Reflection, July
Our month’s poetic companion notes “Before you know what kindness really is/ you must lose things.” Naomi Shihab Nye’s verse calls to another poem that explores the depth of sorrow, Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art.” The poem is written as a villanelle and is a crash course on craft. The speaker of the poem runs through a litany of lost “things” like a watch, door keys, an “hour badly spent”. Yet, as the stanzas move, the litany shifts from things to much larger, emotional ties, like a loved home and cities, even a continent. The poem ends with a second person evoked, “even losing you (The joking voice, a gesture/ I love)”, and the poem is truly about heartbreak, not lost things.
On Literary Gastronomy’s IG, I have begun a series called “Liminal Wednesdays” to explore complex relational, wellness, mental health, and healing theories in a down to earth, easier to digest way. This last week, we further explored binary opposites. The theory is that we process the world through binary opposites, its almost instinctual with our survival instinct (we tend to go towards the negative for safety): “is this safe or a threat.” There are the first binary opposites we use to navigate the world: safe or unsafe. Then we branch out from there. In this way, sorrow and kindness are placed as binary opposites in Nye’s “Kindness” poem. In order to know the truest depth of love (kindness), you must also know the “One Art” of heartbreaking loss (sorrow). Here lies our paradox, in the human condition we are tasked to simultaneously hold grief (loss) and love (joy, kindness, hope).
For the first week of the month, I asked you to start a hero’s journey exploring where your kindness could grow, expand: “The hero’s journey always begins with the call. One way or another, a guide must come to say, ‘Look, you’re in Sleepy Land. Wake. Come on a trip. There is a whole aspect of your consciousness, your being, that’s not been touched. So you’re at home here? Well, there’s not enough of you there.’ And so it starts.” (Joseph Campbell). As your guide, I asked you to consider where in your life you are holding sorrow and where you knew kindness.
These observations can remain neutral. Yet, sometimes, we hold on to sorrow for too long and our hearts begin to close/wall in fear (a blocked heart chakra) and we hide/mask from taking chances because we are afraid of the risks of sorrow (a blocked solar plexus). Yet, we must keep holding sorrow, knowing its depth and until we see the universality of it: “the size of the cloth”. As it is only then we understand that “only kindness makes sense anymore.” We must find ways to nurture and expand kindness in our daily lives, because change-pain-sorrow-heartbreak-grief are the inevitable aspects of being alive and in order to thrive, we haev to keep remaining open.
In the Vino, Verse, and Vinyl book of July we see a tale of passion and heartbreak. We can see in the characters, as a warning, what can happen when you hold on to sorrow so tightly that it drowns you. We can also see what happens when a character rises like a Phoenix from the ashes of heartbreak and still pursues passion:
“Each of us is born with a box of matches inside us but we can't strike them all by ourselves; we need oxygen and a candle to help. In this case, the oxygen for example, would come from the breath of the person you love; the candle would be any kind of food, music, caress, word, or sound that engenders the explosion that lights one of the matches. For a moment we are dazzled by an intense emotion. A pleasant warmth grows within us, fading slowly as time goes by, until a new explosion comes along to revive it. Each person has to discover what will set off those explosions in order to live, since the combustion that occurs when one of them is ignited is what nourishes the soul. That fire, in short, is its food. If one doesn't find out in time what will set off these explosions, the box of matches dampens, and not a single match will ever be lighted.”
― Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate
You practiced “A Part of” exercise to continue to learn to hold paradox, to honor sorrow but still focus on cultivating kindness. You can do this in a myriad of ways, but you must work to keep the fire of soul aflame, to nurture it as a hero pursues their truest calling (leaving behind the sleepy land of unconsciousness for a complex journey of enlightenment). And when you love and lose, you honor the pain and begin the hero’s journey yet again, each time wiser with new elixirs to not only to feed the fire of your own soul, but to encourage others to do the same.
So, I’ll leave this ever so warm July with this question for you: in what areas of your life are you nurturing and growing the flame of kindness (love, passion, joy, hope) in your soul? In what areas of your life are you dampening the flame of kindness with sorrow that is so ready to be released? Act accordingly, you are the expert of your own life.
Be good,
Amanda
These monthly write ups are micro versions of topics explored in 1:1 mentoring and group courses.
Courses listed through 2022, hint there is one about using The Hero's Journey to help you heal and grow!
"Writing to Heal" is a 6 week workshop, starting August 11. For the introductory group, I am offering an over 35% discount! Register here and share with anyone who is ready to take their healing to a new level.
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