In this episode, I speak about curating moments of your life for yourself, through poetry or any means that anchors you in your environment. What do you want to remember, when it is not for others? What is the sensorial imprint of your life, and how to translate it with words?
Get notified when the Silken Mirror membership opens in 2023 : http://eepurl.com/dxzCk9
Follow us on Instagram @moonlitpathchannel
This podcast is hosted by Laure Porché: http://laureporche.com. You can follow me on Instagram @laureporche
If you're enjoying the podcast, consider sharing it or leaving a review on Apple Podcast :)
In this episode, I speak about curating moments of your life for yourself, through poetry or any means that anchors you in your environment. What do you want to remember, when it is not for others? What is the sensorial imprint of your life, and how to translate it with words?
Get notified when the Silken Mirror membership opens in 2023 : http://eepurl.com/dxzCk9
Follow us on Instagram @moonlitpathchannel
This podcast is hosted by Laure Porché: http://laureporche.com. You can follow me on Instagram @laureporche
If you're enjoying the podcast, consider sharing it or leaving a review on Apple Podcast :)
[00:00:00] Laure: Hi everyone. Today I want to talk about our attempts to record the story of our lives, and in this episode, originally I wanted to talk about poetry because my next episode will be a wonderful interview with poet Amber McBride who has just released a beautiful novel in verse for young adults. But then as I was thinking about poetry, I thought that actually what I was really interested about is this urge, I guess my own urge to keep trace of my life in other forms than in my head. And all the forms that this can take and the story that it tells about who you are in your life. And I'm really curious about that because I come from a generation that wasn't raised with social media. And so the story that you curated of your life when I was growing up was for you mostly. It wasn't a story that you were curating for other people, and I think that's changed tremendously, obviously. But I think it's interesting to interrogate that in a way, or like look at it, look at the differences between the two and just the impulse as well of why do we wanna keep a trace.
[00:01:31] Well, like how that impulse of wanting to keep a trace of our life has to be realized in ways that cannot be objective. Because I mean, at least in my time, right, where we didn't have a camera in our pockets, and so there was no real way to record objectively, to record daily life. We could not just like snap pictures of people we were with or things that we were doing it had to come through or to go through our own understanding of it or our own subconscious perception of it, because most of the time it would be compiled in writing.
[00:02:13] And so the moment that you write something, obviously, you know your subconscious is gonna come through what you write. Which is why I find journals so interesting because when you look back at your journals from when you were younger you can see so many things through your writing and you can, and you know yourself, what you edited out or not most of the time. And so I find it really interesting to interrogate the story that we curate for ourselves versus the story that we curate for the world. And I think part of what I've been trying to do in all the work that I've done and and the way that I show up also on social media and on this podcast, is to make those two things closer. You know, overlap at some point the story that I curate for myself, so the things that I think are worth keeping or remembering or that I need to keep in my awareness and the story that I curate for the world of who I am, Hey, this is me. And I think I was very lucky that I wasn't raised with social media because obviously I started out by curating the story for myself about my own life. I have piles of journals that I wrote, most of them in English cause that's also how I learned English was through writing my own diary in English, cause you actually remember words when they're connected to emotions, and then when Instagram rolled around partly my Instagram account, at least the personal one for years, was a way of remembering moments.
[00:03:51] I've always been very adamant about remembering moments. And I guess it's because my memory is not very good. Um, I think partly, and I speak only for myself, but if I'm looking at this impulse to record my life or to remember it or to write a story about it, probably comes from the fact that until very recently, I was living in a functional freeze or something close to a functional freeze. And so, I didn't feel things as deeply as I could. And also I didn't remember things really well most of the time. Daily occurrence or even sometimes people, I would struggle to remember this. And so one of the reasons why I started having practices to curate stories or story about my life was partly because I really wanted to remember all the small moments within the day where I felt connected or that I found beautiful . Of course Instagram is great for that, or used to be great for that cause , you could just snap a picture. And I love my 3000 posts on my personal accounts because I remember every single moment that I took those pictures. And for me I'm grateful for social media for this.
[00:05:12] But what's interesting is that, that that personal account, I actually. Used it as a diary in a way. Like I didn't make a difference , it was a story that I was curating for myself. And other people found it beautiful. Great. But it was mostly for my own memory that I did that. And the reason why I wanted to talk about poetry originally, other than Amber coming on the podcast, was because for me, it's going one step further than just taking picture of a moment. And it's really engraving that moment into your sense memory, and it's also honing your own perception of the world and your own vision. And when we talk about curating stories or curating a story of your own life and curating stories for yourself, I feel like poetry does everything at once. If you're writing poetry about things that you observe in your own life it does several things. First, it forces you to be more present and to look deeper and more attentively because if you wanna write a poem about something, you're gonna need to really look at it and then it forces you to be really connected to your own perception, so basically your own body and your own imagination.
[00:06:33] It forces you to be in yourself fully. It's gonna be really difficult to write a poem that touches you or that is connected to you if you're coming at it from the outside. You have to be in yourself to write poetry because basically you're pulling from your own images and your own sensations and perception, or at least that's how I write poetry, I'm definitely not a poetry specialist and I'm sure that poets write poetry in many different ways.
[00:07:03] But if you're trying to write poetry as a way of recording reality for yourself, your own reality, then you're gonna have to pull from your own perception. And so it does that, it trains you to be present to yourself. And it also engraves that moment into your memory and into your body because you've spent so much time being present and mining your own perception of the moment that there's no way you're gonna forget it.
[00:07:37] And even if you did forget it, the moment that you read that poem that you wrote, you're gonna be right back in there. And I guess you could do that with regular writing when you could describe whatever's happening, but I don't feel it has the same power. I feel very often if I'm writing about a situation or a moment and I'm just describing it, then I stay in my cognitive, I stay in my mind and I don't go as deep into my felt sense and my body as I could. And I feel that poetry connects you directly to the part of you that perceives without knowing it. We perceive an incredible amount of information with our bodies without being aware of it. And this is something I've been talking a lot about recently actually with various people where I was explaining to them something that I learned with my teacher, Jane Peterson in Constellation.
[00:08:36] Which is that a lot of our interactions with people go through our bodies without any awareness on our part, and that we're constantly syncing with other other people's rhythm physically, and that a lot of our communications happen that way. And I know we know a little bit about it, like the talk about yay body language if you do this or if you do that, if you mirror someone.
[00:08:58] Okay. But it goes really deeper than that, and in my training with Jane, we would record our interactions and we would record the group. And then if you speed it up, if you watch it fast forward, you can see the syncing of bodies, you can see the whole group syncing the wave that comes through the group. It'll be a movement and it will travel through the groups and all the bodies, all the bodies will resonate with that movement. Or two people will be talking and their rhythm will sync and they will start moving at the same pace and having same movements and it's completely unconscious. And I feel that writing poetry connects us to that perception or to that proprioception of our environment in a way that is way deeper than just describing stuff, when describing a situation and describing whatever you're looking at.
[00:09:52] And so that's why I love poetry and I think it's a good practice. We were talking with Amber about haikus you'll hear it in the episode, about how haikus are great because they can capture a moment much better than an Instagram post. And it can be the most mundane moment and the most random. But it will capture it in such a way that when you read your poem again, you'll be back in that moment with all the sensory input that you had at the time. And I think that's a really lovely practice. That's something that I did for a while I would write one haiku a day, about one moment in a day, and usually something that would not be memorable. I remember writing this haiku about one night in summer and I heard firework noise, and I went upstairs and I was looking at the fireworks from my window.
[00:10:47] And I wrote this haiku:
[00:10:50] Shimmery flowers
[00:10:52] Cover the cicadas' song.
[00:10:54] Cool air on my feet.
[00:10:55] And if I read it, I remember exactly the feeling of that moment which I wouldn't necessarily if I had just taken a picture or if I just described what I told you, like, oh yeah, I heard fireworks and then I went up and I watched the fireworks from my window . Whereas in the poetry I remember the feeling of watching the sky erupt with sparkly flowers and suddenly the cicadas' song that had been so loud, I couldn't hear it anymore because the sound of the firework was so loud and I remember my cold feet and not wanting to go and change and put on socks because I wanted to watch.
[00:11:37] And so, I feel like it's almost like a training, right? Poetry is training to be fully present and perceive all the dimensions of your life in a way that is way more aware. It comes back to that idea of metaphor, right? That when you start looking around you and looking for metaphors, then you're gonna have access to way more dimensions of your reality. Beginning to write in poetry for me is the same thing in a way as beginning to interpret your own dreams, for instance. It puts you in touch with your own cosmology and your own symbology, and it's kind of takes you out of the outer culture and the acculturation, you know, like the over culturation that we are subject to even more now than when I was growing up because of social media and we get so much information thrown at us all day every day that it becomes really hard to feel yourself amongst the image that is shown to you of life and of basically the story that you should curate, the story of your life that you should curate, right? And what's interesting, and what's acceptable.
[00:13:02] And for me, poetry is an act of rebellion because it's entirely personal. And yes, obviously, you can write for others, to raise awareness on something or to take others with you in a certain point of view, whatever. But still, you are writing from your own vision of the world that is not about what you think , that's what I love about poetry is that it's not about what you think, which writing can be about, right? You can write books and essays and all that about your opinions and what you think about the world that is around you. And for me, poetry is writing about basically your standpoint. It's as if you were taking the person with you in your inner world. For me, it's the closest thing that you can get to bringing someone with you inside yourself to look at the world through your eyes because no one will have the same images when no one will have the same perception or understanding of what surrounds them. People can describe the same thing in the same way. They can see like, I see a bluebird on this tree, you know? But if you start writing it as a poem, no two people are gonna have the same way of translating it, I guess, through their own sensory perception.
[00:14:28] And also it's a great way to connect emotional events or emotions or things that you go through to connect them to the environment that you live them in. And I think that's really important. because it situates yourself in the world in a way that just describing things don't do necessarily. Staying in the cognitive definitely doesn't do. So I'm thinking, for instance like this poem that I wrote a while ago.
[00:15:00] And I never read my poetry to anyone, so I hope you're appreciating it cuz as I said, this is something that I curate for myself and so far I've shared my poems, I think with one person. Not to say that I'm a good poet, but it's not something that I do often, so I'm thinking of this poem for instance.
[00:15:18] The trees have turned to ice,
[00:15:20] scintillating under the nightlight sun.
[00:15:23] Drunk with cold, I stagger home to betrayal in neat letters.
[00:15:28] And when I read it, I really remember not just what happened and what I felt, but I remember the whole landscape of this. I remember the New York streets that were covered in snow, it was in the middle of a blizzard. And I remember my body in that space and in that landscape, and it feels very anchoring. Because when I read my diaries, for instance, very often I'm just describing what happened in my opinions and what happened, what they said, and what I said, what I felt, la la, la la. But it is almost never anchored into my environment. It's always kind of an inner whirlwind in a way. And it feels very floaty and disembodied when I read it, I'm like, I can't actually remember what I felt. You know, it feels like I'm reading things and I, I understand what I mean, but I can't necessarily remember what I felt. And I think it's partly because it's not anchored into a sensory perception of the environment and it's not anchored into a place.
[00:16:36] And that's something about story and about remembering your story or curating your own story that I find very important. And I remember talking with Francesca Mason boring in the episode about this, and I was very moved and touched when she was talking about in her family that the stories that were told and that were passed down were always anchored, all the things that were described in the stories were things that surrounded them in the landscape. And I feel there's real power and there's real security in anchoring your experience as a human being in your environment because otherwise you're just floating around and you're not really connected to anything and you're just this kind of ball of feelings and thoughts and emotions and sensations and all of that, that's just barreling through the world without anything to really anchor it down. And for me, poetry does that because the moment that I start considering something that I wanna write about, either a moment or an emotion or whatever it is, the moment that I start looking at it through the lens of poetry, I start looking at my environment and I start looking at how do I situate this.
[00:17:59] Because obviously I start connecting to my sensations because that's what I wanna write from. And so suddenly it anchors me and it puts roots in my experience that feel grounding. And I've written many poems that were to ground me in a moment where I was having a difficulty or whatever, and I knew that writing about the situation in that way would get me so much into my body and into the present moment of what was surrounding me and what was happening around me and in me, obviously, you know, would connect my inner experience with the outer world, that it would help. And so that's partly why I wanted to do this episode. This episode is a little all over the place. I'm aware I still refuse to write these in advance or to even have a plan for them. I just turn on the mic and I start talking. I still want to keep that format because it's a chance to channel whatever is coming through. And sometimes it's really clear and sometimes not really clear. But I own that. I will never take it the wrong way if somebody writes me and say, it's hard to follow you and be like, yeah, I get it. It's hard to follow myself. And it's precisely why I like poetry because it anchors that propention to go into 10 different directions at once because when I'm writing a poem or when I'm writing poetry about something, I have to go closer and I have to look at it better. And I can't go 10 different directions, I have to be really present. And that podcast is a little bit of an incentive. I know I've already encouraged you to look at metaphors in your life to start looking around you and look for metaphors in situations, in places, and what you're feeling. But I said take it one step further and start looking around you and seeing what do you wanna curate, you know, what in your life is worth curating for yourself, not for other people. Not this will look great on Instagram, but rather like, I wanna remember this moment. I want to remember as much as I can of this moment. Like all the layers of it. And when you find these, and it can be as simple as waking up in the morning and having the sun hit your bed in a certain way, and just reveling in that.
[00:20:29] When you find those moments, starts playing with words to try to capture all the dimensions and all the layers of those moments. There's many ways to write poetry, and it's all about finding your own voice. So , you would have to find your own voice with that. But without putting any pressure on yourself or being serious about it, but just, you know, five minutes a day, take a moment and start trying to see if you can connect your inner experience with the outer reality with words that convey how the two meet, and see what it does for you. Because I suspect it will add a lot of richness to your life. And on this, I will leave you until our next episode, which will be an interview with the poet and writer and teacher Amber McBride, and which I really look forward to sharing with you because I am in love with her writing.
[00:21:31] And if you want to read her books before you listen to the interview so that you will have more context and you'll be even more excited to hear the interview because if you like this podcast chances are you will adore her books. You can find both, I think in all bookshops at this point. The first one is called Me Moth and the second one is called We Are All So Good At Smiling, and they're both novels and verse, and they're written by Amber McBride. So in the meantime, I wish you to keep searching for the magic in your life.