Saved by Faith Hahn
To Love Sorrowfully: Poetry and War
And when the war within rages, as it does in every life, the practice of joy, the courage of joy, becomes our mightiest frontier of resistance. “Your joy is your sorrow unmasked,” Kahlil Gibran observed in one of his prophetic poems.
Maria Popova • Audubon on other minds and the secret knowledge of animals, the paradox of joy with Nick Cave and Lisel Mueller, how Dostoyevsky became a writer
In unpredictable times, poetry leaves the safe, familiar ways of knowing and speaking and listens out into new forms of being and creating. It searches for new insights between the known, it fathoms the space between people, between us and the living world, between different ways of seeing and shaping the world. It listens for new ways of being tha... See more
Mike Kauschke • The Poetic Art of Living in a Time Between Worlds - Emerge
Stuart Evans and added
Art is a weapon against despair. It is a tool with which to alleviate a sense of crushing isolation and uniqueness. It provides common ground where the sadness in me can, with dignity and intelligence, meet the sadness in you.
Alain de Botton • A Therapeutic Journey: Lessons from The School of Life
Life is fierce and difficult. There is no life we can live without being subject to grief, loss and heartbreak. Half of every conversation is mediated through disappearance. Thus, there is every reason to want to retreat from life, to carry torches that illuminate only our own view, to make enemies of life and of others, to hate what we cannot unde
... See moreDavid Whyte • David Whyte
rob hardy added
The End and the Beginning
By Wisława Szymborska
After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won’t
straighten themselves up, after all.
Someone has to push the rubble
to the side of the road,
so the corpse-filled wagons
can pass.
Someone has to get mired
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.
Someone has to drag in a girder
to prop
... See moreThe traumatic experience of military service, a reminder of the horrors of the military academy, almost completely silenced him as a poet. (Rainer Maria Rilke)
Maria-Helena added
art is a tool that can help release us from our numbness and provide for catharsis in areas where we have for too long been wrong-headedly brave.
Alain De Botton • The School of Life: An Emotional Education
Rather than transforming the inner condition of man in order to prevent wars, humans are asked to go to “school” in order to relive and recite the details of the wars that have taken place.