Healing Poetry

In the fall of 2010, for one week, I made a point of tracking searches to One Year of Writing and Healing and recording some of these. During this particular week in early November, a little over 200 people visited the site. Someone in Hanoi got there by searching for the Yeats’s poem, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” Someone in Pine Lake, Georgia arrived via “healing poetry.” A person in Bombay searched for the story “Grief” by Anton Chekhov. Someone from Tyler, Texas searched at 2AM for “writing grief.” And someone in Perth, Australia reached the site by one of its more popular searches and a poem I’ve come to appreciate more and more as the years go by—the poem, “The Guest House,” by Rumi. Here are the first twelve lines:

This being human is a guest house.
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 honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

I’ve come to love Rumi’s poem because of the way in which it offers company. A person might think in the middle of the night that they’re alone with sorrow, or with some other unexpected and difficult visitor, but the simplest of searches could bring any one of us to the poets, many of whom have been there long before us.

Rumi, a Persian poet, wrote in the thirteenth century. I can’t imagine him having written this poem without some deep and long familiarity with difficult emotions. And then that breakthrough. Emotions as guests? The possibility of extending true hospitality toward them?

And how wonderful that a guest might arrive with such a useful broom.

Looking for more company from healing poetry? Me too. I’ll gradually be adding poems, including found poems and excerpts, along with a few thoughts about such to my blog.

You can find them here at Healing Poetry.

You may especially enjoy this video: Last Night As I Lay Sleeping