For Today - Open as a Child (and the importance of Poetry)

You may strive to be like [your children], but seek not to make them like you.  -- Kahlil Gibran

To be open as a child, exploring, and full of wonder, is a healthy place of growth.  Curiosity is an essential part of my humanness.  At the same time, when I find something that works, I need to stick with it for so long as it still works. 

For me, right now, what works is doing my morning read and writing, eating three meals a day and one snack, and consciously connecting with my Higher Power, my breath.  It is also helping to track my thoughts, identifying automatic patterns that I am slowly changing.

The quote this morning had me resorting to Google.  Khalil Gibran's name was vaguely familiar and when I looked up his biography (Lebanese-American poet, born 1883) there were many quotations from his work that were familiar and some new, but hauntingly beautiful:

• Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.
• Faith is an oasis in the heart which will never be reached by the caravan of thinking.
• Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.
• You pray in your distress and in your need; would that you might also pray in the fullness of your joy and in your days of abundance.
• Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh and greatness which does not bow before children.
• But let there be spaces in your togetherness and let the winds of the heavens dance between you.  Love one another but make not a bond of love:  let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.

As I ponder this morning's quote and the work of its author, Khalil Gibran, I honour the great contribution poets make to life.  I read an essay in university called Poetry is Not a Luxury by Audre Lorde.  She writes, in part:

Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.  The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

As they become known and accepted to ourselves, our feelings, and the honest exploration of them, become sanctuaries and fortresses and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas, the house of difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action.  ... Poetry is not only dream or vision, it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. ...

For there are no new ideas.  There are only new ways of making them felt, of examining what our ideas really mean (feel like) on Sunday morning at 7 A.M. after brunch, during wild love, making war, giving birth; while we suffer the old longings, battle the old warnings and fears of being silent and impotent and alone, while tasting our new possibilities and strengths. [Sister Outsider, 1985]

So grateful this morning for the quiet, the dark, the opportunity to write, a mug of good coffee, tasting my new possibilities and strengths.