Miss-Spelled Words
The sacred art of getting it wrong
When I was a teenager, I wrote a lot of wonderfully bad poetry.
Most of it was about girls I wanted to love me—mysterious priestesses of the hallway whose backpacks brushed against mine in passing. I thought if I could just perfect my wanting—if I could long with more precision, ache with more elegance—maybe then she would see me. Maybe then she’d turn and say, “Oh, you. You’ve been here all along.
”That was the fantasy. Not just of love—but of being seen.
And so I wrote. Compulsively. Sometimes in notebooks, sometimes on the backs of math homework. I spelled badly, loved madly, and cast wild incantations into spiral-bound grimoires I never planned to show anyone.
Except, of course, I always hoped someone would find them.
I remember one of the lines:
there are so many doors with no keys in sight,
there might be a way, thinking as hard as I might,
but if my mind were a watermelon, I'd eat it all
and sit on the ground and smile.
That was me—trying to think my way out of longing, only to land in a kind of absurd joy. I didn’t know it then, but that was a spell. It didn’t rhyme right. It didn’t make much sense. But it was honest, and it was mine.
I remember another line:
loneliness is oneliness and you can always count on this,
and in comparison, all else is bliss
I didn’t know how to spell “onlyness,” and maybe that was the point. I thought I was alone. But I was really one. There’s a difference. And it took me decades to realize that sometimes our mistakes carry meanings we couldn’t quite say on purpose.
A dear literary friend once told me I should publish those old poems in a book called Miss-Spelled Words. We laughed about it—because it was perfect. The irony was delicious. I was trying to write spells, but I didn’t yet understand how the world—or language—worked. So the spells missed. Or they landed, but not the way I wanted.
They were miss-spelled:
Spelled wrong.
Spelled in longing.
Spelled by someone who missed.
I think now about the sacredness of that.
The way Sacred Imagination doesn’t wait for us to get it right before it starts speaking. It whispers even through typos. It flares up in broken meter. It shows up in watermelon metaphors and the raw sincerity of teenage wanting.
And sometimes I think the soul speaks most clearly through a cracked voice.
That’s why I believe in keeping a typo.
Because sometimes it isn’t a mistake—it’s a doorway.
A holy misfire.
A sacred misstep that reveals the path.
The Adolescent Mage
Looking back, I wasn’t just a boy with a notebook.
I was an untrained mage.
I was casting spells I didn’t yet know how to aim.
I thought love was a prize I could conjure with the right arrangement of syllables. I thought poems were keys to hearts. I thought if I just felt enough, something might change.
And maybe that wasn’t wrong.
Maybe Sacred Imagination always begins in this kind of apprenticeship.
In the fumbling. The misspelling. The earnest, clumsy alchemy of trying.
What I wrote wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t polished. It was practice.
It was prayer.
It was poetry trying to become real.
And isn’t that what all magic is?
The Sacred Typo
There’s a certain kind of beauty that only reveals itself when you mess up the spell.
The sacred typo is the glitch that opens the veil.
It’s the line that accidentally speaks more truth than you meant to.
It’s when you write “loneliness” and mean “oneliness.”
It’s when you spell “belonging” and realize it hides the phrase “be longing.”
It’s the language of the soul, spoken with a stutter.
I no longer have those notebooks. I destroyed them in another bout of teenage angst, as one does. A kind of sacrifice. Or maybe a purification rite. But some of the lines live in me still, like old spells murmuring from the bones.
And I think: maybe they were meant to miss.
Maybe the magic was in how they missed.
Because they didn’t make me visible to her, but they did help me see myself.
They taught me how to long.
And how to speak that longing.
Even if it came out crooked.
Still Spelling
Now, I’ve got spellcheck.
And AI.
And I’ve slowed down enough to care about punctuation. (Most days.)
But the truth is: I’m still casting spells.
Every time I write.
Every time I reach through words to shape something real.
Every time I imagine the world as it could be—and name it, not perfectly, but faithfully.
That’s Sacred Imagination.
Not the mastery of language, but the devotion to it.
Not the perfection of longing, but the willingness to feel it anyway.
Not spells that always land—but spells that mean something, even when they don’t.
So here’s to the misspelled boys and their watermelon minds.
To the poets who couldn’t rhyme, but kept writing.
To the sacred typos and the oneliness we all carry.