Yesterday my soul slipped into the sea,
It buoyed there a while and cried for you and me.
That soulless surface scarred, it dredged the deepest dream, it swelled the strangest sigh…
Yesterday my soul sank to the bottom of the sea.
It lingered there a while and marked the depth of thee.
Tear-filled waves crash upon your shore.
What fears you had, but now, no more.
(A poem I wrote on the island.)
Walt Whitman is famous for writing poetry in such a way that it was evocative of his own inner-most feeling. That is to say he wrote what he FELT like writing because, quite literally, he could do no other.
However, this notion of freely-associative decision-making, thinking, and feeling is not limited to poets and artists, or, even, our own relatively “modern” or globally-Westernized society. For example, in their The Statues that Walked, a discussion of the means by which the indigenous inhabitants of Easter Island transported the moai, depicting Rapa Nui’s legendary founder Hotu Matu’a, across the island from the quarry where they were carved, Terry Hunt, PhD and Carl Lipo, PhD also discuss the truth and power of indigenous knowledge more broadly, especially in terms of how it conflicts with our own “common sense,” “Westernized” notions of logic, truth, and pragmatism. They describe how certain North American tribes of American Indians would base hunting routes off of the cracks that formed when heating animal bones in a fire. While this may, at first, seem entirely nonsensical, it makes sense, Hunt and Lipo write, because the act of randomly selecting hunting routes based on the cracks that formed from heating animal bones in a fire serves to “randomize” those routes so that, over time, the diversity and quantity of available prey does not diminish in any given area.
The same may be true in our personal lives. The author Alice Miller suggests as much, both in her own extensive body of work and in her reference to Descartes’ Error, which discusses the overriding power and importance of emotion over, necessarily, strictly “rational” thought.
I know the power and importance of these facts in my own life in helping me to overcome my own extensive trauma…
How about you? You might just find it’s…
Observations from the Brink 