Oh, I think I would probably like this one. I’m fascinated by memory, the way that it’s not nearly as static or linear as people like to think (this is true for traumatic memories in particular). I often think about some of these ideas in relation to God’s instructions — he continually tells his people to remember, remember, remember. So there must be something important to the telling of the stories. What is it that we are supposed to learn from remembering? Not that we are victims, but also we have to remember in order to heal. So often it’s as if people want to gloss over difficulty, to prove they’ve survived it, and it’s actually in the remembering and telling that we heal more fully.
What a beautiful reflection! I really liked this: "As the author reflects on this growth, she also opens to us the blossoming self-knowledge that she now can see in her own older poetry: In that poem, she had not yet learned to allow herself to remember things fully, for example, but in this poem, the last couplet showed her something new despite efforts at avoidance." Writing is such a great path to self-knowledge.
Oh, I think I would probably like this one. I’m fascinated by memory, the way that it’s not nearly as static or linear as people like to think (this is true for traumatic memories in particular). I often think about some of these ideas in relation to God’s instructions — he continually tells his people to remember, remember, remember. So there must be something important to the telling of the stories. What is it that we are supposed to learn from remembering? Not that we are victims, but also we have to remember in order to heal. So often it’s as if people want to gloss over difficulty, to prove they’ve survived it, and it’s actually in the remembering and telling that we heal more fully.
What a beautiful reflection! I really liked this: "As the author reflects on this growth, she also opens to us the blossoming self-knowledge that she now can see in her own older poetry: In that poem, she had not yet learned to allow herself to remember things fully, for example, but in this poem, the last couplet showed her something new despite efforts at avoidance." Writing is such a great path to self-knowledge.