I find now, swallowing one teaspoon of pain, that it drops downward to the past where it mixes with last year’s cupful and downward into a decade’s quart and downward into a lifetime’s ocean. I alternate treading water and deadman’s float.
Interpretation
This quote speaks to the enduring nature of pain and how it accumulates over time, impacting our lives profoundly.
Anne Sexton's quote reflects on the experience of pain as a continuous and overwhelming presence in our lives. It suggests that even a small amount of pain can be significant, as it becomes part of our personal history, mixing with past experiences and creating a deep reservoir of emotional turmoil. The imagery of treading water and floating highlights the struggle that accompanies living with such pain, evoking the challenges of survival and coping in the face of hardship.
In practice
Sharing this quote at a support group for those dealing with grief.
The Witch's Life" When I was a child there was an old woman in our neighborhood whom we called The Witch. All day she peered from her second story window from behind the wrinkled curtains and sometimes she would open the window and yell: Get out of my life! She had hair like kelp and a voice like a boulder. I think of her sometimes now and wonder if I am becoming her.
Do you like me?” No answer. Silence bounced, fell off his tongue and sat between us and clogged my throat. It slaughtered my trust. It tore cigarettes out of my mouth. We exchanged blind words, and I did not cry, I did not beg, but blackness filled my ears, blackness lunged in my heart, and something that had been good, a sort of kindly oxygen, turned into a gas oven.
Don't bite till you know if it's bread or stone.
Abundance is scooped from abundance yet abundance remains.
I am your dwarf. I am the enemy within. I am the boss of your dreams. See. Your hand shakes. It is not palsy or booze. It is your Doppelganger trying to get out. Beware...Beware...
We talked death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric light bulb. Sucking on it!
There are times in life when people must know when not to let go. Balloons are designed to teach small children this.
Sometimes we become so focused on the finish line, that we fail to find joy in the journey.
It haunted him all night, while he slept alone; it was still there in the morning, when he swallowed his coffee and backed down the driveway in the crumpled old Ford. And riding to work, one of the youngest and healthiest passengers on the train, he sat with the look of a man condemned to a very slow, painless death. He felt middle-aged.
My life has been the polar opposite of safe, but I am proud of it and so is my son, and that is good enough for me. I would do it all over again without changing the beat, although I have never recommended it to others. That would be cruel and irresponsible and wrong, I think, and I am none of those things.
To have a childhood means to live a thousand lives before the one.
Movement is life. Life is a process. Improve the quality of the process and you improve the quality of life itself.
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