Why we tell

Rachel wrote these words: "My heart has felt like it’s going to explode all day, a sore throbbing under my ribs, a beat up leather mitt and I thought coming here to release the valve would help a little, but so far what’s troubling me has no way of getting out... There’s no hope of cutting out the things we’ve done, the people we’ve met, our experiences, griefs, triumphs. Right now I’m just trying to mold the aches into places more soothing than the surface of my skin."

Reading these words, I wondered if perhaps the melancholy that hides there underneath the ribs might be exacerbated by the expectations of the season. It demands we feel joy yet stirs up the darkest imaginings in me. There is always that sense of what has been lost, what has, of necessity or human frailty or merely the passage of time, been abandoned. I remember everything that used to be more perfectly than it ever could have been, and it makes me ache. I create worst case scenarios in my head, and hang them on the flimsiest notions. I came here to try and exorcise them by writing them out of myself but couldn't summon the words. So when I read what Rachel had written, within a meditation on the spiritual power of poetry, it was a gift. I felt somehow less afraid of being fearful, I could come out of hiding, I was not so wounded and alone.

There is a healing that can happen when we see ourselves in another's truth. Such is the grace I have found here, again and again, and thank you.