Comfort & Courage

When I was a girl, my father read aloud to me, silly poems by Ogden Nash and others. The one I remember the best was by Laura Elizabeth Richards, titled “Eletelephony.” When I began reading alone, I loved to read that poem. I loved the rhymes and the glorious rhythm of the thing. “Once there was an elephant,/who tried to use the telephant—/No! No! I mean an elephone/who tried to use the telephone—”

Reading was a mix of good feelings. First of hearing the poems in my father’s voice, then hearing them in my head (and laughing) as I read. No doubt this had something to do with my association of writing poetry with comfort. This way of comforting myself emerged as I became stressed in the practice of medicine.

Photo by David Todd McCarty on Unsplash

I wrote a scene for my memoir about a poem that rose spontaneously, though I’d written only one or two poems before. In the poem I responded to grief, anger, and frustration. In some magical way, writing helped me process those emotions and move forward. I got brave enough to confront the things that were making me angry. And I gave myself the time I needed to grieve, a very difficult thing in the middle of a busy physician’s life.

Though it sounds dramatic, it’s not an exaggeration to say that poetry saved my life. But I didn’t know it for sure until I wrote the memoir. Poetry was a gateway, a stepping stone that allowed me to find other sources of courage. I got messages from my unconscious through writing, and the Universe was able to show me other ways of connecting. First through a Transformational Breath session, and later through Reiki.

It wasn’t until after my breast cancer treatments, though, that I found the most direct way of communicating with my unconscious, which was shamanic journeying. This felt like lucid dreaming, in which useful images arose. I began to trust the power of imagination, that imagination was not coming only from my small ego-self, but was also infused with direct revelation of things beyond what my ego knew.

I was a daydreamer as a child. During recess, if I didn’t want to play with the other children, I would wander around by myself, reinventing my surroundings. Once, or maybe more than once, I imagined that there was a low platform at one end of the playground, upon which sat a throne. And I sat in that throne with crown, robe, and scepter. I was the queen of the playground. What did all of these imaginings mean? I don’t really know, except that perhaps they were compensating for acknowledgment that I wasn’t getting in real life. Or maybe I was just conflating the real world with the fairy tales I had read.

Only recently was I able to take the “only” out of the phrase “only imagination.” In a Zoom-class guided shamanic journey, we visualized colors, when suddenly one of my colors went out and turned black. Where did my color go? I thought. Just then, the teacher said, “You’ll notice now that the colors have been extinguished.” Huh! I thought, maybe I’m not just imagining this. Maybe I am receiving information directly, maybe through the teacher, maybe from somewhere else. It was a dramatic step forward in trusting myself and my visions, a step along the path that began with receiving comfort and images from poems.

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Thanks for reading,
Deborah