Preface to The Tough of Love
This is poetry for coming back to life. The central themes being Death and Love. I learnt early how intimate they are but being in a culture where death is pushed to the side, where the grown-ups hide their own grief, thinking it will protect children, I had no access to the rituals of endings. I had to learn them for myself. I’m still learning.
“Much of our knowledge of the Life/Death/Life nature is contaminated by our fear of death…[these] forces are part of our own nature, part of an inner authority that knows the steps, knows the dance of Life and Death. It is composed of the aspects of ourselves who know when something can, should, and must be born and when it must die. It is a deep teacher if we can only learn its tempo.”
(Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run with the Wolves)
For much of my life I was out of sync with inner authorities and unable to reconcile with outer ones. Trying to fit myself into the world caused me to become very misshapen. I was floundering in ‘the way it is’ instead of surrendering to the way I am. But something in me knew what I needed. On the outside I was drowning. On the inside I was being taken to deep, dark, indispensable places.
“Going mad is the beginning of a process. It is not supposed to be the end result…Going mad takes time. Getting sane takes time.”
(Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?)
This collection has taken over 15 years to come together. In that time, I have done battle with my own mind, made the most of what our current therapeutic culture can aid us with, and journeyed deeper into the nature of my own inner world, to discover that what I’ve actually been doing all this time is learning about ‘care of the soul’.
“Often when imagination twists the commonplace into a slightly new form, suddenly we see soul where formerly it was hidden.
Let us imagine care of the soul, then, as an application of poetics to everyday life.”
(Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul)
I used to find it difficult to use words like soul and spirit – strange that I thought in order to be taken seriously about my inner experience I needed to cloak myself in more ‘intellectual’ language. Soul and spirit are good words to use when talking about the depths and wonders of inner life. We need a shared language, or we need to attempt to create and share new ways of exploring inner realms, if we are to be ‘sane’ or ‘whole’ within ourselves, within our communities, and collectively as a species. Various religious traditions, the arts, psychological thinkers, and other disciplines have come to similar conclusions on the matter, though seeing it through different lenses, from different perspectives, and using different sorts of language and communication.
What we define as mental illness, in some shamanic traditions, is seen as the beginning of a process through which a healer is born. William James explored the idea that some people need to be ‘twice born’ through mystical experience in order to mature into their right mind. Kazimierz Dabrowski developed such ideas in more practical ways – developing the theory of positive disintegration – in which he discusses the ways in which we develop as people, through a serious of disintegrations, trying to reintegrate aspects of ourselves into better ways of being. He argues that certain people have a type of developmental potential that often presents itself, at lower levels, as what has become known as pathological, but given time, as the individual learns to work with their own inner self, they can begin to redirect their inner experiences into higher levels of being – shaping themselves into a self-actualised whole. This requires ongoing work. There is no magic before and after, though, many people describe having ‘peak experiences’ along the way. I have had such experiences both with and without the aid of mind-altering substances. We are not meant to keep pursuing them – we are meant to come back down to earth and integrate them into our daily life, so that we can be both more grounded within ourselves and more connected to something greater than ourselves (Beyond the Narrow Life by Kile Ortigo, is a good practical resource for personal processes of integration, and dabrowskicenter.org has more detailed information on the theory of positive disintegration). All these points of view place emphasis on a processual nature, of mental and emotional development, rather than static identity. Creating a self that is strong enough to sustain us and carry us through life is an ongoing process. It’s a process that involves learning how to love which involves learning how to die.
“…dividing reason from feeling and the heart is a misleading way of conceiving of the world…if we seek to transcend this divide, then pattern or organism become the central metaphysical feature… And this insight – the way the world is best understood as constituted through the patterning of relationships – emerging, stabilising and subsequent dissolving – is central to the processual science of complexity… Furthermore, in order to engage with our world – to grapple with patterns that are not fixed, objective and certain, but paradoxical, subjective, ever shifting, and of which we are a part – we need, amongst other things, the imagination.”
(Jean Boulton, embracingcomplexity.com)
Relationships are inescapable; no matter how isolated we are we are still in relationship to ourselves and the environment in which we find ourselves. Love is such a small and simple word – a word with natural humility. Yet, it holds the miraculous within it. Love is often very misunderstood and yet love always points to understanding. When we find ourselves in a place of understanding, in the liminal spaces of relationship, we know we are in the presence of love – love becomes us.
Without imagination I could not begin to emerge from existential crises and learn to live from a place of deepening love. The imaginal presents itself to us in many ways – for me, it presents itself, primarily, through poetry. There is a power in poetry that brings me back to life. It breaks through me and redirects me, to meet reality fully, where love can do its work.
“…He is suddenly standing, silently,
huge and mild, but I feel afraid. Like slow
movement of spring water or the first bird
of the year in the breaking darkness,
the labourer’s voice recites ‘The Daffodils’…”
(Gillian Clarke, ‘Miracle On St David’s Day’)
I find it odd that much time has been devoted to defending and defining and popularising poetry, painting, music, art of any sort… It’s perfectly understandable that we as artists seek to protect and honour the sacred nature of the work but sometimes, I think we forget, the power works through us, not from us. Our duty is to share it. The tough of love will out.