dig

Essay by Jane Hirshfield from 2018 via poets.org.

At the etymological root of both healing and health is the idea of “wholeness.” To heal, then, is to take what has been broken, separated, frag­mented, injured, exiled and restore it to wholeness.

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Many things beyond physical illness and physical fracture need healing. Some are personal, some are collective, and these two realms are not disconnected. We don’t live in compartments; we live in our lives.

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kintsugi, done well, offers damage made visible as part of the cup’s his­tory, damage made beautiful because the cup was repaired without denial.

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Poems are words that live in the fractures, […] they make new by rejoining parts into a visibly changed whole.

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a person who can ask words to do things words have not done before is not powerless. To make phrases that increase what is possible to think and feel is both exhilaration and liberation. To expand reality is to counter despair, depression, and impotence.

[..]

[Poems] loosen us from the loneliness of separation and the erasures of generality. The particularity and unexpectedness of poetry’s language shake us from sleepiness, complacency, habitual mind. Empathy breaks us from the hypnosis of ego’s grip on its own sense of purpose.

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The rational mind, untempered by poetry, divides; […] fierce rational power, in isolation, is inhuman. Art dwells at the crossroads between what in us is body, what in us is emotion, what in us is history, and what in us is mind. To step into wholeness of seeing and feeling, under any conditions, is in itself restorative.

Jane Hirshfield