It seems to you that you did nothing today, but this is not true. You
worked in the yard after breakfast. - Amorella
2139 hours. I had forgot that. We went to Potbelly's late, got our flat
breaded sandwiches, headed to the cemetery to eat them and it began raining. We
stayed until we finished. I don't ever remember having lunch or even being in a
cemetery in a very dark clouded and windy afternoon. I did not park the car
under any trees for fear a limb might fall on us. It reminded me that rain or
shine or whatever the remains/cremains still are present in all kinds of
weather.
You had Alta's (recipe)
turkey vegetable soup from yesterday. It was very good warmed up. - Amorella
2147 hours. It was. This is good because it grew colder during the day
-- low forties tonight and tomorrow night. It was in the mid-seventies earlier
today and somewhat muggy. Tim came over and mowed this afternoon; he finished before
the rains hit. We watched NBC News and the DVRed first of the year episode of
"Blue Bloods" -- sad show as one of the family characters had died in
last season's conclusion. We forgot. I put a BBC article about poetry on my FB
page for sharing. I forgot that too. Huh?
If this were the last day of your life you
might have remembered how the day was. - Amorella
2156 hours. I suppose you are right, Amorella.
Drop the article in to share here too, then
post. - Amorella
2200
hours. Here is my comment to introduce the article: "Oddly,
many of the words within pass me by, but I continually discover a line or two,
you may too. Have a good upcoming week. "
** **
BBC - Culture
"The
words that can make us calmer"
· By
Fiona Macdonald
27 September 2017
In the
introduction to his new book The Poetry Pharmacy, William Sieghart
quotes the British playwright Alan Bennett. “The best moments in reading are
when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at
things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is,
set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long
dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.”
Sieghart’s
book is subtitled ‘tried and true prescriptions for the heart, mind and soul’,
and it brings the special and particular in 56 poems to bear on anxiety,
depression and grief. Whether it’s a poem to read before a party – which “can
inject self-belief like a shot of adrenaline” – or 17 lines that remind us
“there is a small, wide-eyed animal within each of us that doesn’t understand
why we keep kicking it”, the words in The Poetry Pharmacy have replenishing
qualities. “This is not a poetry anthology, it’s a self-help book for life,”
says Sieghart, who has dispensed more than 1000 ‘poetry prescriptions’ since
his Poetry Pharmacy began in 2014.
He established
the UK-wide National
Poetry Day in
1994, after setting up the Forward Prizes for Poetry a couple of years before
that – and is constantly trying to find ways of bringing poetry into everyday
lives. “I’ve spent a quarter of a century – or more – trying to get poetry out
of Poetry Corner,” Sieghart tells BBC Culture.
The Poetry
Pharmacy is “a distillation of a whole life’s work”, he says, arguing that the
prescriptions encompass “people’s access point to poetry – time of need. I feel
at last I’ve been able to explain what’s obsessed me all of these years.” In
the book’s introduction, Sieghart reveals what first drew him to poetry: “I was
eight years old when I was first sent to boarding school, and I was desperately
unhappy. At a time when friends were in short supply, I found that poetry
became my friend.”
He also
describes witnessing a road accident later in life, and finding relief in
Philip Larkin’s 1961 poem Ambulances. “There I was with blood on my hands,
trying to work out how to cope, and I remembered some lines from Ambulances,
where you ‘sense the solving emptiness/That lies just under all we do,/And for
a second get it whole,/So permanent and blank and true.’ And that was a
brilliant explanation to me about just what was going on,” he says.
“I’ve got lots
of couplets like that which hit me often – just relating to day-to-day events
or what someone’s said, or a thought – it just gives a delightfully beguiling
resonance to life. A way of understanding something in a different way, in a
different light.”
A range of
conditions appear in the book, including ‘loss of zest for life’ – answered by
a poem about ironing – and ‘social overload’, with another Larkin poem prescribed
for those who have “spent so little time in their own company, that they
probably couldn’t pick themselves out of a line-up”. There is solace offered up
from 700 years ago – from the 14th-Century Persian poet Hafez – and thoughts on
migration from Imtiaz Dharker, who was born in Lahore, grew up in Scotland, and
now lives between Mumbai, London and Wales.
Sieghart
believes people are put off reading poetry because they’re not sure how to
tackle it. “Reading poetry aloud is critical – out loud, or in your head,” he
says. “If you just read it as though you’re reading a piece of journalism or a
novel, you’re missing a dimension, you’re reading it flat on the page and you
can’t really get what the poem’s on about.”
It can also
difficult to find a way in. “Most people don’t know where to begin with poetry,
they know a few dead poets’ names and very few living poets’ names,” says
Sieghart. “In a way it’s hard to find what you’re looking for, it’s like a
needle in a haystack. But you know you’re feeling anxious, depressed,
sleepless, grieving, heartbroken – and what you really want is someone to say:
‘This is the one to read, this is going to help you’.”
One of his
favourite poems is not something that would fit a prescription, however.
“Something I hold dear is Aubade by Phillip Larkin – it was written quite late
in his life, and it’s about lying awake at night and being frightened of dying.
He manages to hold onto the thoughts we’re most scared of, and develop them and
explore them – most of us just want to push them aside,” says Sieghart. “It’s
bold, it’s stark, it’s straight to it – and it’s a fantastically moving poem.
Whenever I read that at a reading, it stuns and silences the room.”
Below
are three previously unpublished prescriptions from William Sieghart’s
pharmacy: 56 different prescriptions can be found in The Poetry Pharmacy by
William Sieghart, available now from Particular Books.
Over-cautiousness
Also suitable
for: boredom, fear of change, lack of courage, inertia or fear of mortality
What intrigues
me about Philip James Bailey’s wonderful poem We Live in Deeds is its call to
action. There’s something intensely motivating about the idea that we might fit
a whole life’s worth of living into an hour, if only we had the courage. So
often we are paralysed by our fears, concerns, worries and ‘what-ifs’, and we
forget to dread the ‘what-if-I-don’ts’ instead.
Imagine if
everything this poem claimed were true. If we measured our lives by our hearts’
throbs – by our excitements, our longings and our pangs of misery – just think
how differently we’d do things. We’d take risks for the sake of taking them,
and fall in love for the thrill of it. We’d sacrifice ourselves for others with
ease and grace, because in doing so we’d also be enriching ourselves.
If we feared
boredom, or being boring, more than we feared the consequences of bold action,
I can barely conceive of the marvellous things we’d create and the spectacular
lives we could lead. There is such huge potential within us, and within the
world itself, and yet for some reason we choose to live lives of constraint and
repetition. Imagine if we didn’t.
All of this
may sound grandly unattainable. But is it as silly as it seems? Or is it,
actually, the way we all wish we had the courage to live? Life is not valuable
to us in itself, so much as it is valuable as a means to other ends, like
experience, kindness and joy. This poem reminds us that a shorter life can
still be full. It’s the richness of life that matters; its duration is simply a
number.
Avoiding One’s Fears
Also suitable for: anxiety, avoidance behaviours, general fear
or substance abuse
Most of us
spend a huge amount of mental energy trying to push away fear, to block it from
our minds completely. We live in a world of painkillers, tranquilizers, beta
blockers and all sorts of more raucous solutions to fear; people will go to
remarkable lengths to push aside the thoughts they least want to think.
Yet, as
William Stafford suggests in For My Young Friends, it is only by allowing our
fears in, by bending with them instead of trying rigidly to ignore them, that
we can grow. Our fears are always on the edge of our vision, with us whether we
acknowledge them or not. By understanding them better we can also understand
ourselves. Fears are our motivations just as much as desires are. They are what
makes us who we are, and what keeps us safe.
Running away
may feel good in the short term – in fact, it can feel wonderful for a while.
But if you’re always running and never engaging, you’ll find you’re facing in
the wrong direction for your whole life. You’ll never have the chance to look
back the way you came and feel proud.
Fears are not
your enemies, they are your companions. Some of them are liars, and some of
them are wise guides. Without getting to know them properly, you will never be
able to determine which ones are which. Look your fears dead in the eye, and
try to understand them. Don’t flinch, and don’t blink. You are not alone.
Everyone is afraid. This is the world, and we all live here.
William
Stafford, For My Young Friends Who Are Afraid, from Ask Me. Copyright © 2014 by
the Estate of William Stafford. Reprinted with the permission of Graywolf
Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org
Grief at premature death
Also suitable for: coping with the loss of a child
A premature
death feels entirely different to the loss of a person who has had their time
and used it well. The terrible, gasping unfairness of it all compounds our
grief, and the shock of losing someone we thought we had decades longer to
enjoy is ghastly. When the person we have lost is a child, the sense of horror,
of a fundamental unnaturalness, is even more staggering. There is very little
to be said that can make it any more bearable.
And yet Ben
Jonson has found something to say, and it is a comfort. He tells us that the
value of our lives is not dictated by their length, or their solidity. Living
like an oak tree, becoming ancient and huge and eventually toppling over under
our own weight, is not the only way to live a good human life. For all that the
oak is strong, it will never flower.
There are
those among us who are lilies. They may be destined only to last for a summer’s
day, but they are, as Jonson says, the plant and flower of light. Their beauty
is not constrained by their fragility, and nor is their impact diminished by
its brevity. Their life, though it may be short, can still be perfect. In fact,
it may be in part because they are with us for such a brief time that they
manage to move us as they do.
The essential
thing when thinking about a life cut short is not to imagine it as an oak
sapling, cut before its prime. Those we lost were never meant to be grand old
trees at all. Instead, they lived their days bright and treasured; they bloomed
before they fell, and that was enough. Their lives were beautiful, and whole,
and perfect, like a flower on a summer’s day. They are gone now, but their
memory remains with us, a source of light. It will never be extinguished.
***
[I include the
full source if you wish to read the added poetry from the article that I could
not copy.]
http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20170927-the-words-that-can-make-us-calmer?ocid=ww.social.link.facebook
** **
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