Willing To Share Healing Poetry/music/etc.?

[Hope4Now]

My friend posted this on facebook last night. It is an amazing story of a combat vet. It so resonated with me and my trouble with pain and walking. The song playing in the background is Coldplay's Fix You. I love it. It made me think of all the good people in my life who are trying to help fix me. I know I have to fix myself, but I'm needing a lot of help along the way.

 

[Hope4Now]

I like this poem. A lot! I'm hoping maybe I'll find things easier before I'm sixty. And that there will be more days than not that I feel the way she does.

Halleluiah! (by Mary Oliver)

Everyone should be born into this world happy
and loving everything.
But in truth it rarely works that way.
For myself, I have spent my life clamoring toward it.
Halleluiah, anyway I’m not where I started!

And have you too been trudging like that, sometimes
almost forgetting how wondrous the world is
and how miraculously kind some people can be?
And have you too decided that probably nothing important
is ever easy?
Not, say, for the first sixty years.

Halleluiah, I’m sixty now, and even a little more,
and some days I feel I have wings.

 

[franciemarnie]

I love that @Hope4Now. I like that poet, and I LOVE my life now versus before 50. For me, it has become easier, and I look at the world again with some of the wonder I had as a child. Hallelujah indeed!

 

[Hope4Now]

From our Unitarian Universalist Easter service this morning. About how to find resurrection in ourselves and create it in our world.

The Paradoxical Commandments
by Dr. Kent M. Keith


People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered.
Love them anyway.

If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives.
Do good anyway.

If you are successful, you will win false friends and true enemies.
Succeed anyway.

The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow.
Do good anyway.

Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable.
Be honest and frank anyway.

The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds.
Think big anyway.

People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs.
Fight for a few underdogs anyway.

What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight.
Build anyway.

People really need help but may attack you if you do help them.
Help people anyway.

Give the world the best you have and you'll get kicked in the teeth.
Give the world the best you have anyway.

 

[Hope4Now]

I've been listening to this song a lot lately. With the exception of the line about remembering a place where you lived without worry or care (I don't think I've EVER experienced that), I find the song a hopeful and healing one. She's one of my many favorite singer-songwriters.

 

[Echo]

This is for all my brave and beautiful friends here on the forum, especially, today @Hope4Now, @Ryn, @Wyakin, @mytai - you are all an inspiration. I love Emelie Sandé's voice, but these lyrics particularly resonate for me at the moment. I thought I would share them with you.

 

[Hope4Now]

Thank you for the song @Echo. It is so very powerful. It immediately put me in mind of this poem that I have always loved:

Our Deepest Fear
Marianne Williamson
(often incorrectly attributed to Nelson Mandela who quoted it)

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God.
Your playing small doesn’t serve the world.
There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.
We are all meant to shine, as children do.
We are born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.
It’s not just in some of us, it’s in everyone.
And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

 

[Wyakin]

@Echo Thank you, this is one of my favourite songs when I am feeling down. She really does have an amazing voice. I really like that album. Think I have a music choice for poo picking today!

@Hope4Now Great thread!

 

[Echo]

@Hope4Now - lovely that you have included that here; it really is a very powerful piece and one I have always found very encouraging. Good to see it in full.

@Wyakin - poo picking! Just the thing! Yes, the whole album is wonderful. It is all on my playlist for when I need to sing my heart out. When my PTSD symptoms first hit with a fury, and my ex left, singing got me through.

 

[Hope4Now]

Thanks to my 12 year old daughter who, with her friends, is dragging me into awareness of pop music, this is a new favorite song.

 

[Wyakin]

I love this song.

 

[Echo]

@Wyakin - lovely.