Day 3: '40 Until 40' Meditation
A second attempt at a ‘found poem’ proved tricky.
‘40 Until 40’ is a poetry project to keep me creative over the forty days that lead up to my big 4-0 birthday. A gift to myself of time to write in the whirlwind of new motherhood. Each day I choose a 35mm photo I have taken over the last decade and see what words want to be with it. Process wise I’m open to whatever works on a given day, but I have some new methods I’m keen to try so let’s see where they lead me…
Day 3
The Photo
The Poem
The Process
My second attempt at a ‘found poem’ was harder than my first. There were so many directions it could have gone in. Even though, technically my word choices were constricted — I wrote the poem using only the text from two pages of an 80’s gardening manual — the choices were endless, and I found it difficult to to know where to start. I decided to go with the phrase ‘late winter’ and leant into this as a way to describe depression. As I continued to write, I found myself drawing upon my own experience of depression, following the breakdown of my long-term relationship in my early 30’s.
The poem was hard to wrestle into shape with so many options to pick from, but once I added the blackbirds I decided to stick with them and their plight in the depressing climate. To me they represented how depression and grief can freeze your emotional world, rendering you numb.
In the poem, winter (depression) has the birds (emotions) in a frosty grip. The ‘unwise’ idea of caging them as a means of protection (or self-preservation) relates to the need to be open with others when you are suffering. That you can’t just put all the pain into a mental cage and not deal with it.
To survive the terrible winter, the birds needed to be free to feel it.
Again for a found poem I started writing first, then looked at my photos to add context. The photo I picked to pair with the poem was taken at a weekend meditation retreat I attended in 2018. I had been meditating for about a year at that point and credit it with helping me recover from depression without taking any medication. I’d caveat that I had a ‘situational’ depression with no previous history of mental health problems—so taking extended time off from my job as a midwife, eating well, moving my body, doing weekly therapy and meditating worked for me.
The retreat was done largely in silence, which was a new facet of meditation I hadn’t explored before. I love the stillness of the photograph, much like what can be felt in deep meditation and what I sensed through the practice of silence over the two days in that room.
The appearance of a ‘cage’ with the lines of the shutters and the shadow they cast upon the floor was a surprise to see, as it links back to the words I’d written, when I hadn’t yet picked the image. The subconscious at work! It also felt to me that the poem also reads like a letter being written to update a friend. The window in the photo caused me to imagine the letter writer looking out of a window likening their mood to the seasons that passed it.
I found meditation and mindfulness allowed me to see the mental prison of my own making from a lack of acceptance, severe rumination and general avoidance of uncomfortable emotions that needed processing. Meditation is like a slow thawing. You find the blocked areas of your mindset and eventually after lots of practice and dedication, things start to shift and flow. Then one day you manage 20 minutes in a relatively undisturbed state, at ease with life and you know, like in the poem that spring has arrived.
My writing is free to access but if you wanted to show a small sign of appreciation, hot drinks on maternity leave are always welcome!
Jade x