To rant or not to rant
if I get going, will I ever stop
Being a person of words, I have learned over time that there are things that should also not be said.
There are times when words hurt and do not help, when silence is best, and when even our internal dialogue is aided by a little personal awareness of leaving things be.
But the universe, and maybe God (but I won’t hold God too closely accountable on this one for good reason), has pointed at the calendar and decided it is time for a good rant. What I am speaking of is mostly good timing. As
and I move through our week-by-week read through of The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry, we have found ourselves in “rant week.”Note that this is not the title of the chapter, rather, the author presents a more powerful word to the writer: witness.
In Internal Family Systems therapy, witnessing is an essential element of processing the internal world as impacted by the external reality in past, present, and future. Witnessing is what makes therapy powerful. Witnessing is the secret sauce of good relationships and of healthy spirituality. Witnessing is sitting together in shared stories, with non-judgment, and practicing the belief that clarity arises alongside curiosity and compassion, when we let ourselves be seen and we are open to seeing another, including our shadow self.
The Poet’s Companion asks the question, “What issues in the world concern you?” in order to draw the writer into the art of witnessing, both the sufferings of others, and also that internal world within us of both light and shadow.
The author invites you to dig deeper and rant a bit. The therapist in me asks, “Wait, is that healthy? I mean, if I get going, will I ever stop?” The therapist in me also says, “There is power in a non-judgmental space to put our thoughts, our words, our emotions, our losses, and our concerns.” This is what we are called to do as poets and as writers and as relational humans in the world, we offer places of non-judgment, of expression, and of connection. Writing says,
“We are human, and it is better to be human together.”
Ranting is really an expression of exasperation, and don’t we all have that in loads right now? There is a time and a place and maybe that’s the hardest part. We need to find those safe spaces and they can’t be taken up entirely by the rant because we have to leave room for the quiet to heal us. Sometimes the rant will take up loads of that space, let it be a space specific enough that it can hold it. Other times, the light will take up more space. It’s good to look for both, and good writing brings both forward.
My rants are usually about wide and various things, and they usually are held within my closest relationships because social media just cannot carry the weight of my need to be heard. It is flawed in that way. My most frequent rants include: unnecessarily genderizing concepts, the sound of someone crunching chips, and forced weights borne by vulnerable populations.
And so here is my rant for the week, on a topic I feel deeply helpless to change, and so I will mark the steady drumbeat of challenge until we are heard.
Requiem for our children
One thousand bullets and more
Have broken through the
Age of reason
Onto the playground
Children’s backpacks loaded with the weight of our guns
Folders and binders and bullets lodged among ambition and dreams
Small souls asking for the bathroom pass and hoping not to die
Gather around, children,
This is how you build a barricade
Upended desks
The blunt end of a student’s seat with the tennis ball removed
The curriculum:
Melville’s Whale
Counting 1-10
There are no longer 9 planets, the Sun holds 1.3 million Earths
Doe Rae Mi on the recorder
Make yourself small in case they come for you
Who have we become, America?
And here is ’s poem on ICE raids:
leaving without
The dreams come
of things left
behind yet
found again.
A book left
on the case.
A bowl left
in a box.
Grandma’s coat
on the hook.
We left so
fast without
time to grab
what really
mattered.
They come in
dreams and
are used and
loved and
no longer
abandoned. What would you rant about, dear reader? This is a safe space, not the internet, but our little corner of it. Or send it to me privately. We all need a small space somewhere for our rants.
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