Poetry helps us heal, especially in a time where we live with such deep unknowns for our lives and for this world. Emily P. Freeman encourages us in a section of her book, A Million Little Ways, to “show up as a poet,” in our lives. In that section, she quotes G. K. Chesterton’s book Orthodoxy:
“Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion….To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.”
The practice of accepting everything instead of striving to understand it all can truly be freeing–and much less exhausting! So it is okay to not know, to surrender all we cannot fit inside of our reason and our plans, to instead stretch ourselves out into the unknowns, to surrender and to trust, even to learn to float for a while.
I believe this is also what it takes to step into the unknowns of our stories in order to heal our pain, be it emotional or physical. But fear keeps us on the run. Fear kept me away from so much of myself for over two decades!
What was I so afraid of? I was terrified of finding dark things that I couldn’t handle tucked way back in the closed off, locked up rooms of my story. But that is because I thought I had to understand everything in my mind or even worse, that I might have to relive it all in order to heal. But the truth is I can show up as a poet and accept these areas of my life without needing to work out every detail, knowing it will never be able to fit inside my head anyway. Healing doesn’t require me to relive it all or to fully understand every nook and cranny–what a relief.
As I learned to reverse my pain, I also learned I wanted and needed to create through writing. It was right inside of poetry (and other creative efforts) that I finally allowed myself to walk into that which I feared. Those fears held my body captive for far too long and now I know that my fear was bigger than anything I was actually afraid of.
In healing, we need to find a place to process and even accept our deep emotions. Poetry is one place I do this. So instead of hiding strong emotions in my debilitating sciatica or in any other symptom in my mind or body, they live inside of my writing, which is much better for me!
