I read this beautiful passage in Kim Rosen’s book on the healing art of poetry this morning.. it spoke to me of the ocean inside of us.
Human beings are creatures of rhythm. The fluids in our body pulse, our hearts throb, our outbreath comes in rhythmic patterns that change with our emotions. In the womb we are rocked rhythmically by the cadence of our mother’s walk and the throb of her heart. We come out craving a rocking, pulsing, singing world that will carry us into our dreams, or swaddle us close to a beating heart, or teach us the alphabet in rhythm and rhyme.
That passage also reminded me of a show I listened too a few weeks ago about using songs to teach babies and young ones things.. What a different world we may have encountered if we had been sung to, rocked, held close and allowed to find our own rhythms. What a sad world we come into when we only get yelled at, pushed and pulled about or left alone in the yawning emptiness.. Still it also occurs to me as I write how I comforted myself on lonely afternoons with no mother around by listening to my favorite records.
I also had the thought after reading this how much it hurts when those natural flowing organic rhythms turn to staccato. On the page before Kim talks of how her poetry teacher in school taught the subject in such a mechanical way, a way void of passion, what Kim remembers most from those lessons was the itchy feel of her stockings underneath her school uniform.
Finding our own rhythm and song is so important. Allowing ourselves to be rocked and held by the ocean or a river and by the earth itself, opening our bodies to the pulse of the weather, allowing the buffeting about of our own inner tides, instead of being forced to have them damned up seems so essential to our current unburdening and releasing in the face of so many restrictions..
Finding out what we can be fed by in terms of rhythm seems so important and seeing where we close then off or down, even more important to our healing and awakening as souls who feel that pulse of soul and spirit move through us echoed in the emerging cadences of our own being.
Emerging From The Dark Night 