Emily Dickinson: Session 2

Greetings, everyone, and welcome to our time together, turning for trustworthy guidance to the life and poetry of Emily Dickinson.

And in this session, I want to begin with the poem, the first line of which is, the soul selects her own society, poem number 303 in the collected work.

The two poems that I've chosen for today, I've chosen because I'm going to have three sessions.

We had one already.

This is the second and then the third.

And what I decided to do in the first two is just select two poems that just, because they're all like this.

Do you know what I mean? Hundreds and hundreds of them.

It goes on and on and on.

So I just chose them because it just happened to be two of them that struck me.

But you can almost choose any one of them.

And so that's why.

See, if the soul selects her own society, she's always trying to help us become aware of the interiority of ourselves.

And so what is it that my soul, my interiority, who and what is it that's nurturing the interiority of my soul, of my self? And they form my society.

And to me, what this means is, we're kind of headed with these poems for today.

It would mean, therefore, insofar as we're moved by her poems, she's in our society.

And she helps us find our way to our society.

And also, we're in hers.

So we're all alone together.

We all belong to each other.

And so I thought that was very significant to me.

And then the second poem, it would be Lonelier Without the Loneliness.

is how do we find our way into that society of oneness? We find it in the interiority of our own solitude and the quietness of our own.

So that's, to me, I think, was the significance of these two poems.

And somehow they belong together, I kind of felt.

So in the very first one, then, about the soul selects her own society, the interior society what nurtures and guides the interiority of our own soul.