We're all poets and we just don't know it

“We are in a storm together, but we are not in the same boat.” I read that statement online and it really spoke to me. We are all trying to make sense of this surreal situation we find ourselves in. Life in one household during this pandemic may be completely different from the other houses on the street. In fact each household on one street may have a completely different experience during this strange period of self-isolation. Some are experiencing financial difficulty and anxiety about the future of their small business. Others are exhausted and frustrated from trying to work from home while also supervising their children’s home learning sessions. Still others are just feeling alone and cut off from the ones they love. But the fact that we are all going through something new and strange is drawing us closer together, and it’s doing something else. It’s bringing our creativity out.

Maybe it’s the silence. There is a lack of highway, train, plane and general industrial noise that normally pollutes our soundscape. It’s eerily silent. It’s actually quiet enough, that we can finally hear our own thoughts. And those are coming through, loud and clear, aren’t they? I know personally, that I have had my clearest, most inspirational thoughts come to me during times when I was forced to be quiet. I was laid up in bed with a fever (not recently, don’t worry), or in a location where I was happily cut off from the technological distractions with which we have so thoroughly encumbered our lives.

It could be an overwhelming of feelings and a desperate need to express ourselves, that is causing this burst in creativity. It could also be that we have been creative all along – we just don’t normally make time for these types of pursuits. Normally our days are broken up by what is known in the corporate world as ‘high revenue’ activities (our jobs or businesses) and practical things we need to do to get through the day (eating, sleeping, and caring for our families). How often do we make time to be creative? I think that the need to express ourselves artistically is clearly emerging and claiming its place on our hierarchy of needs, right up there with food, sleep and some sort of regular human interaction.

I think this is another reason why we go to the Internet so often during stressful, unprecedented times like the one we are in right now. We are looking for solidarity and like minds. We may not be able to clearly express our thoughts until we see them written out by someone else, in a meme. There! That’s exactly what I was thinking! (Like, Share.)

And for those who do have an overflow of words tumbling out of them right now, in an effort to make sense of it all, there is poetry. If you go to Facebook and search Quarantine Poetry, you will find a whole inventory of creativity born in isolation. On Facebook, my friend Katie Nolan posts a daily #covidhaiku. This is one of hers, following the 5-7-5 syllable rule: 

Social media – Increases anxiety – And yet, here I am.

And for those who are not on social media, a quarantine poetry chain mail is going around, via email (and possibly good old fashioned snail mail as well). I recently received a poem in response to my story about Forest Bathing, so I will be submitting it to the quarantine poetry chain. It goes like this:

Skipping Stones

                                Poems are like stones

                                Skipping across the water

                                Wherever they touch

                                A new world begins

                                And where they finally

                                Come to rest

                                The truth is not far away.

                                                                Murray Kelly, 2020                              

Springtime normally makes me feel like doing something wild with my hair, getting my hands in the earth and writing a poem about new life. This year I’m reading the poems of others around the world who are feeling rather uncomfortable with this particular plot change, including this:

“The cycle of unfinished tasks, completed in a noiseless room…the silence becomes unsettling and I am left to worry…like a bruised little bird, too confused to fly…not knowing, when I will be let out.” ~Didi Kasana, Vienna, Austria.

If anything, this Covid-19 situation is a reminder to all of us that our life’s plan can change at any minute. And our “new normal” might mean social distancing for the foreseeable future.

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