help me understand

[miss-providence.livejournal.com]

I have this person in my life.

i feel in my heart that we are meant to be together, and have been, but he has suffered through years of my anxiety and leaving and returning and confusion.

he tells me that my fight or flight is skewed to flight.

i need to read some poetry that addresses this or can help me relax and accept the love being offered to me.

I dont have any more chances with him, and i need to have my head right before I jump in.

(this is TMI, i know.. but poetry helps my head and heart more than anything else I know!)

Comments

[altaego.livejournal.com]

How about his from Rumi

Only the Best

In the slaughterhouse of love
they kill only the best,
none of the weak or deformed.

Do not run away from this dying.
Whoever is not killed for love is dead meat.

[miss-providence.livejournal.com]

hahaa.

that is superb! that is how i feel on my most overthunked days (my word- i have a tendency to toil about things and get no where)

[gregoryness.livejournal.com]

Ask Me

Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.

—William Stafford

I chose that, because I feel our fears do not touch the stillness that rests at the base of all life. I want to remind everyone who needs it to look right in front of themselves and find reasons to smile with their depth of being, and, if it's what you need, to accept the love being offered you.

[miss-providence.livejournal.com]

beautiful. thank you.

[gregoryness.livejournal.com]

You're very welcome. I commend you for using poetry to help you through your hard time, I think that's a wonderful idea!

[revolte-avecmoi.livejournal.com]

oh, that's a really good one.

[passinggo.livejournal.com]

I read your post and immediately thought of this one - always a meaningful one for me, maybe for you too if you don't already know it.

A Settlement

Look, it's spring.

And last year's loose dust has turned into this soft willingness. The wind-flowers have come up trembling, slowly the brackens are uplifting their curvaceous and pale bodies. The thrushes have come home, none less than filled with mystery, sorrow, happiness, music, ambition.

And i am walking out into all of this with nowhere to go and no task undertaken but to turn the pages of this beautiful world over and over, in the world of my mind.

***

Therefore, dark past,
I'm about to do it.
I'm about to forgive you

for everything.

- Mary Oliver

[miss-providence.livejournal.com]

wow. i dont know that one!

that speaks to me so deeply. it sounds like you really understood what i was asking for.

[chad-etc.livejournal.com]

You've probably heard this one from Mary Oliver too, but just in case (and because it's always helpful), here it is:

"Wild Geese"

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

[teithiwr.livejournal.com]

Oh, I love that. Mary Oliver is fantastic.

[doozerloover.livejournal.com]

Hm, not as fittingly perfect as some of the others, but this Yeats poem sometimes helps me when I'm feeling anxious about committing to something:

To his Heart, bidding it have no Fear

Be you still, be you still, trembling heart;
Remember the wisdom out of the old days:
Him who trembles before the flame and the flood,
And the winds that blow through the starry ways,
Let the starry winds and the flame and the flood
Cover over and hide, for he has no part
With the lonely, majestical multitude.

[chad-etc.livejournal.com]

Comes the Dawn
- Virginia Shopstall


After awhile you learn the subtle difference
between holding a hand and chaining a soul
and you learn that love doesn’t mean possession
and company doesn’t mean security.

And you begin to learn that kisses aren’t contracts
and presents aren’t promises
and you begin to accept your defeats with your head up
and your eyes ahead
with the grace of an adult not the grief of a child.

And you learn to build your roads today
because tomorrow’s ground is too uncertain for plans
and futures have ways of falling down in mid-flight.

After awhile you learn that even sunshine burns if you get too much
so you plant your own garden and decorate your own soul
instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.

And you learn that you really can endure
that you really are strong
and you really do have worth
and you learn and you learn…with every goodbye you learn.

[seussisms.livejournal.com]

I've always loved this one

[paperchained.livejournal.com]

I love this. Thank you, it was just what I needed.

[chad-etc.livejournal.com]

I always liked this one, too.


The Thing Is
- Ellen Bass

to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you've held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.

[miss-providence.livejournal.com]

i'm pretty sure this poem just changed my life.

[chad-etc.livejournal.com]

Then that's a good thing, right? Poetry always comes through.

if you forget me - pablo neruda

[installmentplan.livejournal.com]

I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.

I have the same wild animal instinct to run, this has always explained my nature well.

Re: if you forget me - pablo neruda

[miss-providence.livejournal.com]

it is definitely a wild animal instinct-

i have a hard time wrapping my head around his patience. I am astounded and humbled by it every time I think about it.


GL to us in finding a balance :)

Re: if you forget me - pablo neruda

[paperchained.livejournal.com]

This makes my heart beat just a little bit faster. I love it--so beautiful it almost makes me cry.

[paperchained.livejournal.com]

Thank you for this post! I'm in the same situation as well, and reading these pieces has helped to give me a little more inner peace.

[miss-providence.livejournal.com]

youre welcome!

i hope you are one the happy end of the situation- as i feel i am.


and bc u said you're going through the same thing- ill just project onto you--


how strange and wonderful is it to have someone love you more than you can understand?!

[clocktowerkiss.livejournal.com]

The Threatened One - Jorge Luis Borges

It is love. I will have to hide or flee.
Its prison walls grow larger, as in a fearful dream. The
alluring mask has changed, but as usual it is the only
one. What use now are my talismans, my touchstones:
the practice of literature, vague learning, an apprentice-
ship to the language used by the flinty Northland to sing
of its seas and its swords, the serenity of friendship, the
galleries of the library, ordinary things, habits, the
young love of my mother, the soldierly shadow cast by
my dead ancestors, the timeless night, the flavor of
sleep and dream?
Being with you or without you is how I measure my time.
Now the water jug shatters above the spring, now the man
rises to the sound of birds, now those who look through
the windows are indistinguishable, but the darkness has
not brought peace.
It is love, I know it; the anxiety and relief at hearing your
voice, the hope and the memory, the horror at living in
succession.
It is love with its own mythology, its minor and pointless
magic.
There is a street corner I do not dare to pass.
Now the armies surround me, the rabble.
(This room is unreal. She has not seen it.)
A woman's name has me in thrall.
A woman's being afflicts my whole body.

And You Are Jeff (http://community.livejournal.com/greatpoets/2337202.html) by Richard Siken is most definitely worth a read. It's long, but wonderful and blunt. This is my favourite stanza.

Two brothers: one of them wants to take you apart. Two brothers: one of them wants to put you back together. It’s time to choose sides now. The stitches or the devouring mouth? You want an alibi? You don’t get an alibi, you get two brothers. Here are two Jeffs. Pick one. This is how you make the meaning, you take two things and try to define the space between them. Jeff or Jeff? Who do you want to be? You just wanted to play in your own backyard, but you don’t know where your own yard is, exactly. You just wanted to prove there was one safe place, just one safe place where you could love him. You have not found that place yet. You have not made that place yet. You are here. You are here. You’re still right here.

I can really identify with your feelings. I can tell you that, for me, it was more than worth it to jump in.

[appyella.livejournal.com]

or the very last stanza of You Are Jeff.
one of my very favorites.

[http://users.livejournal.com/i_broke_it_/]

Thanks for asking this. I love all these poems. They're exactly what I need right now as well.

arriving a bit late...

[aquamarcia.livejournal.com]

This could be what he's saying to you:

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

-- Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven by William Butler Yeats