This is so beautiful, Annabel. Thank you for posting about John O'Donohue's poems too, they are often a great comfort and I hadn't read the ones you mentioned. Time To Be Slow was one I turned to in the pandemic, as I saw it as a Poem on the Underground and now have a poster of it.
I love the rawness of your honesty and gentleness of your wisdom Annabel. I've come across 2 similar reflections in the last few days, both pointing to the transformational power of embracing even despair as an ally. One from David Whyte's beautiful book Consolations where he writes "Despair is a necessary and seasonal state of repair... the time in which we both endure and heal, even when we have not yet found the new form of hope." And the other from Amanda Knox speaking of her epiphany after 2 years in prison waiting for her trial, only to be convicted for another 26 years for the infamous crime that she didn't commit: "I’d thought I was in limbo, awkwardly positioned between my life (the life that I should have been living), and someone else’s life (the life of a murderer); I wasn’t. I never had been. The conviction, the sentence, the prison—this was my life. There was no other life I should have been living. There was only my life, this life, unfolding before me." Here we all are, with this, here, now.
This is so beautiful, Annabel. Thank you for posting about John O'Donohue's poems too, they are often a great comfort and I hadn't read the ones you mentioned. Time To Be Slow was one I turned to in the pandemic, as I saw it as a Poem on the Underground and now have a poster of it.
I love the rawness of your honesty and gentleness of your wisdom Annabel. I've come across 2 similar reflections in the last few days, both pointing to the transformational power of embracing even despair as an ally. One from David Whyte's beautiful book Consolations where he writes "Despair is a necessary and seasonal state of repair... the time in which we both endure and heal, even when we have not yet found the new form of hope." And the other from Amanda Knox speaking of her epiphany after 2 years in prison waiting for her trial, only to be convicted for another 26 years for the infamous crime that she didn't commit: "I’d thought I was in limbo, awkwardly positioned between my life (the life that I should have been living), and someone else’s life (the life of a murderer); I wasn’t. I never had been. The conviction, the sentence, the prison—this was my life. There was no other life I should have been living. There was only my life, this life, unfolding before me." Here we all are, with this, here, now.