Poetry as Grace

Have you ever noticed the serendipitous nature of poetry? In my life it seems that certain poems have crossed my path at the exact moment that I needed them.  I can’t explain this.  I don’t try to.  But I have come to think of it as grace- which I suppose is a catch all for everything that has been an unexpected loving presence in my life.

For example when I was on maternity leave with my daughter I remember a day just prior to my return to work date in which I was distraught.  I was beginning to experience that severing that one can feel when a being which had been a part of your living body begins to move away from you.  I called my friend that morning sobbing.  I told her I needed to problem solve a way to be able to extend my maternity leave or work part-time.  I asked her through my tears to generate some fabulous unknown idea that would allow me to have more precious time at home with my two children. I asked herthink me out of my intolerable feelingsand come up with some answers.

She didn’t of course.  She could not have. And I knew deep inside that’s not what I actually needed in that moment.

What I did need was to just be with the intense loss as it was.  Not to figure out the future. Not to problem solve to get the answers, but to just exist in the space in between all that certainty.

Later that same day, I came upon these words  by German poet Rainer Maria Rilke:

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

Granted, it is not from one of his poems, but rather his work Letters to a Young Poet. Yet, it reads just like poetry does it not? And more importantly for me, these words acted as a container to guide my heart safely through a sorrowful place and time.

Recently, I came upon another poem, or rather it came upon me.

It was a couple of weeks ago when I was in a place of deep contemplation of my new mantra: “In this, there is that;” a mantra I have written about previously.  During that time I tuned in to a podcast of a Dharma Talk by Christina Feldman called The Wisdom of Disappointmentgiven at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts in 2007.  In the talk, Ms. Feldman cited the following poem by a woman named Rashani:

The Unbroken

There is a brokenness

out of which comes the unbroken,

a shatteredness

out of which blooms the unshatterable.

There is a sorrow

beyond all grief which leads to joy

and a fragility

out of whose depths emerges strength.

There is a hollow space

too vast for words

through which we pass with each loss,

out of whose darkness

we are sanctioned into being.

There is a cry deeper than all sound

whose serrated edges cut the heart

as we break open to the place inside

which is unbreakable and whole,

while learning to sing

Isn’t that just beautiful? And isn’t the truth of that poem so true? 

After I heard the poem I had to look it up myself of course, and have now read it several times privately as well as to some colleagues who also work in the mental health field.

As a seeker, I find it reassuring somehow that in this one area, poetry, I don’t have to do all of the work to seek things out.  In this one small area of my life, poetry seems to seek me.  And for that, I am grateful.