Wanted: Inquisitive Angel

transformation of a day gone wrong

(This post by L.L. Barkat is a reprint from Tweetspeak Poetry, © 2018)

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If I could hire an angel—and I understand that angels aren’t for hire—but if I could, I’d hire a question angel.

The question angel would traffic in, of course, questions. This countryless, genderless creature would be able to communicate equally well with a person of any mind or heart, speak any language as it were, but not with persuasions or debates. They’d simply go round slipping questions to us, like love notes passed from hand to hand when the teacher isn’t looking, or like elixirs slipped into drinks.

Since angels aren’t for hire, I’ve been in search of another way, at least for my own life, to create the gaps that are the essence of questions. Questions, true questions (not the rhetorical kind), are knowledge gaps—admissions that I do not know everything about the world, and that you, or someone else, might be able to give me a few answers—answers I hadn’t even imagined. Why, you might even slip me a question I hadn’t considered asking.

One of the best ways I’ve been lately thinking that I can come upon these gaps, so brimming with potential, is to purposely cross paths with people from different generations. To this end, I’ve been occasionally visiting the library, the children’s section, and just listening to children as they parse the world. I’ve also attended a few writers retreats and writers groups, at a venue where I expected to meet people a little bit older than me.

Enter Jewel, a new writer friend. This is not, by the way, her real name, but it definitely reveals the quality of her heart.

Just the other day, Jewel became a question angel for a writing group whose center had begun to come undone—the group having devolved into a political discussion that was ruining our purpose and our mood.

As we each set pen to paper during the writing time, Jewel, a person whose profession has long asked her to smooth things between people, was troubled at her own response to the current state of politics, specifically a first-ever experience of actually hating someone and wishing that person harm.

In a small notebook, she wrote about this hatred and really let herself experience and revel in it. (Brave Jewel! She even expressed herself with a few expletives—very uncommon for her sweetly-demeanored self.)

But the writing didn’t end there. Jewel was determined to answer a question she had set for herself: “Why do I love to hate?” What followed was an answer more tender than she may have expected. It was certainly more tender than I expected after hearing the answer’s robust opening that clung to hatred like a charm.

If angels traffic in miracles, which perhaps some do, then Jewel also became a small miracle worker that day. She transformed, at least for me, a day that felt like it had gone wrong.

When I asked her what made her able to explore her new, uncharacteristic experience of hatred, she cited a sense of freedom that has come with age. The truly impressive thing, to my mind? She turned that very freedom into the chance to question its ways.

For which I can only say, “Thank you, my question angel. Thank you, Jewel.”

Discuss With Friends (Or Use in Personal Journaling)

1. What is your instinctual response when you face something surprising about yourself? Does your response differ if the surprising thing is negative versus positive?

2. Do you think it was useful in any way for Jewel to first embrace her hatred before questioning it?

3. What would make it possible for you to be your own “question angel”—especially where complicated feelings or identity issues are involved?

4. Who is the best question asker you know? What makes their questions so appealing to you? Can you try out their style for yourself?

5. In your journal, or as a group writing prompt, pose a question about something you are experiencing. Answer the question. Then pose another question about the answer you’ve given. Try doing this several times, so that each time you are circling around and discovering new things as you write your answers.

6. Pose a question about any topic and write a poem in answer to it. How does it change your experience of poetry writing, or even the quality or nature of the poem, when your poem is born from a question?

7. Have you ever set out to meaningfully cross paths with people who are in different generations from your own? Why or why not? If you’d like to try it out, what local places and programs might give you a small way to start?

Photo by Sandy Millar, Creative Commons, via Unsplash.