I sometimes wonder if people who read my poems think I'm melancholy. Yes I do believe there is a beauty in sadness. A raw beauty that reveals our vulnerability, our soul. When we are at our most vulnerable, when the walls of ego have crumbled we are finally able to truly connect.
Sadness like joy is an emotion but because we construe it as negative we try our hardest to avoid feeling it. But we cannot avoid it, it does not go away. We merely suppress it for a while until it finds another way to seep out from our psyche, from our unconscious. Frequently it will seep out into our thoughts but because we have not allowed ourselves to feel our sadness when it first arose we now become locked in our thoughts. We think and think about what made us sad and in so doing prolong our suffering.
What I am learning over the years and it is years because I appear to be either a slow or stubborn learner is that expression does shorten our suffering. If we can allow ourselves to feel our negative emotions at their time of origin we are less likely to become locked into our perpetual thinking/rethinking cycles. For me I have found writing poetry is a way I can engage in a non judgemental way with my feelings. I can express what I feel without analysing it. And because I find negative feelings more difficult to express in physical ways I tend to write more poems about them. "Feel it, write it, don't think it" is becoming my mantra.
