Halloween Group Therapy

“Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here,

that is natural, that is love…

 ― Rainer Maria Rilke

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

—Mary Oliver

As Adam Phillips, psychoanalyst, notes, “the following poem speaks of the absence of what became, in Winnicott’s developmental theory, the formative experience in the child’s life; the way the mother, in the fullest sense, ‘holds’ the child.  Poetry is not an indulgence or a luxury: it's the key to who we are, and central to the therapeutic process."

The Tree

Mother below is weeping
    weeping
    weeping

Thus I knew her
Once, Stretched out on her lap
as now on a dead tree
I learned to 
make her smile
to stem her tears
to undo her guilt
to cure her inward death
To enliven her was my living


D.W. Winnicott

Anne Lamott

Beannacht

BY JOHN O'DONOHUE

On the day when

 The weight deadens

 On your shoulders

 And you stumble,

 May the clay dance

 To balance you.

And when your eyes

 Freeze behind

 The grey window

 And the ghost of loss

 Gets into you,

 May a flock of colours,

 Indigo, red, green

 And azure blue,

 Come to awaken in you

 A meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays

 In the currach of thought

 And a stain of ocean

 Blackens beneath you,

 May there come across the waters

 A path of yellow moonlight

 To bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,

 May the clarity of light be yours,

 May the fluency of the ocean be yours,

 May the protection of the ancestors be yours.

And so may a slow

 Wind work these words

 Of love around you,

 An invisible cloak

To mind your life.

GO TO THE LIMITS OF YOUR LONGING

By Rainer Maria Rilke

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,

then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.

Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand