Living in the Layers

Shoshona Pascoe, MFT

Poetry and psychotherapy share an intention to deepen into the essentials. When a poem captures something for me, I feel, as I did when I first heard this poem, a resonance in the body. I sensed a settling and an alertness at the same time: pay attention! Simple words, chosen with care, placed beside one another forming something powerful and tender. This poet was also a gardener and his poem evokes for me the beauty of a complex living system. In psychotherapy we endeavor, as we come into relationship with the challenges and pain of our lives, to grow something new from the raw material. Much as the beauty of a perennial garden has its seasons and is grounded in the compost of the old, so our lives are replenished by the sense we make of all that has brought us this far. "The Layers" gives me precious permission to have it all, letting go of the preferences and trusting in life as it is.

Read "The Layers" by Stanley Kunitz
 

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