The Daily Boost #754
We can count on it
A FEW WORDS ON THE SOUL
Wisława Szymborska
Translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh
We have a soul at times.
No one’s got it non-stop,
for keeps.
Day after day,
year after year
may pass without it.
Sometimes
it will settle for awhile
only in childhood’s fears and raptures.
Sometimes only in astonishment
that we are old.
It rarely lends a hand
in uphill tasks,
like moving furniture,
or lifting luggage,
or going miles in shoes that pinch.
It usually steps out
whenever meat needs chopping
or forms have to be filled.
For every thousand conversations
it participates in one,
if even that,
since it prefers silence.
Just when our body goes from ache to pain,
it slips off-duty.
It’s picky:
it doesn’t like seeing us in crowds,
our hustling for a dubious advantage
and creaky machinations make it sick.
Joy and sorrow
aren’t two different feelings for it.
It attends us
only when the two are joined.
We can count on it
when we’re sure of nothing
and curious about everything.
Among the material objects
it favors clocks with pendulums
and mirrors, which keep on working
even when no one is looking.
It won’t say where it comes from
or when it’s taking off again,
though it’s clearly expecting such questions.
We need it
but apparently
it needs us
for some reason too.
(My thanks to Wislawa Szymborska and the translators, via MindfulnessAssociation.net.)
The Gentle Nudge
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Same take on the key stanza here:
Joy and sorrow
aren’t two different feelings for it.
It attends us
only when the two are joined.
I tend to pair grief and gratitude, but it’s the same energetically. I also like the way Rilke expressed this paradoxical embracing of opposites:
Take your well-disciplined strengths
And stretch them between two opposing poles.
For inside human beings
Is where God learns.
Beautiful. Love this part:
“Joy and sorrow
aren’t two different feelings for it.
It attends us
only when the two are joined.”
Only when the two are joined because that’s when we’re living and breathing from such a genuine place, that these intense feelings respect and get along. Get along and want to belong together.
Thanks so much for sharing this poem, Phyllis.
Kate