Unfolding: meditation through poetry
In the beginning .... Searching for meaning and connection one poem at a time
In the summer of 2024, I started an experiment in the upstairs room of my local bookshop - sharing a poem in quiet contemplation with a group of people.
I missed community. Connection. Maybe this could be the way to build one. I couldn’t be the only one feeling lost, untethered? James Crews, in his poem Community writes: “maybe we too can/ join hands, make some/ new and sacred thing / that will save us all.” Could this be the beginning of something?
I am not a poet.
In moments of sadness, depression, yearning for an unrequited love, I may have written some bad free verse, but my love of poetry comes from what speaks to me, nothing more insightful. As a school girl I was forcibly made to learn poems to recite in order to erase my accent and make me socially acceptable with crystal-glass received pronunciation. I probably still can - if given the right quantities of red wine - declaim the Paint Box by EV Rieu or “Do You Remember an Inn, Miranda?” As a teenager, I had loved the obscure density of the Waste Land, but secretly, if truth be told, preferred TS Eliot’s work as the lyricist of Cats. At University, where I studied English, I managed to gloss over the Romantics, and by then the only verse I was interested in were the lyrics of Leonard Cohen or Tanita Tikaram.
And yet, in my midlife I had started to turn to poetry more and more. Perhaps, just as there are no atheists in foxholes, we become poetry lovers in midlife. Midlife is a time of reflection, of taking stock, of becoming. I was searching for something, and I didn’t know what. I wanted to have a spiritual practice somehow, to sit in silence and meditate, but online meditation apps left me feeling all the more alone. I berated myself for my mind wandering, the antithesis of self compassion.
Lectio Divina
I saw that my local church was holding a meditation practice on a Friday morning. Standing at the centre of my small seaside hometown for millennia, the cool dusty stone of the church of St Mary da Haura was quietly welcoming as I entered, nervously thinking I would be exposed for the agnostic imposter I was. Surely I would be smote down by the god of the Old Testament? Interrogated about my credentials and found wanting? Instead, I found a group of people sat opposite one another in the choir stalls. I went to sit at the back, sliding along the wooden pew as inconspicuously as I could. The woman leading the group explained that they would be practicing Lectio Divina – divine reading. The ancient practice of meditating on religious texts.
In the third century, the Christian scholar Origen wrote: "[W]hen you devote yourself to the divine reading ... seek the meaning of divine words which is hidden from most people". Origen believed that the Word of God – logos - was incarnate in the scriptures and so could touch and teach everyone who read or heard it. By engaging deeply with the text itself, you could move beyond basic thoughts and discover the higher wisdom embedded within. In the sixth century, St Benedict further developed the practice in his monasteries, and by the 12th century, Lectio Divina became formalised into a four-step process by the Carthusian monk, Guigo II.
In his book, The Ladder of Monks, a letter on the contemplative life, Guigo describes the four movements of Lectio Divina as four steps on the ‘ladder’ of prayer: lectio, meditatio, oratio, and contemplatio. Reading (lectio), leads to thinking about the significance of the text (meditatio); - meditation in turn leads to the third movement, a response in prayer (oratio). The fourth movement is when the prayer, in turn, opens you up to the gift of the words in quiet stillness - contemplatio.
I went a few times to sit in the church. I was out of touch with the bible passages – there felt like a lot of pronouncements on random rules, a fair bit of flaying, beating and coveting of false gods. But sitting with a text, however disconnected I felt from it, I found myself ruminating on a phrase, connecting it with my life, pondering on the choice of words, the symbols, omens, its meaning to me for my life at that point.
50 shades of grey
I used to be somebody. I don’t mean famous, but I used to feel that I existed in the world for people. But over the past few years, I had begun to feel I was fading out of existence, becoming less and less visible, greyed out, like an app you didn’t subscribe to.
Do I blame my age, or the pandemic? I had worked mainly from home since my son was born long before the lockdowns. The school gates used to mean I would see fellow parents at different stages of harassment, and the weekly trip to the office gave me a hit of connection and creativity with colleagues. In the heady novelty of the first lockdown, we bult artificial communities – zoom quizzes with friends, family, watching films and theatre together using the same link, even an online disco. But by the second and third lockdowns, the enthusiasm had waned.
As we began to ‘live with the virus’ I remained in isolation. Because I was in remission from non-hodgkins lymphoma, a type of blood cancer, I was classed as extremely clinically vulnerable – although I didn’t feel it. Work risk assessed me and said I couldn’t go to the office. As others got together maskless, I stayed in my screen box. The primary school gates closed, as the teenager walked to secondary school independently, and I permanently worked from home. I felt myself ebbing away, as if didn’t really exist, except in the parameters of my attic office, with its view of the Co-Op car park and life happening elsewhere.
This is not a book group
One of the lingering after effects of Covid was my addiction to doom scrolling. My reading became limited to infection statistics and disinformation horror stories. My book group had fallen foul of the pandemic. Meeting online exposed the fact that we were only in it for the wine and the gossip. Busy mums didn’t have time to read books. In my isolation I felt a yearning to re-establish a community of book lovers. I missed talking about books, sharing recommendations. That communal feeling of reading a book together but separately, knowing that though apart you are together in a psychic space created by the writer.
I had tried more formal book groups (without the wine and gossip). But I felt the pressure of having to say something erudite and interesting, of not wanting to offend, of needing to agree with other people’s judgements, and didn’t go back.
It occurred to me that poetry could be an accessible way to connect through words, without the commitment of reading 500 pages. Perhaps, I could find other people who would like to listen to a poem, and meditate on it, in quiet mindfulness The Lectio Divina framework could be a way to connect with other people through poetry without anyone having to expose themselves. We would be able to think about the poem in private contemplation. The poem could anchor our thoughts so we could meditate without the demand to keep our minds blank.
So I booked an hour upstairs at our local book shop – Chapter 34 Books. I called it Unfolding Poetry – it felt like yoga for the mind, and we would physically unfold the poem we would read. The first poem we shared together was The Summer Day by Mary Oliver. It was quiet, communal, contemplative. I felt that the experiment had moved beyond just an idea, and into the world, and it was beautiful.
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do/ With your one wild and precious life?”
If you’re local to Shoreham-by-Sea and would like to experience Unfolding Poetry - sign up via Eventbrite or visit Chapter 34 Books
If you’d like to listen to the poems we share, head over to our Instagram or Facebook for audio recordings.
Poems mentioned in this stack:
The Paintbox - EV Rieu
Tarantella - Hilaire Belloc
The Waste Land – TS Eliot
Old Possums Book of Practical Cats – TS Eliot
The Summer Day – Mary Oliver
Community – James Crews