with the stone face.
The stone heart stone hands stone feet.
See in between she has also stone
and does not speak.
She is acting her part in the dialogue
like the wind listening to wind
or the wind listening to stone.
Stone on wind. Wind on stone.
I think you are almost sisters.
I think you have sat together a long
time. Oh silence, What, from you, wants to emerge?
by Nadia Colburn
In an article in Resurgence magazine Nadia Colburn writes with great eloquence and potency about how for her, from the combination of writing poetry, mindfulness and therapy a path of healing emerged where before there was only despair. You can find the full article here (worth a read in my opinion!). She centres her story on this arresting poem that she wrote when the effects of her childhood trauma began to paralyse her in her mid-thirties. Not only does what felt dead come back to life, but a new engagement with the world is born and she becomes an environmentalist.
I feel awe when I read this poem with her whole story as the backdrop. The poem has the agonising transformation captured within it. The stoniness of her trauma intractable at the start, line by line, is embraced into the elements and the Earth. The silence becomes a space of emergence. How can she say so much in only eleven lines?! From death to life, from absolute desolation to sisterhood, from paralysis to potential.
In reading this poem feel I become witness to the wonder of how we human beings can heal and transform. I also feel a wonder at how Nadia has tapped a poetic intelligence, which is far from rational, to enable this. Something within her spoke through the poem from beyond her thinking mind. A healing force which came from so deep within her that it was only much later that she came to further layers of understanding about what she had written. Her poem was her self-created medicine and she absorbed that medicine over a long time. It was a medicine both to cure and to become.
I’ll finish with by quoting her words:
‘As I had been taught to do in my practice as a poet, and also in my mindfulness practices and in yoga and therapy, I sat with that silence, that weight… as I sat with the stone itself, I saw that the stone itself was no ‘thing’. The stone, too, was part of something larger, a world in which none of us is cut off, but in which we are all interconnected.’
As I close this piece I am feeling the arising of a deep wish. Nadia gives me hope through her story. I wish for us each to nurture hope both for ourselves and for our world. Thank you Nadia!
Ps. Join me to encounter more poetry with the power to heal and open your both your eyes and heart. Our Mindfulness Meets Mystical Poetry Course starts at the end of October. Find out more here.
