There's a reason poets often say, 'Poetry saved my life,' for often the blank page is the only one listening to the soul's suffering, the only one registering the story completely, the only one receiving all softly and without condemnation.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the therapeutic nature of poetry, suggesting it offers solace and understanding to those in pain.
In this quote, Clarissa Pinkola Estes highlights the profound connection between poetry and personal suffering. She suggests that when individuals express their deepest emotions through poetry, they find a safe space where their struggles are acknowledged and validated. The blank page becomes a confidant that accepts their emotions without judgment, providing comfort and healing as they articulate their experiences creatively.
In practice
In a discussion about mental health, one might say, 'As Clarissa Pinkola Estes noted, poetry saved my life during tough times.'
Asking the proper question is the central action of transformation- in fairy tales, in analysis, and in individuation. The key question causes germination of consciousness. The properly shaped question always emanates from an essential curiosity about what stands behind. Questions are the keys that cause the secret doors of the psyche to swing open.
Tears are a river that takes you somewhere…Tears lift your boat off the rocks, off dry ground, carrying it downriver to someplace better.
Though fairy tales end after ten pages, our lives do not. We are multi-volume sets. In our lives, even though one episode amounts to a crash and burn, there is always another episode awaiting us and then another. There are always more opportunities to get it right, to fashion our lives in the ways we deserve to have them. Don't waste your time hating a failure. Failure is a greater teacher than success.
Stories are medicine. They have such power; they do not require that we do, be, act anything - we need only listen.
To love means to embrace and at the same time to withstand many endings, and many many beginnings- all in the same relationship.
That is what the intuition is for: it is the direct messenger of the soul.
There comes a moment when it is no longer you who takes the photograph, but receives the way to do it quite naturally and fully.
Homer has taught all other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.
I adore the theater and I am a painter. I think the two are made for a marriage of love. I will give all my soul to prove this once more.
I'd have been a filmmaker or a cartoonist or something else which extended from the visual arts into the making of narratives if I hadn't been able to shift into fiction.
The voice is raised, and that is where poetry begins. And even today, in the prolonged aftermath of modernism, in places where "open form" or free verse is the orthodoxy, you will find a memory of that raising of the voice in the term "heightened speech".
When you're writing a novel, you spend four years sitting in your basement and a year waiting for the book to come out and then you get the feedback. When you do work online, the moment you're finished making it, people start responding to it which is really fun and allows for a kind of community development you just can't have in novels.
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