Creativity and Nature:
One Person's Meaning and Purpose
Poetry and songs that illustrate the Research findings
1.
They express feelings in balance with thinking
The research showed that it is impossible to experience meaning if you don't feel and think in balance. Meaning is what you value and value involves what you feel about something as well as what you think about it.
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Multi-format Poetry
Marching to your own Drum
Meaning does not arise from following the crowd or living to seeking approval blindly. Living according to others expectations and agendas undermines your sense of self and therefore, your meaning and purpose.
Lyrics are usually second fiddle to music in most songs. This poet dares to defy what has always been done and make new tools serve poetry.
In combining music and imagery with a poem the goal is to deepen the impact of the words and their messages rather than a catchy tune. this maybe controversial but she does it anyway because it fulfils an important purpose and is therefor meaningful.
Using new tools to give the power to realise her value of sharing through poetry also fuels meaning and purpose through increasing sense can-do, which the research shows is essential for knowing meaning and purpose.
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Themes that Matter
The subject matter of the poems matter to their author and thus writing about them creates meaning for the author and ideally for at least some readers.
The Haori sequence follows the ebbs and flows of identity as the writer interacts with difficulties and interpersonal traumas but also with her passions for the beauty in nature, art and music.
She engages with things she values through another value: the love of self-expression through words.
Other things may matter much more to you and those're the things that will give you meaning. The key is to do what you love and what matters to you.
Poems from Meaning Sought and Found
Doing What you love creates Meaning and Purpose
The first Haori playlist begins with a reverie of connection with nature, a recurring theme that exemplifies meaning through doing what you love.
Trauma Triggers Meaninglessness
The second song recounts a well documented escape from one of numerous massacres of First Nations peoples in colonial Australia. It illustrates several kinds of value-destruction that trigger meaninglessness and purposelessness.
A book of poems that trace the contractions and expansions of identity in contexts of early meaninglessness, search, false starts, interpersonal trauma, illness, death, recovery and the wonders of the natural world.
It is downloadable here, with or without hyperlinks to song versions of many of the Poems.
Or you can order a hard or paperback copy from Amazon here.
The Poems below are playable in full whereas the playlist offers 30 second excerpts and the chance to download your own selection or purchase the whole list at a much reduced cost.
Bareetch Churneen has just witnessed the massacre of about forty tribe members by a line of ten armed horsemen. She escaped but both her trauma and the loss of valued beliefs and ways of living expressed in other poems in the first movement, can account for loss of meaning amongst Australia’s First Nations peoples.Trauma demolishes core assumptions about yourself – your competence, power and value. It activates survival parts of the brain that overpower rationality and emotion. It leaves you anticipating disaster. It cuts you off from the sense of yourself, from what you value and from connection with your environment, including people. When you cannot access the feelings associated with value nothing seems meaningful, neither yourself nor the things you once enjoyed. If you have experienced one or more major traumas in which life was threatened you will likely need to help from a Clinical Psychology trauma specialist to neutralise its effects. However, the self-help exercises of Resilient Self Psychology will prepare you for getting a good outcome from trauma therapy. Other poems in the first movement document the destruction of the First Nations lifestyle and the struggle to maintain the world view underlying identity, meanings and purposes.
When an independent self is disallowed
Haori
These poems were written over a lifetime to express and share life experience. Only I, Me, You & They, from the end of the collection, was written to summarise the self-help approach based on the research findings.
Haori provides a case example of finding meaning after meaninglessness. The poems turn out to contain the same themes as found in the researched descriptions. This could mean that the researcher interpreted those descriptions through the bias of her personal experience. However the interpretations that follow are only now being made. They were not part of the experiences that produced the poems.
In Next Door, the poet has lost the only adult she experienced as seeing her for herself rather than as an extension of her parents' aspirations and values. This loss, combined with intellectual disconfirmation of a family belief system, triggered four years of desperation at life’s lack of meaning and purpose.
When the people around you see you as extensions of themselves, parts or all of your identity cannot develop or must be suppressed. During teenage years the brain reorganises around your identity as an individual. If your environment doesn’t support this you will likely struggle with feelings of meaninglessness and purposelessness. For the poet, this was deepened by the theme expressed in Undertow - a recurring attraction to people who make life worse rather than better. In Moth, the poet is served ‘up on a plate’ through being seen and the uncontrollable emotions that ensue lead to the desperation of meaninglessness that opens ‘Find’.
Beliefs that Generate value and match experience can provide
Meaning & Purpose
In Find, Meaning is found through confirmation of a belief system that gives value to life, projects, suffering and the self. The research showed that such beliefs must provide value-generating answers to the five questionings present in meaninglessness and purposelessness - Who am I?; Why am I of value?, What is worth doing? How can I achieve what I value? Religious and other philosophical systems package different sets of answers to these questions but they will only give meaning and purpose if they are believable because they match evidence from personal experience and reasoning. A self that is constricted by low self-awareness, self-value or low-confidence can be supported by such beliefs. However, if the beliefs themselves are invalidated, meaning and purpose in life is lost and the fundamental problems of identity remain to be solved. The first Haori play list ends with Undertow because this poem represents a recurring theme of unhealthy romantic attractions, eventually overcome through psychological healing rather than philosophical beliefs.
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2Four years without meaning and purpose
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Downloadable Poems
``Haori Seven Movements of Being"
Download Options
With links to musical and video versions
With links to poems read by the poet/
Purchase softcover
purchase Hard cover
Fixed Price or Donation
Song Playlists
The poems as songs or spoken with music.
Purchase individual tracks or the full playlist collection.
Being there
1900s
2000's
Individual or Full Collection
Video Versions
Multimedia video interpretations bringing the Seven Movements to life visually and aurally.
Stream or Download
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02
Published Collection
Being There
Windows 0n a Whirling World
A collection of windows — each poem a frame through which something of the world becomes briefly visible. The work turns outward, toward landscape, encounter, and the strange particularity of being present in a moving world.
Perspectives on world of change
Downloadable Poems
Individual poems or the full Haori collection as downloadable files. Choose what resonates.
Fixed Price or Donation
Song Playlists
The poems as songs. Purchase individual tracks or the full Haori playlist collection.
Individual or Full Collection
Video Versions
Multimedia video interpretations bringing the Seven Movements to life visually and aurally.
Stream or Download