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Karen Davis's avatar

One thing I find interesting is that in at least some eastern traditions, anger and compassion lie along the same meridians. I take what I’ve learned to mean anger can be the door through which we fully open to compassion. I’ve also come to believe there’s no true compassion without self compassion. I sit with this.

Today I had an experience of having my boundaries violated by a medical professional. Not sexually, but by not listening, forcing my body when I was screaming out in pain and leaving me bruised. I let it happen. I didn’t scream stop. My reaction to scream stop was delayed until I left. It’s so engrained in me not to say stop. If we can’t say stop when it’s our bodies how do we say stop to the violations of others and the planet? This afternoon I practiced screaming STOP and NO.

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KSC Hatch's avatar

Something I think about re: Mary Oliver: She is my favourite poet AND one of the few I can even name. She also had a traumatic childhood which she rarely, if ever, talked about in any detail (there is an excellent interview with her in the On Being podcast in which Krista Tippet seems to want her to divulge details and Oliver skillfully sidesteps this intrusion) while always sharing specifics about how she found joy, connection, and belonging. I turn to Wild Geese again and again, and share it often, because it is one of the strongest reminders most people I know need to hear. It's not that she glosses over or ignores suffering, but that her poetry speaks to an understanding that almost every one of us is carrying some heavy shit. She doesn't need to be specific about the experiences that led her to find solace in writing poetry about all the beautiful things in the world because that is already there in the poetry itself.

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