Tag: self-compassion

poetry appreciation

come, poor Jackself

Jan 14, 2022 #compassion, #Crews, #despair, #fear, #generosity, #Gerard Manley Hopkins, #Hopkins, #James crews, #kindness, #my own heart let me have more pity on, #self care, #self-compassion by Lucy Crispin

My therapy practice would be a lot less busy if people really knew how right it is to be self-compassionate. So many of us can pay lip service to the notion of “put on your own oxygen mask first” while not truly believing it’s “allowed” or, actually, the long-term more altruistic thing to do (in that it helps you keep in a fit state to support others). So I love this poem—a recent discovery—which expresses that sense of unease about kindness to self. Here’s James Crews’ ‘Self-Compassion‘.

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poetry appreciation, reflection

reading poems, reading us

Nov 28, 2019 #attachment, #awareness, #Bowlby, #cats, #childlessness, #compassion, #connection, #emotion, #grief, #poem, #poems, #poetry, #reader response, #reading, #self-awareness, #self-compassion, #Winnicot by Lucy Crispin

Last week we were talking about how Gilbert’s ‘Failing and Flying’ makes visible all sorts of assumptions embedded in our (Western) culture. This week, I want to think about how reading makes visible things inside ourselves, which we may or may not have been aware of. And I want to start with what I think is a remarkable poem, written by my 13 year old goddaughter. It formed the front page of a card she sent me a few weeks ago. Here it is:

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poetry appreciation, reflection

‘poetry is what makes the invisible appear’

Nov 23, 2019 #Cafavy, #compassion, #elegy, #Failing and Flying, #grief, #Ithaka, #Jack Gilbert, #loss, #love poem, #poem, #poems, #poetry, #process, #self-compassion by Lucy Crispin

Well, yes. It does. That’s one of the things that’s brilliant about it.
Think, for instance, of Jack Gilbert’s ‘Failing and Flying’, with its casual, almost conversational, opening line: ‘Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew’. In just those six words an entire culture is conjured, one where only winners matter and product always trumps process.

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