The Meaning Path
by Matthew Head
I didn’t come to essays and poetry through a literature class or a creative writing course.
I came to it the way most people come to things that actually change them — sideways, unexpectedly, at a moment when nothing else was working.
I’d spent years doing what you’re supposed to do. Read the self-help books. Took the courses. Followed the frameworks. And found that other people’s answers, however well-intentioned, couldn’t reach the questions I was actually carrying.
The questions that don’t have clean answers. The ones that arrive somewhere around midlife and don’t leave. Am I wasting the one life I have? Why does everything look fine from the outside and feel unfinished from the inside? What kind of father, husband, person am I becoming? What is asking to be lived that I keep avoiding?
Then I heard David Whyte in conversation on a podcast, talking about poetry as a way of being stopped in your tracks by what you already know but haven’t faced yet. He recited Start Close In. I listened once, then again, then kept going back finding something new each time in those simple words.
That was the beginning of something I’m still inside.
I’m Matthew Head. By profession I’m a chartered accountant with years inside corporate life — the spreadsheets, the targets, the performance reviews, the slow grind of building someone else’s numbers. I know what it costs to be good at a career that doesn’t quite fit. I know the particular exhaustion of high performance in the wrong direction.
The Meaning Path is what I built for the questions that work couldn’t answer. The name is deliberate — not a destination, not a program with a finish line. More like a horizon. Always there. Something you can drift from and find your way back to. A path you walk, not a problem you solve.
Through essays and poetry I explore the terrain most of us are quietly navigating — the life that looks fine but feels unfinished, the slow return to something more honest, the questions worth sitting with rather than solving. Not as an expert. As someone still finding his way through it.
If any of this sounds familiar — the good life that doesn’t quite fit, the quiet pull toward something you can’t yet name — you’re in the right place.
I publish essays and poetry here when something is worth saying.
Interested in working together or just want to say hello, you can reach me at matthew@themeaningpath.com
