Poetry
"A poem is like a temple, which you enter in order to feel" - Mary Oliver.
Why Poetry? In these times sometimes we need to enter a different aspect of how we relate to this world, for me poetry can do this - and it can recognise a feeling or emotion and bring it into the world. Sophie Strand says it so beautifully when she says on her Make me Good Soil Substack essay :
’Poems for me are the product of overflow. They are where the love and grief and awe go when they overflow the cup of my body, my being, and my stories. They oftentimes feel like the purest essence of my animist and ecosensual being.’
Poems for our inner world.
1. The Guest House, Rumi
This being human is a guesthouse.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
Some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honourably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
2. You Who Never Arrived, Rainer Maria Rilke
You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don't even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of
the next moment. All the immense
images in me -- the far-off, deeply-felt
landscape, cities, towers, and bridges, and
unsuspected turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods--
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.
You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house-- , and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me.
Streets that I chanced upon,--
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and,
startled, gave back my too-sudden image.
Who knows? Perhaps the same
bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, separate, in the evening...
3. Kindness, Naomi Shihab Nye
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.
4. Be a Good Host, Toni Spencer
Welcome monsters, the fuck ups, the loneliness, the judgements. The growling, the grieving and the fears.
Welcome the monsters.
Slowly, let them find the seat they like. It may be your favourite chair, your lap, or that space behind the fridge.
Welcome them.
They may smell of lavender, or sewage, of sweet sunrises, or the entrails of lost species.
They may, having been welcomed in to your home like this, become very, very quiet all of a sudden.
And some, perhaps, one or two may begin to scream.
Be a good host.
Bear with them. Make tea. Pour out the last of your elderberry vodka. And yes, those biscuits you’ve been saving for the apocalypse? Them too.
Be a good host, because now, the thing is, you’re in this together. Laws are being passed to stop you escaping.
Be a good host.
Welcome these ones you so unwittingly silenced. The monsters are longing for you. They want you to notice them, to listen to their stories, to play with their tails, to let them wrap you in the greatest of hugs, to tend to their matted hair, as if you had all the time in the world. Because maybe you do.
Be a good host.
Let your welcome be timeless, where no guest ever feels you wanting them to leave, no matter how out of your depth you feel.
Be that ‘guest house’ Rumi spoke of. Let the ones you’ve been holding at bay be your teachers, your lovers, your saviours, the bearers of new recipes, the writers of new love poems and radical manifestos.
Be a good host.
Welcome the monsters.
5. Wait Without Hope, T.S Eliot
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Music
Music is a wonderful therapy and can have an influence on our mood and well-being. Here’s a play list I gathered together for a Climate event.
