it.
• Insight can strip away whatever proves false.
• And if something deeper still remains, I can meet that too.

That is the kind of unshakeability I am interested in:

Not becoming impossible to move.

Becoming increasingly willing to let everything move that needs to—because I trust that what is actually mine cannot be lost through becoming more truthful.