Kids and cats famously love cardboard boxes. Give a kid a gift that comes in a big box, and the box itself may become the best gift ever. At this moment, Bob the Cat is curled up in a cardboard box that contained some documents I brought from the printer. It’s a shallow box, perhaps 12 by 18 inches. She claimed it before it was empty, and for several days, she has sat, snoozed, and snuffled around in the box beside my desk.

There’s a sense of security in boxes. For me as a writer, a box of one kind or another provides the boundary that guides my imaginative and spiritual journey. It is the restriction that paradoxically enables freedom.

One of my boxes is the discipline of rhyme and meter. Ideally, when a poem starts, I don’t know where it’s going. The exploration of language through rhyme and meter actually shapes the thought, not the other way around. The English language offers a vast range of choices. How fortunate I was to be born into it. Then again, if you were born into Urdu or Spanish or Chinese, you could be feeling exactly the same way. But you probably wouldn’t be thinking in exactly the same way.

Another of my boxes is Christianity. It would be impossible to explore every possibility of God (or not-God, for that matter) without a framing of story, ritual, and community. I have accepted my box of faith as a way of finding both security and freedom. For the limited time I have to figure out this life, choosing to think inside the box helps a lot.

Thank you, Bob the Cat.