Poetry to remind us that withdrawing doesn't solve rejection
21 Saturday Nov 2009
Written by Jo Jordan in POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY, WELLBEING & POETRY
Tags
abandonment, despair, Linda Pastan, loneliness, MAry Oliver, poetry, positive psycholgy, rejection, Wild Geese, withdrawal
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Is is easy to retreat from life
Barack Obama said of his natural father – he had difficult life because he did not reach out to people.
When times are difficult, we tend to retreat from the world. When we are unpopular in the playground, we pick up our toys and go home. Then we really have no one to play with us. Do you know that people who are lost in the bush or surrounded by fire actually hide from their rescuers? When times are bad, we may be tempted to hide.
We may be rejected but it will help us little to go this way
“I am learning to abandon the world
before it can abandon me.
Already I have given up the moon
and snow, closing my shades
against the claims of white.
And the world has taken
my father, my friends.”
By Linda Pastan, a new poet for me.
When we are out of sorts with the world, we must ask ourselves how we can change the conversation and fall in love with life again.
When we are feeling bruised, we might also remember “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver. “You do not have to walk on your knees for 100 miles through the desert . . You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves . . Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh, and exciting ~ over and over announcing your place in the family of things”.
UPDATE: I’ve just found this old post and link to a tremendous poem on living with fear
