Poetry, Permeability, and Healing

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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

[…]

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

[…]

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.

[…]

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

AG2020_1880469 or Thrives in the Sun

dig
AG2020_1880469a

Untitled (Thrives in the Sun), 2000. A print available through the Sunny Project, Sun Pours Daylong, an exhibition and online print sale of Florida photography by Florida photographers.

Sun Pours Daylong runs from July 24 through August 30, 2020, and is on view in the Miami Design District; was organized by Gesi Schilling, Rose Marie Cromwell, and Adler Guerrier.

The clear burning light of the sun pours daylong into the saw grass and is lost there, soaked up, never given back. Only the water flashes and glints. The grass yields nothing.

Marjory Stoneman Douglas, The Everglades : River of Grass

Feminist City, Leslie Kern

dig

On creating the non-sexist city. Kern’s article in the Guardian.

society’s historical and ongoing ideas about the proper gender roles for men and women (organised along a narrow binary) are built right into our cities – and they still matter. They matter to me as a mother. They matter to me as a busy professor who often finds herself in strange cities, wondering if it’s OK to pop into the neighbourhood pub alone. Ask any woman who’s tried to bring a pram on to a bus, breastfeed in a park, or go for a jog at night. She intuitively understands the message the city sends her: this place is not for you.

Yet the city can be a place of great freedom. The anonymity of urban life breeds possibilities easily stifled in a claustrophobic small town or suburban enclave. Education, work, pleasure, politics: the city broadens our horizons and gives us choices our foremothers never had. Despite its hostilities, it remains our best hope for radical change.

Book by Verso.