Emotional Literacy
/Have I lived enough?
Have I loved enough?
Have I considered Right Action enough, have I come to any
conclusion?
Have I experienced happiness with sufficient gratitude?
Have I endured loneliness with grace?
I say this, or perhaps I’m just thinking it.
Actually I probably think too much.
Then I step out into the garden,
Where the gardener, who is said to be a simple man,
is tending his children, the roses.
- The Gardener, Mary Oliver
In high school I learned about Frost, Whitman, Poe, Byron, and Plath. I analyzed the text and the composition. I was tested on why the poet chose to use a particular word in a particular way, and to discern what messages were embedded within the spaces connecting each word.
I don’t remember being asked how poetry made me feel, and I find that terribly sad.
I find it almost a crime that, in school, the analytical aspects of poetry were emphasized to a greater degree than the emotional. Granted, it was my teachers’ job to get the nuts and bolts of the text into my mind for the next exam, but I lost the composition in favor of recognizing individual notes.
At 33, poetry is the means by which I connect with humans throughout history. Some have long since passed, but their words remain. Allowing us to share a gentle conversation across the ages.
Perhaps some day I’ll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow.
- Sylvia Plath
I wish I had been put on an emotional scavenger hunt in school instead of a textual analysis mission. Say, one semester learning the basics of poetry, prose, haikus, and jisei. Then the following semester is all about finding a poem that rocks your entire being. Forcing you to accept that while you sometimes feel alone; others have felt what you felt.
Farewell-
I pass as all things do
dew on the grass
- Banzan
After graduating high school I tried navigated undiagnosed depressed and anxiety with only my own words. My words and my ability to analyze them only let me tread the treacherous waters of mental illness. My education was limited to understanding the words; not feeling them. I wasn’t taught that poetry is meant to be spoken out loud, preferably by multiple voices. I wasn’t introduced to Oliver, or Rumi, or Proust. I could logic my way through a poem, but logic only takes a person so far in poetry and in recovering from mental illness. I had to go below the water, I had to feel the deep pressures of solitude that others had experienced to learn that I could effect survival too. It’s taken the better part of a decade, but I feel more of an emotional connection to the authors of the words I read.
I feel part of what the author felt, and I feel hopeful because even if I’m severely depressed, if I’m reading then I’m never really alone.
At the end of this post are some poets, famous and obscure. Here’s your mission — Find a poem that makes you weep. Another that deepens your joy. One more that sets fire to your anger.
When I find myself overthinking. Which is often. I recall part of Mary Oliver’s “The Gardener”. After a moment, my thoughts slow, I perceive my environment more broadly, and I feel more content.
Poetry continues to be the best way in which I feel the world and my place in it. It has gotten me through some of the worst my depression and anxiety could offer, and, I feel, it can provide those that do not live with mental illness far more than an analytical understanding of the disease.
