I want to know if you can sit with pain
mine or your own
without moving to hide it
or fade it
or fix it.
This is a stanza from a poem posted by April on her yoni blog from a book called The Invitation. I am thinking about what it means to sit with pain without trying to obliterate it. I think in real life situations this is a challenge. I don't like to see those I love hurting; I don't like hurting. But I think maybe when we write sometimes that's what we're doing, sitting still with pain until it speaks to us and tells us what to say.
Photo credit: "Mother and Daughter, Davenport, Iowa" by Alec Soth, printed in The New Yorker, March 29, 2004
Alec Soth's website: http://www.alecsoth.com/index.html
2 comments:
Wow, pain is such a relative thing. The idea of pain such as physical pain scares me less then emotional pain. I can deal with physical pain, but emotional...it can drive me crazy if I sit with it too long...as I tend to be very morbid...usually it's best if I hand that type of thing off to my God. Less messy, I tend to go to extemes and try and fix something that isn't broke. Roseg
Sitting with pain. I did it (physical pain)for a few years. At first I would let it show then I stopped. I masked it. When you saw it, it was really bad, but because I was masking it they did not realize that.
It is hard for me to just sit there when someone is hurting, physical or emotional. I am an empathic and I try to take it from them.
I have suffered a great deal of emotional pain that I kept hidden, because I did not want to share my pain. It was my pain and I believe that I was using it to escape from life. Now that I have let go of it, life has truly began for me.
Post a Comment