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Healing Language and Healing Images

The Guest House by Rumi: A Quiet Revolution?

Posted by on May 8, 2007 in Guest House, Healing Images, Healing Language and Healing Images, Healing Poetry

The Guest House by Rumi: A Quiet Revolution?

I came across this poem, The Guest House, by Rumi, for the first time, week before last, when I was looking for a clean link for Mary Oliver’s poem, The Journey. 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. How wonderful is that? The image of sorrow and all the other emotions—joy yes—but also the difficult ones—anger—shame—fear—all as visitors—some pleasant visitors and some more difficult ones—and all of them guests. And guests with a broom no less. Sweeping through the rooms—clearing it. Rumi’s lines here resonate for me with those lines by Paul Simon from his song, “Sound of Silence”: Hello darkness, my old friend I’ve come to talk with you again. But now I’m picturing Darkness with a broom. Full text of Rumi’s poem Photo by Vladimir Shioshvili at Wikimedia Commons: Brooms for Sale in a Tbilisi...

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Sweetness

Posted by on February 8, 2007 in Healing Language and Healing Images, Healing Poetry

One of three places that I’ve come across Mary Oliver’s poem, The Wild Geese, in the last month or so was as a kind of epigraph—before the table of contents—to the poetry anthology, Staying Alive, edited by Neil Astley.  The anthology, first published in Britain, is one I would recommend, and I’ll probably get around to writing about it more here on this site one of these days.  Meanwhile, today, I wanted to draw your attention to one particular poem that I found in the anthology—a poem called “Sweetness,” by Stephen Dunn. The poem is freely available on the web, this because of a project–Poetry Out Loud–which encourages high school students to memorize and recite poetry. But back to the poem, Sweetness—the first seven lines— Just when it has seemed I couldn’t bear one more friend waking with a tumor, one more maniac with a perfect reason, often a sweetness has come and changed nothing in the world except the way I stumbled through it. . . Nice, huh? The poem makes me think, among other things, of that bag of tomatoes and that rotisserie chicken in Eighteen Ways of Looking at Cancer.  But any way you look at it, I think maybe he’s onto...

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Whatever Leads to Joy

Posted by on December 22, 2006 in Healing Language and Healing Images, Healing Poetry, Recommended Books

The book, What the Living Do, was written by Marie Howe in the wake of her brother’s death from AIDS. It’s a book that, perhaps better than any other book I know, walks that delicate balance between making memorial—remembering who and what has been lost—and choosing life in the wake of such loss—figuring out, day by day, what it is that the living do (after). There’s joy in the book—and in the poem—but it’s that bittersweet kind of joy— The poem, “My Dead Friends,” can be found here. The poem consists of only thirteen lines. Here are six of them: I have begun, when I’m weary and can’t decide an answer to a bewildering question to ask my dead friends for their opinion and the answer is often immediate and clear. . . They stand in unison shaking their heads and smiling—whatever leads to joy, they always answer. ....

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On Gratitude and Embracing What Remains

Posted by on November 21, 2006 in Healing Language and Healing Images

I was looking for something to put up about loss and gratitude before taking a brief break for the Thanksgiving holiday and then I remembered this from the end of Andre Dubus’ essay, “Broken Vessels,” (which I wrote about earlier this week). The passage can be found on p. 194 of Broken Vessels, this the next to the last page of the essay, and the book. A week ago I read again The Old Man and the Sea, and learned from it that, above all, our bodies exist to perform the condition of our spirits: our choices, our desires, our loves. My physical mobility and my little girls have been taken from me; but I remain. So my crippling is a daily and living sculpture of certain truths: we receive and we lose, and we must try to achieve gratitude; and with that gratitude to embrace with whole hearts whatever of life that remains after the losses. No one can do this alone, for being absolutely alone finally means a life not only without people or God or both to love, but without love itself. In The Old Man and Sea, Santiago is a widower and a man who prays; but the love that fills and sustains him is of life itself: living creatures, and the sky, and the sea. Without that love, he would be an old man alone in a boat. I like the language Dubus uses here—the way, sometimes, we have to work to “achieve” gratitude—the way this might not always come naturally—but still it can come—at least at moments–and sometimes those moments can be enough: moments in which we are able to embrace what...

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