Despair, boredom, restlessness, fear, worry, lack of pleasure: these are conditions that have haunted so many of us during the pandemic and interfered with our feelings of joy and accomplishment. One resource that’s always available to us is our creativity.

Leo Tolstoy, the great Russian author, touched on what makes art so powerful in What Is Art?

“The activity of art is based on the fact that a man, receiving through his sense of hearing or sight another man’s expression of feeling, is capable of experiencing the emotion which moved the man who expressed it. … And it is upon this capacity of man to receive another man’s expression of feeling and experience those feelings himself, that the activity of art is based.”

Art is the passing of feeling from one human heart to another. We pass on the feelings that we have in our hearts to others.

After witnessing on TV George Floyd’s murder, I felt speechless, mute, but also compelled to “say something.” But what could I, a white woman very far removed from Mr. Floyd’s world, contribute? I did not want to appropriate a story that was not mine, and yet I was deeply unsettled and needed to find my words. The result of this inner conflict surprised me.

I don’t just write for Psychology Today. I write fiction and I am deep into work on my second novel. But my original training and background is as a poet. When George Floyd was murdered, I hadn’t been writing poetry for quite a while. And yet, something rose in me. The tension I felt to speak against violence, oppression and privilege, about victims and perpetrators, sprung forth in what became a series of fifteen new poems. They are now a section of my forthcoming book of new poems.

The poems are in the voices of women who have suffered violence, mothers who have lost children to war or disaster, women in exile, girls kidnapped by rebel forces. I felt I could get inside their skins because I know about loss too, perhaps not as dramatic a loss as in these cases, but I know I carry in my DNA the grief of ancestors and a lineage of persecution and diaspora. My novel-in-progress, The Lost Mother Archive, delves into the enduring pain of intergenerational trauma.

Empathy enabled me to write my poems. Difficult times invite us to cultivate our inherent capacity for empathy by exposing us to suffering, to feel into the pain with our entire being, and to understand that when we give these feelings form, as we do when we make art, they are redeemed from the darkness. We take what’s inside ourselves and objectify it so that we can walk around it and study it, so that we represent our private reality outside ourselves and offer it to the culture. We don’t have to “learn” empathy as much as allow ourselves to feel it.

Feeling connects us with what is most vital and powerful within us. It’s one of the ways we know we are alive, and a barometer of what matters to us. Fear, sadness, rage can be great motivators to create, but we don’t need to be embedded in catastrophic events for our creativity to flourish. We do, however, need the courage to be vulnerable to our own truths and realities.

The path forward is like a hero or heroine’s journey in which we set off into the unknown, unsteady and unsure, but with a sense of urgency. Along the way we meet demons and obstacles. Many times, we desperately want to turn back. But an unnamable faith urges us onward. When the hero or heroine attains the treasure, she returns with it to her place of origin, refreshing and renewing the culture.

To make art we first have to believe that making it matters, which is a serious and profound question in a world filled with very real, very concrete struggles. Why create art if we don’t think it matters?

In a world such as ours, might we not conclude that art is superfluous, an indulgent privilege of certain classes and populations? Might we not ask: how can my poem or my painting or my song matter in the grand scheme of things, and therefore, why should I spend time and energy in that direction? My answer is a resounding yes!

Our desire to create springs from the depth of our soul. This urge is hardwired in our chemistry. One piece of evidence for this is that, across time and cultures, some form of art has been with us since humans walked the earth.

Seventeen thousand years ago, Paleolithic people descended into caves in southwestern France, and blowing mineral pigments through tubes, painted scenes of hunting and other ritualized activities on the rock walls. The cave spaces are assumed to have been spiritual sanctuaries that were decorated with pictures of horses, oxen, birds, and people, and it may be guessed from these gestures that art’s origins are linked to a human need to document our lives and to create a sacred space for ceremonies in which we connect to the divine.

Art creates new forms and visions that help us survive. Gospel, hymns, blues, jazz were born out of the joys and tribulations of a people. In the Nazi ghettos and death camps, the persecuted made drawings and paintings, wrote poems and stories that leave a testimony of how they lived, suffered, and died. The friends and families of the disappeared in Latin America; the incarcerated, interned, and exiled in camps and gulags and on reservations; the political prisoners in China and in other Asian countries have all left us their poems and stories and paintings. The need to tell our stories and to bear witness urgently pushes us to find our voice. The personal is always political. In an interconnected universe, what happens to you influences me and everyone else – and vice versa.

The brilliant writer and thinker James Baldwin said: “People are trapped in history and history is trapped in people.” What he meant is that not only are we born into a particular time in history, but we are born into a particular family with particular struggles and life experiences and backgrounds. This is our material. This is what we bear witness to and document in our stories, songs, paintings, dances.

You may be listening to this and saying, “What does this have to do with me?” Maybe it feels like you are in exile and you spend every day trying to survive in a system founded on oppression and colonization. Or maybe you say to yourself, “I’m not in a death camp. I’m not in exile. My issues are minor compared to these.” In both cases, the question remains, “Why are my work and my voice important?”

Believe me, it is.

What we all share is a desire to give form to something that has not been expressed ever before. It is our own individual stamp on the ineffable sorrows, joys, pain, anger, sufferings that compose our lives. Each one of us lives a life that contains these things and so each one of us has a unique perspective, an individual way we view the world. Our individual perspective is what composes the whole, the collective, and each of us participates as actor and witness in creating a society.

This means that in some ways, we are already prepared, and we already have the raw material to create. We come to our creative being with a personal temperament, with specific social circumstances, with specific historical circumstances, with our ancestral influences, with inclinations, and with a great deal that we don’t know about ourselves, that is, with a great deal of mystery.

Please know you already have at your disposal all the material you need. If you can allow yourself to follow your curiosity even into states that are uncomfortable, like anxiety or depression, and become the observer of them, and seek to find within them some nugget of worth, you will discover that inside these darker elements there is often a hidden treasure, a gift. This, I believe, is the deep secret of art. It is life-restoring and life-enhancing for both the creator and her or his world.

Art is a bridge to empathy, to connection with our pack. Because humans are pack animals, we suffer when we become isolated. Isolation, loneliness, despair are the breeding grounds for our darker emotions. But the act of creation is life-giving. This is the reason why writers sometimes refer to completing a book as “giving birth” or “having a new baby.”

In my own experience, the ability to focus intensely on a project provides a buffer from worry and anxiety that is so much with us during this time of uncertainty. No matter what comes of the attempt, there is satisfaction and a sense of accomplishment in the effort. Crucially, a sense of hope is restored.

Experience, that is our material, all of it, the good, bad, the ugly. What is it you will remember most about this time of the pandemic on planet Earth? What is pressing inside you to get out?

As the great jazz musician Charlie Parker once said, “If you don’t live it, it won’t come out your horn.”

One of my favorite things in the world is discussing with book clubs the themes of this post – creativity and empathy – as well as the themes of my novels and other posts – resilience, writing, intergenerational trauma, mother/daughter relationships, Carl Jung and Jungian therapy, dreams, and even fairy tales. If this interests you, please find my contact info here.

This post appeared in a slightly different form on Dale’s blog on Psychology Today. You can find all of Dale’s blog posts for Psychology Today at 

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Several weeks ago, I received an interesting chain letter. Instead of being asked to send money to the designated recipient, I was to send a poem and forward the chain letter on to 20 people. If everyone followed through, I would receive 400 poems in the mail in short order.

I usually trash these invites, but something about this one caught my fancy, and I complied. In return, I received a variety of texts, including a Bob Dylan song, a verse from children’s book author Shel Silverstein, a poem by someone’s mother-in-law as well as poems by the illustriously immortal. The range and scope of the responses heightened my awareness of how we often turn to others—poets, rock stars—to speak to our souls, forgetting that all of us have the capacity to bear witness to our experience and unearth words that reflect back our deepest understanding of ourselves.

In his latest book, Drinking from the River of Light: The Life of Expression poet, spiritual teacher, and cancer survivor Mark Nepo credits self-expression as the rope he climbed to emerge from his struggle with cancer and return fully to life:

“I’ve come to believe that the heart of awakening is the quietly courageous act of feeling and facing what is ours to face. And I’ve discovered along the way that writing—expressing—is one of the best ways to stay awake. It doesn’t matter how ‘good’ our expressions are but that they keep us in relationship to the larger Universe we are a part of.”

You may be thinking what this has to do with you if you are not a writer or poet. Please consider this excerpt from James Baldwin’s magnificent story “Sonny’s Blues.” The character speaking is Sonny, a heroin addict and jazz pianist.

“It’s terrible sometimes, inside…that’s what’s the trouble. You walk these streets, black and funky and cold, and there’s not really a living ass to talk to, and there’s nothing shaking, and there’s no way of getting it out—that storm inside. You can’t talk it and you can’t make love with it, and when you finally try to get with it and play it, you realize nobody’s listening. So you’ve got to listen. You got to find a way to listen.”

That storm inside. Can’t talk about it. And sex won’t help. And nobody wants to listen. Sound familiar? By the end of the story, Sonny concludes that the remedy to his despair is that he has to listen to himself.

The poet Gregory Orr speaks passionately about his discovery of poetry and how it helped him survive his unbearable despair after he accidentally killed his brother. In a 2006 interview for NPR, Orr compellingly talks about how language helped him heal. “I believe in poetry as a way of surviving the emotional chaos, spiritual confusions and traumatic events that come with being alive. When I was 12 years old, I was responsible for the death of my younger brother in a hunting accident. I held the rifle that killed him. In a single moment, my world changed forever. I felt grief, terror, shame, and despair more deeply than I could ever have imagined. In the aftermath, no one in my shattered family could speak to me about my brother’s death, and their silence left me alone with all my agonizing emotions. And under those emotions, something even more terrible: a knowledge that all the easy meanings I had lived by until then had been suddenly and utterly abolished.”

Orr’s portrayal of his situation aligns with psychoanalyst and Buddhist teacher Mark Epstein’s description in The Trauma of Everyday Life of what happens during trauma: “the reassuring absolutisms (albeit mythical ones) of daily life—that children do not die, that worlds do not move, and that parents always survive—are replaced by other, more pernicious convictions: the ‘enduring, crushing meanings’ (of one’s aloneness, one’s badness, one’s taintedness, or the world’s meaninglessness).” Trauma, he writes, “forces one into an experience of the impersonal, random, and contingent nature of reality, but it forces one violently and against one’s will.” It also exposes us to our powerlessness, our helplessness. “The old absolutisms no longer reassure, and the newly revealed reality feels crushing.”

How do we cope when life as we know it breaks down and what we have counted on seem broken? How can we discover our strength and courage in facing challenging obstacles?

Here is the last stanza of the poem Gregory Orr wrote years after his brother’s accident in which he resolves his once unutterable grief and shame.

Gathering the Bones Together

By Gregory Orr

for Peter Orr

I was twelve when I killed him;
I felt my own bones wrench from my body.
Now I am twenty-seven and walk
beside this river, looking for them.
They have become a bridge
that arches toward the other shore.

Language summons a whole world into being, says Orr. His poem contains a trauma, but also stands outside and apart from the trauma. The bridge he mentions is the bridge language makes between our inner and outer worlds. As humans, we are continually seeking self-understanding, ways to know ourselves and make sense of who we are. Unlike other species that have language, humans are the only species that have metacognition, the ability to reflect on our own minds. This self-reflective capacity—Why did I do X? How did that make me feel?— is essential to making meaning of our lives.

Language’s magical power is to make sense of the senseless. At the age of nineteen months, Helen Keller became blind and deaf. In her autobiography, she describes the dramatic moment when her beloved teacher Annie Sullivan helps her, at six years old, connect a physical sensation with its word.

“As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten–-a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that ‘w-a-t-e-r’ meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept away.”

The writer Isak Dinesen famously said, “All sorrows can be borne if you can put them into a story or tell a story about them.” But writing from the heart isn’t just about the transformation of difficult emotions; to write from the heart is to engage with life at its fullest, in all its terror and splendor. In writing from the heart, we break our self-silencing and flex our muscles of courage to uncover our deepest truths.

Writing stories, poems, or journal entries may actually be the second necessary action required in finding our voices and uncovering our inner resources, the essence of who we are. The first action is deep listening. Hear Mark Nepo on listening:

“In many ways, writing is listening and simply taking notes. . . . Being still and listening allows us to behold what is before us. The deepest form of bearing witness is to behold another in all their innocence. This is the key to love. To listen until the noise of the world subsides. To listen until the noise of the mind subsides. To listen until the noise of our wounds subsides. To listen until we only hear the life before us.”

Miriam Greenspan in her powerfully helpful book, Healing Through the Dark Emotions: The Wisdom of Grief, Fear, and Despair, offers three skills and seven steps in alchemizing difficult emotions. Our culture, she claims, is emotion-phobic, and encourages an invincible heroic ideal while often shaming those who do not live up to societal expectations.

Greenspan offers ways to regain balance and exuberance in the face of even the darkest emotions. The author uses the acronym ABS for the three skills she believes basic to healing: A for Attending, B for Befriending, and S for Surrendering. “When we can mindfully attend to, tolerate, and surrender to the energy of the dark emotions as it flows,” Greenspan writes, “we open the heart’s doorway to the magic of emotional alchemy.” But, after describing these skills and steps in detail, she adds a caution. “The three basic skills and seven steps of the alchemy of the dark emotions are condensed distillations of a process that is ultimately mysterious. This process cannot easily be reduced to a set of skills, ideas, or biochemical events. The systemization of any emotional process gives it an aura of scientific credibility. But emotional alchemy is an art, not a science.”

What the authors mentioned have in common is a deep faith in our capacity to handle and thrive beyond even the most troubling aspects of our lives and a conviction we are inherently courageous and loving beings capable of transformation.

When we practice deep listening—and try to find the words for what we hear—we may be surprised at what we find.  What we haven’t noticed about ourselves, what lies hidden within, may come as wonderment at the ignored riches and creative forces offering their help.

This post appeared in a slightly different form on Dale’s blog on Psychology Today. You can find all of Dale’s blog posts for Psychology Today at 

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