[ChatAction] Fwd: The radical act of letting things hurt and how (not) to help a friend in sorrow; the root of our strength in times of crisis; Whitman's ode to life

Sun Dec 20 14:03:53 MST 2020

Folks,

I've forwarded this because (at the end) it mentions an aspect of peace we
have not yet surfaced, in my experience. If you are not aware of this
website I highly recommend it!

Warmly,
Kathryn

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Brain Pickings by Maria Popova <newsletter at brainpickings.org>
Date: Sun, Dec 20, 2020 at 10:03 AM
Subject: The radical act of letting things hurt and how (not) to help a
friend in sorrow; the root of our strength in times of crisis; Whitman's
ode to life
To: Kathryn Alexander <kalexandertoo at gmail.com>

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[image: Welcome] Hello Kathryn Alexander! This is the weekly email digest
of the daily online journal *Brain Pickings*
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by Maria Popova. If you missed last week's edition — Robinson Jeffers on
the key to peace of mind; control, chance, and how the psychology of poker
illuminates the art of thriving through uncertainty, Alfred Russell
Wallace's prophetic century-old prescription for course-correcting our
species — you can catch up right here
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And don't miss the anniversary edition of essential life-learnings from 14
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If my labor of love enriches your life in any way, please consider
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– for fourteen years, I have spent tens of thousands of hours, made many
personal sacrifices, and invested tremendous resources in *Brain Pickings*,
which remains free and ad-free and alive thanks to reader patronage. If you
already donate: THANK YOU. The Radical Act of Letting Things Hurt: How
(Not) to Help a Friend in Sorrow
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[image: okaynotokay_megandevine.jpg?fit=320%2C488]
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=3c8b414c92&e=463d61dea1>

“Grief is a force of energy that cannot be controlled or predicted,”
Elizabeth Gilbert reflected
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=ba5e885f14&e=463d61dea1>
in the wake of losing the love of her life. “Grief does not obey your
plans, or your wishes. Grief will do whatever it wants to you, whenever it
wants to. In that regard, Grief has a lot in common with Love.”

Like love, grief swells into an entire inner universe that comes to color
the whole of the outside world. Like love — that rapturous raw material for
most of the songs and poems and paintings our species has produced — grief
lives itself through the grieving and can’t but speak its truth. Unlike
love, our culture meets the voice of grief with an alloy of disquiet and
denial. We want to make the sadness go away, to lift the sorrowing heart
out of its sorrow immediately. Often, we mistake for personal failure our
inability to salve another’s grief or mistake for their failure the
inability to snap out of it on the timeline of our wishes.
[image: ilikeyou_10.jpg?resize=680%2C402]

Art by Jacqueline Chwast from *I Like You*
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=fcd97f4b23&e=463d61dea1>
by Sandol Stoddard — a vintage serenade to friendship.

When psychotherapist *Megan Devine* — creator of the excellent resource *Refuge
in Grief* and author of its portable counterpart, *It’s OK That You’re Not
OK: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn’t Understand*
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=c1138c6a00&e=463d61dea1>
(*public library*
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=ceeb3b1646&e=463d61dea1>)
— watched her young, healthy partner drown, the sudden and senseless loss
suspended her world. As it slowly regained the motive force of life, she
set out to redirect her professional experience of studying emotional
intelligence and resilience toward better understanding the confounding,
all-consuming process of grief — the process by which, as Abraham Lincoln
wrote in his immensely insightful letter of consolation
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=522971ef94&e=463d61dea1>
to a bereaved friend, the agony of loss is slowly transmuted into “a sad
sweet feeling in your heart, of a purer and holier sort than you have known
before”; a transmutation in which skillful loving support can make a world
of difference — support very different from what we instinctively imagine
helps.
[image: shadowelepant10.jpg]

Art by Valerio Vidali from *The Shadow Elephant*
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=2d2b82792e&e=463d61dea1>
by Nadine Robert — a subtle meditation on what it actually takes to unblue
our sorrows.

In studying how people navigate intense grief — the loss of loved ones to
violent crime, suicide, disaster, infant death, and other abrupt
catastrophic traumas — Devine arrived at an arresting insight. Again and
again, she observed that our most intuitive impulses about helping those
whose suffering we yearn to allay — by cheering them up, by reorienting
them toward the lighthouses in their lives amid the darkness — tend to only
deepen their helpless anguish and broaden the abyss between us and them.
And so she began to wonder what does salve the immense sorrow we encounter
in the world and experience in our own lives.

This is what she learned:

[image: f948d925-05d1-4435-97eb-31ee56eaa146.png]
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=016b8f6fd9&e=463d61dea1>

Complement with a soulful animated short film
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=ab5b2cb4da&e=463d61dea1>
about depression and what it takes to recover the light of being, an uncommon
children’s book
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=abfe0f5ed1&e=463d61dea1>
about that nonjudgmental place of permission for sadness where all healing
begins, and Nick Cave on living with loss and the central paradox of grief
as a portal to aliveness
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=8fe0850178&e=463d61dea1>
.
Forward to a friend
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/Read Online
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donating=lovingIn 2020, I spent thousands of hours and thousands of dollars
keeping *Brain Pickings* going. For fourteen years, it has remained free
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your own life this year, please consider aiding its sustenance with a
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Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way:
*197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7* Our Need for Each Other and Our Need
for Our Selves: Muriel Rukeyser on the Root of Strength in Times of Crisis
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[image: thelifeofpoetry_rukeyser.jpg?fit=320%2C493]
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“My one reader, you reading this book, who are you?” *Muriel Rukeyser*
(December 15, 1913–February 12, 1980) asks with the large forthright eyes
of her words in one of the most beautiful and penetrating
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=d4dfc4f9d9&e=463d61dea1>
books ever written on any subject. “What is your face like, your hands
holding the pages, the child forsaken in you, who now looks through your
eyes at mine?”

It is the summer of 1949. Her life is still only thirty-six years long but
thirty thousand years wise. She has lived through two World Wars, has
shared a small ship with fivefold the number of refugee bodies the vessel
can hold, has been arrested for placing her own solid and unapologetic body
on the right side of what is yet to be celebrated and capitalized as Civil
Rights, has stood amid the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War and traveled
home to tell their story, has staggered the world with her debut poetry
collection at only twenty-two and followed it with a thoroughly unexpected
sidewise triumph of vision in her staggering more-than-biography
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=51b8d11821&e=463d61dea1>
of one of the most influential and misunderstood scientists who ever lived.

But it is this book, *The Life of Poetry*
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=2c9427f84c&e=463d61dea1>
(*public library*
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=8c391acd73&e=463d61dea1>),
that is and would remain her elemental statement of belief — a humanistic
document for the epochs, a reliquary of rapture, a blueprint for resistance
to the thousand desultory derogations by which living can desecrate life.
[image: murielrukeyser.jpg?zoom=2&w=680]

Muriel Rukeyser

Rukeyser writes in the introduction:

[image: 2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]In times of crisis, we
summon up our strength.

Then, if we are lucky, we are able to call every resource, every forgotten
image that can leap to our quickening, every memory that can make us know
our power. And this luck is more than it seems to be: it depends on the
long preparation of the self to be used.

In time of the crises of the spirit, we are aware of all our need, our need
for each other and our need for our selves. We call up, with all the
strength of summoning we have, our fullness. And then we turn; for it is a
turning that we have prepared; and act. The time of the turning may be very
long. It may hardly exist.

However slow or subtle the turning, the fulcrum by which we turn is love.
“In time of struggle,” Rukeyser tells us, “all people think about love” —
never more so than amid uncertainty, when the familiar terrain grows
foreign and uneven, when the very ground beneath our feet fails to hold
steady:

[image: 2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]In this moment when we
face horizons and conflicts wider than ever before, we want our resources,
the ways of strength. We look again to the human wish, its faiths, the
means by which the imagination leads us to surpass ourselves.

If there is a feeling that something has been lost, it may be because much
has not yet been used, much is still to be found and begun.

[image: Velocity_OfraAmit.jpg?resize=680%2C939]

Art by Ofra Amit from *A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader*
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=e00b970328&e=463d61dea1>.
Available as a print
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=86d7d79b9c&e=463d61dea1>
.

We have struggled to find this untapped potential, Rukeyser argues, because
our standard modes of intellectual probing sidestep the life of feeling,
which poetry — “this other kind of knowledge and love” — alone can access
and allay:

[image: 2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]Now, when it is hard to
hold for a moment the giant clusters of event and meaning that every day
appear, it is time to remember [poetry], which has forever been a way of
reaching complexes of emotion and relationship, the attitude that is like
the attitude of science and the other arts today, but with significant and
beautiful distinctness from these — the attitude that perhaps might equip
our imaginations to deal with our lives — the attitude of poetry.

A generation before Audre Lorde placed at the heart of poetry the courage
to feel, from which all power and all change spring,
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=b9cdceec84&e=463d61dea1>
Rukeyser distills the essence of poetry as “an approach to the truth of
feeling,” insisting upon its clarifying and cohesionary power:

[image: 2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]However confused the scene
of our life appears, however torn we may be who now do face that scene, it
can be faced, and we can go on to be whole.

As we wade from the chaos without to the cohesion within, this is what we
move through and move toward:

[image: 2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]The images of personal
love and freedom, controlled as water is controlled, as the flight of
planes is controlled. The images of relationship… the music of the images
of relationship.

Experience taken into the body, breathed in, so that reality is the
completion of experience, and poetry is what is produced. And life is what
is produced.

In the final pages of the book, Rukeyser returns to what is left as the
bedrock of our strength when all falls apart and away:

[image: 2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]As we live our truths, we
will communicate across all barriers, speaking for the sources of peace.
Peace that is not lack of war, but fierce and positive.

[…]

All the poems of our lives are not yet made.

We hear them crying to us, the wounds, the young and the unborn — we will
define that peace, we will live to fight its birth, to build these
meanings, to sing these songs.

Complement this fragment of Rukeyser’s uncommonly vitalizing *The Life of
Poetry*
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=06cf6d1f65&e=463d61dea1>
with Maya Angelou’s poetic consolation for our crises and our contradictions
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=8386028fc7&e=463d61dea1>,
then revisit Rukeyser on the deepest wellspring of our aliveness
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=a8f8845f32&e=463d61dea1>
.
Forward to a friend
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/Read Online
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/
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On
the Beach Alone at Night: Meshell Ndegeocello Reads Walt Whitman’s Ode to
the Interconnectedness of Life
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=754eb48ae8&e=463d61dea1>

[image: leavesofgrass_margaretcook.jpg?fit=320%2C419]
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=a6af200eeb&e=463d61dea1>

We live our lives by tidal forces — vast oceanic waves of change and chance
sweeping us together, stranding us apart, washing over us with their
all-subsuming totality of feeling, only to retreat and then begin anew
before we have fully regained our breath and our footing. What buoys us is
the awareness that, however distant and desolate the shore might appear,
however dark and cold the waters of the night, there are other bodies
swimming these waves, others so different yet so kindred — life itself
swimming itself alive, as it did long ago in the primordial oceans that
gave us feet and lungs and consciousness to live by. James Baldwin hinted
at this in one of his least known and most beautiful meditations
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=371c1fab7c&e=463d61dea1>:
“The sea rises, the light fails… The moment we cease to hold each other,
the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the
light goes out.”

Water might well be the supreme meaning-making element of poets and poets
may well be the original water nymphs — poets in the broadest Baldwinian
sense
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=720276eedf&e=463d61dea1>
of artists in any medium, makers of various life-rafts, who surface the
deepest truth about us and mirror it back to us in their art.
[image: margaretcook_leavesofgrass25.jpg?resize=680%2C851]

Art by Margaret C. Cook from a rare 1913 edition
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=b03980791d&e=463d61dea1>
of *Leaves of Grass*. (Available as a print
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=f2e121c67b&e=463d61dea1>
.)

With his deep-seeing poetic consciousness shaped by the spare solemn
beaches of his native Long Island, *Walt Whitman* (May 31, 1819–March 26,
1892) always retained a profound relationship to the water, to its
symbolism and its actuality. Throughout his poetry, he celebrated the ocean
as the “old mother” of life. He cherished winter beaches as pastures for
creativity
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=2b58f2ff50&e=463d61dea1>.
He imagined the living wonders of “the world below the brine”
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=d4a18f9ab2&e=463d61dea1>
long before Rachel Carson invited the human imagination into the living
reality of the marine world for the very first time
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=475a710609&e=463d61dea1>,
a world then more mysterious than the Moon. His daily ferry commute across
New York’s slender tidal estuary became one of the profoundest and most
penetrating poems
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=b9ca82c283&e=463d61dea1>
ever composed.

It was in the solitude of the beach and the solitude of the night that
Whitman felt most connected to the life of this world and the life of the
universe — a transcendent sense of interleaving, which he reverenced in his
poem “On the Beach Alone at Night.” At an intimate edition of *The Universe
in Verse*
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=8391b5fe6a&e=463d61dea1>
I hosted for his bicentennial, the poem came alive in a singsong
benediction of a reading by musician extraordinaire, Baldwin-champion
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=65546c28ec&e=463d61dea1>,
and poet of song and spirit *Meshell Ndegeocello*, accompanied by cellist
Dave Eggar and guitarist Chris Bruce, inside a deconsecrated white chapel
Whitman passed countless times on the Brooklyn ferry, newly transformed
into a living artwork and sanctuary for contemplation by Governors Island
artist-in-residence Shantell Martin
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=fbb0ead820&e=463d61dea1>.
Words from this poem fomented the mission manifesto of the endeavor to
build New York City’s first public observatory
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=1443386b04&e=463d61dea1>,
just across the water from the chapel.

[image: 01d14d49-6d16-482f-b49b-a81b0897d298.png]
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=100b68a7d8&e=463d61dea1>

[image: 2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]*ON THE BEACH ALONE AT
NIGHT*
*by Walt Whitman*

On the beach at night alone,
As the old mother sways her to and fro singing her husky song,
As I watch the bright stars shining, I think a thought of the clef of the
universes and of the future.
A vast similitude interlocks all,
All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets,
All distances of place however wide,
All distances of time, all inanimate forms,
All souls, all living bodies though they be ever so different, or in
different worlds,
All gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes, the fishes, the brutes,
All nations, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, languages,
All identities that have existed or may exist on this globe, or any globe,
All lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future,
This vast similitude spans them, and always has spann’d,
And shall forever span them and compactly hold and enclose them.

Join me in supporting Governors Island’s wonderful public programming,
green space, and other pastures for creativity with a donation
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