Take in your heaviness, your loneliness

Question

Hello evey body.“Take in your heaviness, your loneliness, how far you are from everyone who cares about you. Think about what brought you to serve your time.Would you please help me?I can't understand the above sentences.

Clive · Accepted Answer

First, let me ask you some questions.

Where did you find these words?

This seems to be poetry. Do you like poetry?

Do you usually understand poetry that is written in your native language?

The poet is speaking to a person. Where do you think this person is? How do you think this person is feeling?

Clive

Anonymous · Answer

Jamal 1315Hello evey body.

everybody

Jamal 1315I can't understand the above sentences.

The second is poorly written. I resist trying to pry meaning from garbled language. If the writer was not clear and correct, the loss of meaning is his problem, not mine. I cannot guess what a person thought they wrote.

His use of "brought" is faulty. If something brings someone to a condition, the something has had the effect of putting the someone in that condition. (What brought him to this pass?) If something brings someone to do a thing, which is what we have here, the something has impelled the someone to do it. (What brought you to steal that car?) Nothing impelled the addressee in your excerpt to serve his time. The writer confused the two formulas.

AlpheccaStars · Answer

Jamal 1315Would you please help me?

You have to consider the entire context! The setting is a girls' prison in a poor country on the top of a mountain.

The prisoners are being rehabilitated by a woman visitor. It is a meditation exercise. In context, it is easy to understand.

Infinite Country
Written By: Patricia Engel
Chapter 17
At the prison on the mountain, the staff brought in a woman who took a few girls into a room where they sat cross-legged on floor cushions. The lady was rich enough that she wore diamonds and told the girls she’d traveled to India and the Far East, studying different techniques for altering one’s consciousness. A girl asked what that was supposed to mean, but the lady said never mind, she’d show them if they were willing to close their eyes and listen. She spoke in a soft voice, told the girls to picture themselves far from the prison walls, letting their imaginations take them somewhere they felt completely free. She suggested the beach, described the white foam and lapping waves, soft sand under their feet, until a girl called out that most of them had never been anywhere near an ocean.

Then the lady told the girls to pretend they were birds flying over their mountains and valleys on a day with no clouds so they could see every grassy pleat, indigo lake, and river twine. The towns below were pastel and bone-colored formations squaring churches and plazas. Cattle-freckled pastures, the plastic-sheeted nurseries where orchids and roses are grown for export; cars and buses taking people from their jobs to their families.

“A busy world, a peaceful world,” the woman said. “You are a part of that world.”

She instructed the girls to imagine themselves light, almost weightless, carried by their long feathers, hollow avian bones.

“Now return to your lives in the present.”

She had them note the hard ground beneath their cushions, discomfort and tension in their hips and knees. The stiffness of their spines from cold seeping into the old unheated prison-school building so they existed in a permanent low-grade shiver.

“Remember where you are right now,” she said, as if they could forget. “Take in your heaviness, your loneliness, how far you are from everyone who cares about you. Think about what brought you to serve your time. It is your crime and the decisions that led to it that will keep you shackled to toxic soil and prevent you from soaring as you are meant to do.”

Take in your heaviness, your loneliness

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