Where Are You Glued Together?

(That’s where you can hear good singing)

Rainer Marie Rilke suggested not just telling about our pain but singing it.  Rilke invites us to a more intimate, compassionate relationship between human beings – an intimacy that renders ordinary expression inadequate.  Courage to express our suffering could serve us well:

It’s O.K. for the rich and the lucky to keep still,
no one wants to know about them anyway.
But those in need have to step forward,
have to say: I am blind,
or, I’m about to go blind,

or, nothing is going well with me,

or, I have a child who is sick,

or, right there I am sort of glued together.

And probably that doesn’t do anything either.

They have to sing, if they didn’t sing, everyone

would walk past, as if they were fences or trees.

That’s where you can hear good singing.

People are really strange: they prefer

to hear castratos in boy choirs.

But God himself comes and stays a long time
when the world of half-people start to bore him.

Rainer Maria Rilke 

Expressing Your Suffering Courageously

Be detailed and specific:

• What painful things do you most want to speak about?

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• What is it you can no longer avoid?

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• What do you want to courageously sing about?

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• What are your places of being glued together?

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• What do you want to invite into your life right now?

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• Shape your responses into a poem either here or in a journal.

Exercises drawn from Poetic Medicine: The Healing Art of Poem-Making and Finding What You Didn’t Lose: Expressing Your Truth and Creativity Through Poem-Making by John Fox

 Catherine Haynes, M.S., LMFT, 206-854-7333 catherine@catherinehaynes.com ~ www.catherinehaynes.com