The Poem
It discovers by night
What the day hid from it.
Sometimes it turns itself
Into an animal.
In summer it takes long walks
By itself where meadows
Fold back from ditches.
Once it stood still
In a quiet row of machines.
Who knows
What it is thinking?
Donald Hall, the 14th U.S. Poet Laureate, digs deep into the subconscious, and we find another portion of the conscious mind smiling back at us. The subconscious has gotten a bad rap through the generations. Religion plays a part in shuffling the deck of fear, and then dealing us a distorted hand filled with half-truths. The Western World has been taught to believe that the subconscious is unpredictable, unreliable and filled with unpleasant energy.
The door to our inner self has been padlocked with a mental combination lock. We have been taught to believe that we are divorced from a portion of our own reality. The concept of original sin holds us in a hammer lock of uncertainty, and the only way out is to participate in superficial rituals and guilt-filled obligations. The idea of a tainted consciousness opens the door for major psychoanalysis and soul reconstruction.
As Hall points out, we live without consciously knowing how we maintain and use our physical awareness. But, we do know. The atoms and molecules within the cells have their own consciousness, and they mesh with the molecules and atoms in the air, earth, and universe. That mixture produces a unique reality that is built for us by our subconscious.
Our subconscious believes in us even though we don’t know what it is thinking. It is the night of our mental day or the ying of the yang of our conscious mind.
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