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.
Decoration is really about creating a quality of life, and a beauty in that life that nourishes the soul, that makes life beautiful.
Are artists the canaries in the mine, warning of the coming explosion before anyone else? It's hard to look at the world before 1914 and not wonder if they somehow felt a catastrophe was bearing down on them and their societies.
[Short Talk on Sylvia Plath] Did you see her mother on television? She said plain, burned things. She said I thought it an excellent poem but it hurt me. She did not say jungle fear. She did not say jungle hatred wild jungle weeping chop it back chop it. She said self-government she said end of the road. She did not say humming in the middle of the air what you came for chop.
For me, the importance in learning about the dance is using it as a voice. It's not about a step, it's about a way to express oneself.
When photographers get beyond copying the achievements of others, or just repeating their own accidental first successes, they learn that they do not know where in the world they will find pictures. Nobody does. Each photograph that works is a revelation to its supposed creator.
We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
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