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There are only a few times in a lifetime, if you are fortunate, that an event cracks open a hidden part of your mind. This happens with an almost unbearable beauty and strangeness. The experience feels completely unlike anything you have ever known before. You fall downward, deeper and deeper into the depths of your unconscious mind. This place is dark, yet it is also rich and fertile. It holds the terror and the longing that create human suffering. However, it is also the place where surrender happens. This surrender leads to the end of suffering. It is not a surrender that comes from giving up or accepting defeat. Instead, it is a surrender that comes from faith. When you reach this point, the quiet voice of your inner self begins to sing. At that moment, the trapdoor in your mind turns into a portal. It leads to a life that is larger, truer, and full of new possibilities. This journey creates a kind of rebirth.
Nobel laureate Louise Glück knew how to capture the essence of these rare experiences. Her writing shows how such moments make us sober up and realize that we are mortal. They also remind us of what it means to be truly alive. She expressed this truth with an image of sharp originality in the title poem of her 1992 collection, The Wild Iris. This collection remains a powerful example of her ability to speak about deep human struggles.
THE WILD IRIS
At the end of my suffering there was a door. Hear me out: that which you call death I remember. Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting. Then nothing. The weak sun flickered over the dry surface. It is terrible to survive as consciousness buried in the dark earth. Then it was over: that which you fear, being a soul and unable to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth bending a little. And what I took to be birds darting in low shrubs. You who do not remember passage from the other world I tell you I could speak again: whatever returns from oblivion returns to find a voice: from the center of my life came a great fountain, deep blue shadows on azure sea water.