Recently I walked several miles in an airport terminal, toting a heavy backpack while listening to poetry. I was waiting for a return flight home, breathing sighs of relief after a tense work meeting with a client. My bag was laden with a laptop and construction plans, but my mind was no longer yearning for an urgent escape from a seemingly impossible situation. The conversation had been wearying and somewhat humiliating, but we had gained a sliver of understanding and clarity. Perhaps there could be a path forward after all. As I decompressed, I listened to poet and podcast host Padraig O’Tuama share lessons from his time as a conflict mediator.
“The word 'poem' . . . comes from the Greek word poíēma, which means a made thing. . . There’s an old adage that it is easier to break something than to make something . . . it is easier, therefore, to feel a sense of power when you’re breaking something apart than when you’re beholding something to say, “well, it’s not complete yet, but it’s got potential.” It’ll take time and tenderness and vulnerability and some kind of collaboration and cooperation with each other. Peace is very, very hard."
- Padraig O'Tuama
While I walked by travelers and tile mosaics, I considered how my mindset had shifted since my arrival flight the night before. I had been stewing over the worst possible outcomes for the upcoming meeting, anxious about regulating my emotions and how I could deliver a solution based on all the criticism my team had received. To cope I had reached out to friends and family via phone calls and texts. The squeeze of pressure felt imminent and intense.
In that pressurized tube, floating thousands of feet above the earth, I found a welcome lifeline. O’Tuama’s podcast, Poetry Unbound, was offering a miniseries on conflict and the human condition, featuring a diverse range of contemporary poets. The first poem I listened to was by Joy Harjo, a Muscogee Nation citizen and former US Poet Laureate. Over the hum of an engine, I listened to Harjo’s calming words on setting “conflict resolution ground rules,” giving consideration to the ownership and stewardship of the ground beneath us and the other creatures with which we share it. Then O’Tuama shared his perspective on the poem’s imagery. It reminded me of the power of the biblical Psalms, and how readers can turn these ancient, holy lyrics and metaphors over and over until they become a piece of their own experience, a tether to a divine relationship that brings freedom and restoration in individuals and communities. I thought of the long and short views of time. How a small, humble gesture can instantaneously shift the atmosphere of a room. Sometimes it requires more patience and persistence, like the force of water on rock over millennia, carving a grand canyon.
When the plane landed, I had not been freed from all my reasons to be anxious. But I had been reacquainted with an attitude to adopt in the midst of conflict. Though I may not be gung-ho about disagreements, I can see more clearly how inevitable they are, and how they are not merely the result of failure or a place to level blame at the feet of a scapegoat. One of the most humane things I can do is step back and not let conflict consume me. Instead, I can seek out the tools to navigate it like white water toward the ocean. To turn my conflict partners into fellow paddlers, my energies away from defensiveness and toward creatively finding a new way to communicate.
Life is full of tension, and there is no avoiding it. The key is how you move through it, where it takes you. Wind rushing over a wing carried me through the sky. The pull of gravity brought me back down. And it was the power of words, chosen carefully and offered freely, from poets and supportive friends and love ones, that sustained me.
Expanding the Limits
In this age of electrons
Squeezed through a wire
Of light ricocheting
Through a glass tube
Of online crusaders
And pandemic isolation
I wonder if there is an opportunity
For more genuine connection
A multitude of people in fractured proximity
Moving in a thousand directions
Wondering if there is a common thread
Waved through our current moment
I hear a conversation between two elders
Considering democracy as introspection
Beginning as a matter of the heart
In which we choose how to respond
If we feel safe enough to let down our guard
Ideas will cross pollinate
Risk-taking love will dismantle prejudice
Two-way conversations will open doors
Deep-seated division evaporating away
The space between us now a greenhouse
A thriving environment, no longer stifled
By suspicion and false pretenses
Communities of accompaniment
Offering shelter and a slower pace
Where the goal is not perfect friendliness
But enemies laying down their arms
And becoming open to embrace
Here in this arena, overseen by ancestors
Structure and spontaneity intertwine
In a win-win dance, hard-won and beautiful
A gentle poet on the radio
Shares stories of de-escalation
A farmer rewilds a forest
To be managed by her son
An engineer builds a multicultural team
To tackle transportation challenges
A wounded soldier reckons with trauma
By searching for moments of joy to photograph
The road I walk on is transformed
Orange barricades blocking motorized traffic
So pedestrians can move freely
Swapping our metal boxes for another rhythm
Feet stepping, body sweating, confronted
With our neighbors more directly
Expanding the limits of possibility
To reveal the life we want within reach
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