with Naomi Shihab Nye

Krista Tippett: In these next few sessions, we’re going to investigate some orientations and ways of being that I would call companions to hope. If hope is a muscle that can be exercised to become stronger and more supple, these qualities might be thought of as fascia, or the tendons — complementary ligaments that make the whole viable and sustainable. And our first teacher on this is the wonderful poet Naomi Shihab Nye.

Naomi is winsome and wise about how writing — writing — is a companion to life, and certainly a companion to hope, for her, and it’s a companion to the way we are investigating hope here: the simple act of writing things down.

When I interviewed Naomi a few years ago, she talked about all the groups she works with of all ages. She has said that she has found that writing things down, whoever you are, whatever you’re writing down, even if you’re writing about something sad or hard, you almost always feel better after you do it. She says, “rarely do you ever hear anyone say they write things down and feel worse.” And certainly, this is an experience I’ve had journaling — not consistently, every day, but many, many days of my adult life. Somehow, it helps.

Here’s another way she described what she says is happening. She says, you write something down, “Somehow, you’re given a sense of, ‘OK, this mood, this sorrow I’m feeling, this trouble I’m in, [by writing it down] I’ve given it shape. It’s got a shape on the page…So I can stand back, I can look at it, I can [even] think about it a little differently. [I can wonder,] what do I do now?”’

Naomi actually says that she thinks — she’s a poet, of course — but she thinks that all of us actually “think in poems.” And what she means by that is that "poems don’t batter us." You’re not battered by thought in a poem. You ride a “wave of thought.” You allow thoughts to enter. And while that happens, you are shifting. You’re changing. You’re looking. You’re in a sensibility that allows a kind of looking and interaction. And she thinks it’s good for mental health, and I think journaling is good for mental and emotional health.

It’s about getting centered inside yourself. It’s about reaching toward becoming your best self. You’re going to hear her using that language. Figuring out what that is, how to practice being that best self.

She long called herself a “wandering poet,” though these days she’s a professor of creative writing at Texas State University. There’s one poem she wrote, called “Kindness,” which is really held close by people all around the world. Her father was a Palestinian refugee, and she sometimes refers to her father, also, as a "wandering Palestinian journalist." She grew up — spent her childhood — between his Palestinian homeland and her mother’s home ground of Ferguson, Missouri.

One little thing to set up before you hear this clip of my conversation with her. Someone asked her once, why did you become a writer? And she said, “Possibly as a refuge from our insulting first-grade textbook.” Now, everyone listening to this will not remember these textbooks, but for many generations — and these were my books, too — we learned to read with these very one-dimensional characters, Dick, Jane, and Spot. “Come, Jane, come” — these were some of our first words — “Look, Dick, look.” And Naomi said, “Were there ever duller people in the world? You had to tell them to look at things? Why weren’t they looking to begin with?”

So let’s hear a little of her wisdom.

Tippett: Here’s just some lines from the “History” poem in that book, Transfer. “We were born to wander, to grieve, / lost lineage. What we did to one another / on a planet so wide open for doing.”

Naomi Shihab Nye: So wide open. So much we could do, always. So many surprising moves a person, a country could make that might be imaginative, that might encourage positive behavior instead of negative.

Tippett: And — I don’t know, maybe the magnitude of this moment forces us to rise to the occasion. We’ll see. Human beings do that every once in a while, too.

Shihab Nye: I hope so. I hope so, and I hope — that mysterious rising to one’s better self, which was a concept that really perplexed me as a child. My mother would say, especially if I’d been in some kind of mischief at school, which occasionally happened, because I wasn’t always focused on Jack and — who were those people? Dick and Jane.

Tippett: [laughs] Those boring — Dick and Jane.

Shihab Nye: Yeah, the boring Dick and Jane — I was trying to get away from them all the time. And so I would get in a little trouble, and my mother would say to me — her charge to me, “Be your best self.” And I would think, “Wow, what is that self? Where is it? Where is it tucked away? Where do I keep it when I’m not being it? And are you your best self? Is my teacher her best self?”

And that was just something intriguing to me, that we had more than one self that we could operate out of. And I think one nice thing about writing is that you get to encounter, you get to meet these other selves which continue on in you — your child self, your older self, your confused self, your self that makes a lot of mistakes — and find some gracious way to have a community in there, inside, that would help you survive.

Tippett: That poetry as conversation — that’s right. Writing is a way of having a conversation between those different selves inside you.

Shihab Nye: Yes. That’s nice. I think so. And that’s a big thing. That’s not to be underestimated, that it’s important to do that.

Tippett: My passion is for conversation. In all my years of writing and of journaling — not all the time, but again and again — I’ve come to think of journaling as a way of being in conversation with yourself. And I have to say, I so love what she adds to that, how she takes that to a different place where she talks about how writing things down is a way of getting into community with yourself, with all of your different selves — that it can be an act towards healing and wholeness. These questions she asked — “what is that best self? Where is it? Where is it tucked away? Where do I keep it when I’m not being it?” Finding a “gracious way to have a community in there, inside [yourself], that would help you survive.”

So the invitation here — holding the question of what hope can mean for us, and how it can define us, and be a muscle that propels that best self into the world — the invitation here is to start writing things down. Exchange words with yourself about what you’re doing here. And Naomi is very clear about this, that this can mean that you write three lines. You can write three lines a day. You can write three lines right now.

I also talked to her about when I interviewed Mary Oliver. Mary Oliver — decades, decades ago — she told me she started carrying a notebook. She was quite superstitious about it, that she had to have her notebook with her at all times, because you never know when a thought or an observation is going to come, and you write it down, because if you don’t, you will lose it. But it was a sense of capturing gifts. And these would be gifts that we are making to ourselves, towards our highest aspirations for our best selves.

And by the way, I love Naomi's definition of contemplation as "a long, loving look."