The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning. Hearing one another’s stories can help to tenderize the heart. When we recognize our shared joys and sorrows compassion arises. The space of loving awareness offers us the possibility of feeling deeply and opening the heart. To work for a better future, poet Jane Hirshfield suggests: “people turn to one another for shared witness, for shared restoration, shared beauty.”
We heard from poet Jane Hirshfield’s essay, Poems in a Time of Crisis, Part Two: Tenderness. Jane points to art and poetry to help – in her words – “undo fixity and despair, [to] increase possibility-sense and enlarge a person’s condition of being: tenderness, humility, courage, and resilience.” Creativity and imagination can help to broaden our perspective and choose hope.
We heard Maria Popova’s poem, The Purple Martin, from The Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days. In this lovely poem Maria describes hope as “a motion of the heart.” Given imagination and time we can choose hope over despair.
