Naomi Shihab Nye — Hope Portal, Episode 3

In these next few sessions, we're going to investigate some orientations and ways of being that I would call companions to hope. If hope is a muscle that can be exercised to become stronger and more supple, these qualities might be thought of as fascia or the tendons, complementary ligaments that make the whole viable and sustainable. And our first teacher on this is the wonderful poet Naomi Sheehanai. Naomi is winsome and wise about how writing writing is a companion to life and certainly a companion to hope for her, and it's a companion to the way we are investigating hope here. The simple act of writing things down. When I interviewed Naomi a few years ago, she talked about all the groups she works with of all ages. And she has said that she has found that writing things down, whoever you are, whatever you're writing down, even if you're writing about something sad or hard, you almost always feel better after you do it. She says rarely do you hear anyone say they write things down and feel worse. And, certainly, this is an experience I've had Journaling, not consistently every day, but many, many days of my adult life, somehow it helps. And, you know, here's another way she described what she says is happening. She says, you write something down and you're given a sense of, okay, this mood, this sorrow I'm feeling, this trouble I'm in, by writing it down, I've given it a shape. It's got a shape on the page, so I can stand back. I can look at it. I can even think about it a little differently. I can wonder what do I do now. Naomi actually says that she thinks she's a poet, of course, but she thinks that all of us actually think in poems. And what she means by that is that poems don't batter us. You're not battered by thought in a poem. You ride a wave of thought. You allow thoughts to enter. And while that happens, you are shifting. You're changing. You're looking. You're in a sensibility that allows a kind of looking and interaction. And she thinks it's good for mental health, And I think journaling is good for mental and emotional health. It's about getting centered inside yourself. It's about reaching towards becoming your best self. You're gonna hear her use that language. Figuring out what that is. How to practice being that best self. She long called herself a wandering poet, though these days, she's a professor of creative writing at Texas State University. And there's one poem she wrote called Kindness, which is really held close by people all around the world. Her father was a Palestinian refugee. And she sometimes refers to her father also as a wandering Palestinian journalist. And she grew up, spent her childhood between his Palestinian homeland and her mother's home ground of Ferguson, Missouri. One little thing to set up before you hear this …