What can be the common place between poetry and mediation?

Mediation is a path of virtue to find a solution or outcome in a conflict situation between the parties.

Here we have the term Conflict and Solution.

These two terms are linked to an emotional state of the different parties in a situation.

Fortunately, not every situation is conflictual, the one we are talking about is.

What is conflict for me? It’s a state of confusion from which we cannot escape. Often creating a more or less significant trauma.

I illustrate my sens of it through a poem:

“A light feather

dancing its flight towards the ground

Capture your warring gaze

and my word

Before the feather lays down

it vibrates on my words, those which opens a deep disarray

a giant abyss

Then the feather clings

on the fierce truth

what you wanted to forget

in this moment of veracity

“Oh light feather

Messenger of time

Where is the bird

who carried you in the wind »

In this poem the conflict is staged, the conflict between two people, you and me. The situation and the feeling are posed by the feather, a light witness to a deep shock between two people. The virtue of poetry is reformulation, the search for words, rhythm and silences as in music. Despite or thanks to the words, the latter by their sound, their rhythm and their pause, open the door to what is felt instead of reflected. The poet deeply seeks to go beyond the intellect in order to leave room for perceptions, feelings for the senses.

In mediation these are the tools which gradually bring about the outcome of the conflict; the place is not for the reasonable, for science, but for the unreasonable, for perceptions.

Let us now go into this poetic dynamic which expresses the process of mediation.

“Justice is an old woman, wrinkled

She looks at her audience, calmly

In front of her,

 a group of young people between twenty and thirty-five years old

Old she is, the woman, with a long live

crumpled like a pippin apple, vivid and full of experience,

And she asks herself:

Where do they come from, what do they do, how are they the ones begging ?

She weighs the weighs...

Vulnerable, humiliated, homeless, yet worthy and honest

don't talk nonsense

A tear slips along its folds

The heavy soul balances between law and truth

She said to them: Go ahead and talk!

Everything is in listening, but a listening that is broader than that of the ear, a perception and compassion are ingredients that we find in poetry and that we find in mediation.

I started poetry out of pure necessity, following the trauma, the death of my father, who wanted to express himself. A door that had closed by a shock that I wanted to open. I was 13, and I needed an escape from my pain. At the time I had no concept of trauma, the word had not yet entered everyday language, nor any need to find an expression for it. But precisely the magic and joining of the two elements created my path towards mediation. The law and its equality has its limits,  compassion does not have much room. How can we give shape to the imponderable, the unexpected, the shocking, the indigestible? It is poetry, which refuses the logical and rational organization of words, which seeks like this pen-feather a direct path to the unconscious in order to lay it bare that I have found my way.

The rhythm of poetry versus the rhythm of mediation. Everyone understands that the rhythm in mediation is important, there is a need for space, for the assimilation of the other's words, the integration of their difference. In poetry, the rhythm of words, with or without pauses placed by commas or breaks in the sentence, establishes in reading. And the accentuation of an emotion as in mediation. The emotional dimension can take its place through words and through silences.

Words and reformulation. In poetry the search for metaphors creates the image of emotion in space. In mediation, the use of metaphors is a powerful tool for taking a step back, becoming an observer of the event, it is a way of reformulating.

But the most unbreakable link in both is the space given to emotion and feeling. We do not manage mediation as a thesis antithesis conclusion, but as a sometimes illogical and irrational advance which nevertheless creates the space for dissolution or at least acceptance of the conflict which is real and which cannot be resolved by reasoning pure.

Many writers have nourished my mediation space, multiple poets, but not only that. “Negotiating the non-negotiable”, by Daniel Shapiro was one of the books on the apprehension of what a trauma is, “The Balance scorecard” by Kaplan and Norton is one of the books which gave shape to a perception of the world through my eyes, balance and the involvement of all. Then Mintzberg in the “structuring of organizations” with the image of the complexity of communication in business. These are only a few writers, more striking than others, because they each spoke at the time of what we did not want to see and which was nevertheless there. Isn’t this the foundation of a good mediator? Accepting what is “the crisis” and which is not necessarily perceived as such?