The need for poetry

In the world of labelling and naming, words have meanings and definition. They are consolidated and purposeful, resolute and practical, useful and easy to understand. But in the world of poetry, words are used to challenge all our assumptions, ideas and purposefulness so that we may be plunged into the forgotten waters of our own souls.

How often do we visit the realm of the unnameable, the ineffable, the essence behind meanings and the ground of our own selves? Music gets there. Silence gets there. Nature upholds it. Poetry allows it.

Consider the following:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments.

Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds…

The poet (Shakespeare, Sonnet 118), points to the word ‘love’ but immediately takes away its authority as a word because the word has no real meaning without its essence – which is its unchanging ability to remain as something that cannot be altered. So the incongruous contradiction ‘love is not love’ is completely allowed and permissible because the poet is pointing to a depth in meaning that is often overlooked when the word ‘love’ is used in conventional terms (if there are, indeed, conventional ways to use the word ‘love’).

Or consider Emily Dickinson’s:

I’m nobody! Who are you?

Are you nobody too?

Using language to break the formalities of language to pieces by denying the naming and identification of a ‘person’.

So sensitive souls need poetry as much as plants need sunlight. Because language is far too structured in syntax and meaning, and its frailty is exposed through poetry alone. And maybe silence, if we can manage it.

 

 

Past and Future

Emergence of the divine feminine

What is it about the relationship between the masculine and feminine (not necessarily male and female bodies), that has caused the feminine energy to be oppressed, subdued, dis-empowered and used, while the masculine energy has taken centre stage in human history?

I would like to suggest that it is because of the nurturing aspect of the feminine that, out of love, it has given over its need to be right or centre stage. But too much of anything begins to destroy you, and such is the state of the world right now, overtaken by wars and competition. Also, the feminine energy is intuitive, rather than logic-based. I AM NOT SAYING WOMEN ARE ILLOGICAL. I am saying that the feminine energy has access to a deeper understanding of life rather than just the superficial ways in which life seems to work. A man can embody the intuitive abilities as much as a woman, though social pressure on him to be masculine often suppresses this. The intuitive aspect of the mind has been deeply rejected and dismissed as ‘hysteria’ because it cannot be seen or measured. It is the knowing of the heart which relies on no outward appearances. It is the thing that allows a mother to  know there is something not quite right in her child’s life before any evidence is shown.

Because this type of knowing has been so heavily dismissed as stupidity, we have a rational world. But it doesn’t work very well for everyone, does it?

Only when the masculine and feminine are equally valued, will we have a world where there is true peace.