Leah Marjorie Cox

Hello! I’m Leah, a writer and poet living in a tiny hamlet on the far western edge of the English Lake District. From this wild and windswept corner of the world I share my poems, stories and inner thoughts on everything from creativity to death as I grapple daily with the conundrum of what it means to live a meaningful life. If you’re the highly sensitive type with a love of nature and a longing for the simplicity and quiet of times gone by, I think you’ll feel right at home.

On Writing

You Have to Keep Letting Go

I often find myself going over a poem I have written that I quite like and stewing in fear that nothing as good will ever come to me again. But the longer I keep looking at that poem, the longer I surely prevent the possibility of writing anything else – good or bad?!

The mind really has to be relaxed to write (well). It cannot be living in fear that nothing will come. You have to let go, all the time, of anything you have ever written so as to let something fresh come. You have to trust the source, which I suppose means remembering that it is not ‘me’ who comes up with this or that. ‘I’ can only get quiet and relaxed enough so that ‘this or that’ descends upon me or bubbles up into me.

So you can’t dwell on past poems or worry about future poems, you can only relax and be quiet right where you are and see what is given. It is all given. Well, maybe I have to shape a little what is given and in that I have to trust any fraction of skill I may have gained over the years. So the whole process is at once both easier and harder than you imagine. Easier because all you have to do is be quiet, relax, and enjoy yourself. Harder because everything in you has been trained to do the exact opposite of this.

I Must Claim Myself as a Writer

And so I begin, seriously. Today is the day I claim myself as a poet and writer and set to the task before me. I will not let myself down. Almost all ambition is gone from my life now. My deepest, greatest and truest desire is for freedom. God’s freedom. To know peace no matter what. Beyond that, if I must do something in the world, it will be to write. To leave behind a voice of friendship to those who come after me, as so many others have offered their friendship and wisdom through their writing to me.

It is a long road ahead of me. A road that will last the rest of this lifetime. And isn’t that a good thing? Isn’t it a good and wonderful thing to have a task so great before you that it can never be exhausted? The world is too fast and I am tired of not having the concentration or focus or patience necessary to create something truly worthwhile. Everything must be instantaneous. How can a person write anything truly great when they are busy feeding the monster of social media one or more times a day? Where is the time for silence, reflection, contemplation?

I must let go of the need for immediate gratification, feedback, validation and praise and simply get back into the habit of writing for the love of it and to develop my craft. I must resist, resist, resist the frequent temptation to turn each insight into something – a product, a service, a course. For that is the current way of the world. Everyone is teaching you how to turn your knowledge into an income online and perhaps that is all well and good but it is not conducive to writing really well. It is not conducive to leaving behind what I would like to leave behind.

I am now forty years old and finally I see that I cannot do or be everything. Finally I see, as I pass the threshold into a new phase of life, that satisfaction can only come from dedicating myself to what is most true within me. If I do not do this, I will only feel that I have wasted this precious life that has been given.

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