Tom Hale -Psikoterapia zentroa

"As long as this exists ......"

by  Anne Frank

    "As long as this exists," I thought, "and I may live to see it, this sunshine, the cloudless skies, while this lasts, I cannot be unhappy."

    "The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quite alone with the heavens, nature, and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature. As long as this exists, and it certainly always will, I know that then there will always be comfort for every sorrow, whatever the circumstances may be. And I firmly believe that nature brings solace in all troubles."

excerpt from "The Diary of a Young Girl".

 

    I remember several years ago seeing Carol Gilligan, pyschology professor at NYU whose work on the development of identity in adolescent girls has been monumental in the field, talk about Anne Frank and her relationship with her father.  She describes in the book, The Voice of Pleasure, how daughter's (and son's)  voices, including Annes's, are regularly quited by patriarchal structures; evidence of that is clearly beeing seen in the news every day.    In an analysis of the three different editions of the diary, her father shaped the published book and deleted much of what Anne Frank actually said in her original work.    There was much left, however, and the above quote is beautiful.

    I have never, as many people do, found God in nature.   For me, I find my spirituality in the actual voices, experiences and contacts I have with other people.    My work is based on that belief, not surprisingly.   This video lifts my spirits to the sky every time I see it.

 

    

Full Circle

 

 

                                                        Full Circle

                                                 by Alden Nowlan

In my youth, no one spoke of love

where I lived, except I spoke of it, and then only in the dark. The word was known

like the name of a city on another continent.

No one called anyone his friend,

although they had friends. Perhaps they were afraid

to commit so much of themselves,to demand so much of others;

for if they'd said,

"We're friends," as they never did,

it would have been a contract.

As it was, they could quarrel,

even hit one another if they were drunk,

and remain friends, never having said it.

Where nothing was sworn there could be no betrayal.

Nor did they touch

casually; their persons seemed to occupy

more space than their bodies did.

Seeing an adult run we'd have looked first for the reason

in the direction from which he came. We never met trains;

my people were like that.                                              It was not enough for me.

                      "I love you," I said.

Whispered it, painfully, and was laughed at;

hid until the wounds healed and said it again, 

            muttered it.

Wanting to be loved, "I love you," was what I said.

And I learned to touch, as a legless manlearns to walk again. 

 

                                  Came to live among people

who called anyone a friend

who was not an enemy, to whom there were no strangers:

because there were so many, they were invisible.

Now, like everyone else, I send

postcards to acquaintances, With Love—

Love meaning, I suppose, that I remember the recipients

kindly and wish them well. But I say it

less often and will not be surprised

at myself if the time comes when I do not say it,

when I do not touch, except desperately, when I ask

nothing more of others, but greet them with a wink,

as my grandfather might have done, looking up

for an instant from his carpenter's bench.

 

"Full Circle" by Alden Nowlan, from What Happened When He Went to the Store for Bread. © The Thousands Press, 2000.

"The Weight"

    Saw this poem on the Garrison Keillor website and need to share it.

 

The Weight

by Linda Gregg

 

Two horses were put together in the same paddock.

Night and day. In the night and in the day

wet from heat and the chill of the wind

on it.  Muzzle to water, snorting, head swinging

and the taste of bay in the shadowed air.

The dignity of being. They slept that way,

knowing each other always.  

Withers quivering for a moment,

fetlock and the proud rise at the base of the tail,

width of back. The volume of them, and each other's weight.

Fences were nothing compared to that.

People were nothing. They slept standing,

their throats curved against the other's rump.

They breathed against each other,

whinnied and stomped.

There are things they did that I do not know.

The privacy of them had a river in it.

Had our universe in it.   And the way

its border looks back at us with its light.

This was finally their freedom.

The freedom an oak tree knows.

That is built at night by stars.

 

 "The Weight" by Linda Gregg, from Chosen by the Lion. © Graywolf Press, 1994. 

 

    I am currently reading The Beauty and the Sorrow  by Peter Englund, a history of WWI told through dairies of people who lived at that time and participated in the horrow of that war.  It is hard to read as the stories are so powerful and the tales they are telling so terrible.   Single battles occurred often where 100,000(+)  people died in the course of a few days.    Horses were used in that war, as well as WWII and sufferred terribly.

    Pete Seeger found inspiration for the folk song "Where Have All the Flowers Gone, in 1955, while on a plane bound for a concert he was giving that year. Leafing through his notebooks he saw the passage, "Where are the flowers, the girls have plucked them. Where are the girls, they've all taken husbands. Where are the men, they're all in the army."  

     The lines were taken from the traditional Cossacks folk song "Tovchu, tovchu mak", referenced in the Mikhail Sholokhov novel And Quiet Flows the Don  (1934), which Seeger had read "at least a year or two before".   The Russian novel in two parts was published between 1928 and 1940.  The Don Flows Home to the Sea, part two of the original novel, was published in English translation in 1940.  Set in the Don River basin of southwestern Russia at the end of the czarist period, the novel traces the progress of a Cossack  soldier from a young boy to a Red Army regular and finally to a Cossack nationalist.   War -- in the form of both international conflict and civil revolution --  provides the epic backdrop for the narrative.

    In WWI, Russian troops were among the most feared and hated of all the soldiers in the conflict because of the their tactics of total destruction on the lands they traveled through.   "Scorched earth" hardly describes what they did.

    When will we ever learn?