Nicola Behrman Turns to Poetry for Sustenance

This photo and postcard were printed in an article, that I ran into on Twitter - How Nicola Behrman Got Complete Strangers to Write Poems to Her.  I love what Behrman did:

Over Thanksgiving 2010, visiting my parents in Chicago, I was suffering from a nasty case of lyme disease. Yup. Totally gross! Feeling super low energy and down in the dumps, I reached out to my friends and asked them to send me their favorite poems to cheer me up, and then on a whim, I asked them to write it out by hand and send it to me in the mail in California. After I sent the request I felt a little stupid to be hones, but by the time I had returned home the following week (in this insane fast-paced 21st century world where most of us can’t find the time to respond to our emails) there were three poems waiting for me on my doorstep.

I can imagine how enthralling it was, and is, to see poems and stories come to her mailbox.  Not Inbox, mind you, but physical letters and postcards that arrive at her doorstep.

Elisha Levin, the sender of the photo and postcard, noted:

I sent this poem to Nicola in response to a message that she was going though a tough time. Little did we–all her “people”–know these poems would spark Poetry Post. Well actually, if you know Nicola you would absolutely know that it would, indeed, spark Poetry Post. ‘Trust’ was sent to me by my now-husband during our long-distance courtship. I’ll probably get into trouble for publicly saying this–because he is quite shy about this–but back when we were dating, I almost always woke up to a song or poem or love letter in my inbox. So when I thought about what to send Nicola, I went back to this poem he had sent me. For me it was a reminder, on the days I was tormented by the distance of our love, to ‘trust’ in my relationship. For Nicola, it quite obviously was a reminder to ‘trust’ that she would get out of something that felt agonizing at the time.

Behrman commented further:

I have revisited this beautiful poem often over the past few months and pondered how it is often so much easier not to trust. For on the road to the deep, fulfilling sense of trust that so many of us yearn for, there is a region of no-mans-land, of vulnerability, where we know intellectually the benefits that may lay ahead, but where we still fear the loss of control and the feeling of safetly we will have to sacrifice in order to cross that threshold. But as we have all been told a thousand times and know in the deepest regions of heart, this is precisely where the good stuff happens, and so we trek onwards.

Reference: No. 8 Poetry Tuesday | Trust.