“Little Gidding” is the name of the 4th poem in T.S. Eliot’s book, Four Quartets. It’s an important steppingstone in my transformation for three reasons.
- It was one of the poems recited at the professional training I attended for Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. The workshop was an introduction not only to meditation but also to feeling poetry deeply. The poems recited near the end of sitting meditation invariably caused tears to flow. This workshop occurred just before I left my first job as a doctor.
- The poem quotes Julian of Norwich in its closing phrases. “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” This was a comforting mantra to me in times of trouble. I closed many journal entries with these words.
- The penultimate stanza of “Little Gidding” begins like this:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
These words are an emblem for me. I Look back on all that happened to me between the time I left my first job as a doctor and the time I returned to the same job 15 years later. The end of my exploring was to arrive where I started, but I was moving in a spiral. I’d come full circle, but now I was on a different level. I could begin again.
Question: Is there a poem or a piece of writing that has emotional significance for you? If so, share in the comments below.
I often find that when I read out loud to my partner Barbara, pieces I have written, both fiction and non-fiction, I tear up and sometimes struggle to continue. I did not feel this way when I was writing and sometimes the places where I tear up are not obviously moving. But when I dig deeper – with Barbara’s prompting, I do understand the power of the emotion that was tapped…