Recursive Dream

My Symphony: A Theme for 2025

I was just introduced to the poem 'My Symphony' by William Henry Channing and it felt like the perfect theme for 2025:

To live content with small means. To seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion. To be worthy not respectable, and wealthy not rich. To study hard, think quietly, talk gently, act frankly, to listen to stars, birds, babes, and sages with open heart, to bear all cheerfully, do all bravely, await occasions, hurry never. In a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common. This is to be my symphony.

In the post sharing this poem, the author shared a quote from Novalis:

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason

They went on to write:

The "wound" Novalis speaks of is nothing less than the alienation from the spiritual, the intuitive, and the transcendent—the very essence of life that reason, in its precision, so often neglects. Where reason divides and dissects, poetry unites and restores.

This immediately explained my blossoming love of poetry. Earlier in life, I detested poetry; I felt it was far too abstract and anything worth saying could be expressed with much less flourish and emotion. This followed my mechanical view of life itself: an accident of randomness without meaning or depth beyond what was created by the automated process of evolution. I suppose, on some level, I probably resented people who were capable of seeing life as more than that. (For whatever reason, I have always made an exception for song lyrics — let's not digress into one of my many contradictions, though.)

As my experience of life becomes more profound, I am beginning to experience poetry much differently. It expresses a newfound depth that my usually dry, straightforward prose cannot touch — poetry is helping me better understand my own transformation. Perhaps I need to explore the medium myself, if I hope to sufficiently convey what's happening within me. ✍