Decentering the Self

For Ada Limón, the task of the poet is to look—and keep looking. Her latest book, Startlement: New and Selected Poems, takes up the theme of witnessing and being witnessed, with a particular attention to how poetry can help foster greater awareness of our interconnectedness with the natural world. Bringing together nearly twenty years of her work, the collection traces what she calls “the original questions, the original curiosities” that keep coming up in her life and practice.

In a recent episode of Life As It Is, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg sat down with Limón to discuss how poetry can help us decenter ourselves, the power of loving-kindness, and how startlement can be a spiritual practice.

James Shaheen (JS): Your new book is called Startlement, and the last time you were on the podcast, you talked about what it means to be creatures of constant awe. It seems like wonder and awe are recurring themes in your work. Do you think about startlement as a spiritual practice?

Ada Limón (AL): I do. I love to be amazed, and it’s easy to be. Life is really weird, and I don’t understand why we don’t talk about that enough. I think it’s because we don’t have the capacity to talk about all the strangeness all the time. But I am bewildered by existence on a minute-by-minute basis. I mean, we’re animals that wear clothes. That’s bizarre. So startlement is really just a way of naming amazement and bewilderment. I also started thinking of it as a collective noun. You know how we have collective nouns for birds, like a murmuration of starlings or a murder of crows or a rafter of turkeys? I kept thinking of the book as a startlement of poems.

JS: When we last spoke, you talked about what first brought you to spiritual practice, and you mentioned going to classes with Sharon at Tibet House. Could you tell us about that experience? How does loving-kindness influence your approach to poetry?

AL: At the risk of embarrassing you, Sharon, I’ll just say you changed my life. You continue to change my life. You’re with me daily. Loving-kindness is still the main meditation that I go to. When I first started meditating, I was desperate to find something, and I looked up and saw you were teaching at the Tibet House. I went for the free classes there, and it just became a practice. In fact, I brought my teacher, Marie Howe, there once, and we practiced together.

One of the great lessons I took away from your teaching was the idea of having some humor as you practice. As you taught, you had so much humor and humanity that I really related to the way you approached the practice, and it allowed for such a welcoming doorway that I could walk through. I’m still so grateful to you and your work and the way you brought loving-kindness into my world and continue to do so for many people. It’s still my main practice.

Sharon Salzberg (SS): Thank you so much. That’s really beautiful, and you’re inspiring me at this moment. One of the themes that emerges in this collection is an awareness of our interconnectedness with all beings, which is certainly something that a loving-kindness practice can bring attention to. So how can poetry cultivate greater awareness of our interdependence?

We’re part of a journey, and so many people are on that journey.

AL: I think poetry, at its core, is about paying attention. When you’re deeply looking at something, you’re loving it. And I think that when you do that, whether it’s with a person or a nonhuman animal or a plant or a tree, it is a way of witnessing and being witnessed and recognizing that we are in this together.

It’s so strange to me that we feel alone. It’s a common feeling, and sometimes I feel so isolated in a particular emotion. But then if you really look around you, there’s no way to be alone. We are on this planet together—I mean, really together. And my work is always interested in that. That is a curiosity that comes up a lot, which is how can we constantly feel isolated when, without a doubt, we are working and living in tandem with all living beings.

SS: Right, in one of your poems, you write, “We know now, / we were never at the circle’s center.” So how can poetry help us to decenter ourselves and notice all the other life forms living alongside us?

AL: You know, there’s sometimes a misconception that poetry deals only with self and autobiography, and it’s just about the artist’s gaze. But if you spend your life devoted to noticing and to looking, your sense of self begins to dissolve because you’re looking outward, and then you recognize that things are looking back at you, right? There’s the whole idea that birds notice us way before we notice them. They’ve been looking at us this whole time, and then we go, “Oh, look, a bird.” I feel like recognizing that comes so naturally once you really start to pay attention. As poets, that’s our job: to look, to notice, to witness, and to find language for it—and to recognize where language fails.

I think that the practice of poetry is not unlike meditation, where it allows us to recognize that we’re not at the story’s center. You know, we’re not the hero. We’re part of a journey, and so many people are on that journey. And for me, there’s a surrender there that I resisted when I was younger. It gets easier as I age.

I was just thinking in the shower this morning, “Oh, I need some new clothes, because I’m going to go on book tour.” And then I said, “Well, maybe it’s not my clothes that are the problem. Maybe it’s my body.” And then my mind said, “Or maybe the body’s not the problem. Maybe it’s your mind.” And then of course I started laughing. And I do think that the more you pay attention to your own thoughts, the more absurd it all seems. Just like you have always done in your teachings, Sharon, you have a sense of humor about it. So I think that paying attention offers us much more than we think—it turns out it really helps.

Listen to the full episode at tricycle.org/podcast.

♦

Startlement

It is a forgotten pleasure, the pleasure 
                  of the unexpected blue-bellied lizard

skittering off his sun spot rock, the flicker 
                  of an unknown bird by the bus stop.

To think, perhaps, we are not distinguishable 
                  and therefore no loneliness can exist here.

Species to species in the same blue air, smoke— 
                  wing flutter buzzing, a car horn coming.

So many unknown languages, to think we have 
                  only honored this strange human tongue.

If you sit by the riverside, you see a culmination 
                  of all things upstream. We know now,

we were never at the circle’s center, instead 
                  all around us something is living or trying to live.

The world says, What we are becoming, we are 
                  becoming together. 

The world says, One type of dream has ended 
                  and another has just begun.

The world says, Once we were separate, 
                  and now we must move in unison.

From Startlement: New and Selected Poems (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions 2025). Copyright © 2025 by Ada Limón. Reprinted with the permission of Milkweed Editions.