PLACES OF THE MIND

People and feelings that have always been on your mind

Meeting Benches is a virtual gathering place for travelers, artists, thinkers, and dreamers from around the world. It serves as a digital hub for people to share art, travel stories, and thoughts. Here, you will find a delightful journey through various artistic realms. The site offers articles, galleries exploring the works of emerging and established artists, book reviews, travel stories, and poetry. Whether you are passionate about art or simply curious, Meeting Benches invites you to explore creativity without boundaries, including the minds of Samuel Taylor and Pablo Neruda, Charles Baudelaire, Rudyard Kipling, and Sibilla Aleramo. Type in poetry if you are interested in learning more. The digital images accompanying this post were created by Dastilige Nevante.

The places of the mind, spaces of reflection, thought and interaction, influence our way of living and relating. The places of care and thought, for example, are not only hospitals and nursing homes, but also mental ones. In fact, our thoughts guide our actions and relationships with patients and their families. It happens that the ideas we have about illness, suffering and care influence the attitudes we adopt. Furthermore, understanding and caring for the mind cannot ignore its human and non-human environments. It is no coincidence that Sigmund Freud distinguished between places of the psyche of which we are aware, temporarily unconscious memories that can become conscious, and elements removed from consciousness that require specific techniques to be explored. In short, “Conscious“, “Preconscious” and “Unconscious” can be places of the mind that are both physical and conceptual; this explains why our understanding of them profoundly influences our life, even when writing a poem.

Today he is considered one of the most influential figures in English literature. A poet, literary critic and philosopher, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was considered one of the founders of English Romanticism. His critical works had a strong impact, especially in relation to William Shakespeare. Coleridge coined familiar words and phrases, including “suspension of disbelief“. Throughout his life, he struggled with anxiety and depression, almost as if he suffered from bipolar disorder. Perhaps due to rheumatic fever and other childhood illnesses, his physical health was precarious. He was even treated with laudanum, thus developing an addiction to opium. His verses have the power to show the hidden face of happy and unhappy love, just read this short poem of his. “ON THE ESSENCE OF TRUE LOVE – I have heard many reasons why Love must needs be blind, but this is the best of all I hold: his eyes are in his own mind.”

Pablo Neruda published his first collections of verses when he was young. Dedicated to a diplomatic career, during the Spanish Civil War he sided with the Republic and began writing “Spain in the Heart“, a collection of social and political poems. When he was elected senator in Chile, he had to resign because of his opposition to the political class in power. During his exile, he wrote “The Captain’s Verses” and “The Grapes and the Wind“. Nobel Prize winner for Literature, he died a few days after the military coup that overthrew the government of Salvador Allende. Celebrating life and its power, the places of his mind still relive the past with passionate eyes. “ONE MORE DAY – The days are not discarded, nor are they added, they are bees that burned with sweetness or unleashed the sting: the challenge continues, the journeys from honey to pain come and go. No, the net of the years is not frayed: there is no net. Nor drop by drop do they fall from the rivers: there is no river. Sleep does not divide life in two halves, not action, silence, virtue: life was like a stone, a single movement a single flame that flashed in the foliage, an arrow, a single one, slow or brisk, a metal that descended and descended burning in your bones.”

Despite his promising abilities as a student, his teachers considered him an example of precocious depravity. It is no coincidence that Charles Baudelaire is still remembered for his poetry collection “The Flowers of Evil“. His “Little Prose Poems“, on the other hand, represent the most successful and innovative experiment in prose poetry of the time. Baudelaire developed a passion for art and images from a young age. Discover the magic of the evocative verses of one of his poems on the union between man and the surrounding nature. “MAN, AND THE SEA – Free man, you will always love the sea! The sea is your mirror: you contemplate your soul in the infinite movement of the wave, and your spirit is no less bitter an abyss. You enjoy diving into the bosom of your image; you embrace it with your eyes and your arms, and at times your heart is distracted from its beating at the sound of this wild and untamed lament. Both of you are discreet and dark: man, no one has ever sounded the bottom of your abysses; no one has known, sea, your most intimate riches, so jealous are you of your every secret. But for infinite centuries without remorse or pity you have fought among yourselves, so great is your love for slaughter and death, oh eternal fighters, oh implacable brothers!”

Writer, poet and journalist, with his stories and poems about British soldiers in India and his stories for children, the Nobel Prize winner for Literature Joseph Rudyard Kipling gained notoriety for his He died at just 41 years old, but left us a poem on human value and how to grow up. “IF – If you can keep your temper when all about you are losing theirs, and blaming it on you. If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, and make allowance for the doubt too. If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, or being slandered, and not answer with slander, or being hated, and not be hated, and yet not seem too good, nor talk too wise. If you can dream, and not make dreams your master; If you can think, and not make thoughts your aim; If you can face Triumph and Ruin, and treat those two impostors just the same. If you can bear to hear the truths you have spoken twisted by knaves to deceive fools, or watch the things you have given your life to break down, and stoop to build them again with worn-out tools. If you can make one heap of all your fortunes, and risk them on one turn of pitch-and-toss, and lose, and begin again at your beginning, and never make a mistake. word of your loss. If you can force your heart and your sinew to serve your purpose long after they are gone, And hold on when there is naught left in you But the Will that says to them, Hold on! If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with kings, And never lose your common sense; If your enemies cannot hurt you, nor your dearest friends; If all men count with you, but none of them too much; If you can fill the unforgiving minute With one instant sixty seconds’ worth, Yours is the Earth and all that is in it, And, which is more, you’ll be a Man, my son!”

Sibilla Aleramo, writer, poet and journalist, is best remembered for her autobiographical novel “Una donna“, in which she depicts the condition of women in Italy between the 19th and 20th centuries. Her life was marked by personal and social challenges, but through her writing, she contributed to breaking down gender roles and rewriting the history of women, transforming pain into an opportunity for change. Discover it for yourself, reading this vibrant poem of hers dedicated to love. “IT IS THE DAWN AROUND – It is the dawn around, you yourself are the dawn. The sea wind beats on your beautiful face and on your intent eyes, dearer than all my glories, and the music of your spirit, and the grace of your deep heart, are, vibrant pledges of your entire life. O time that I will not see, crowns that I will no longer be able to give you, but this aroma, roses, incense and laurels, here for me in the dawn is exhaled, I am wide awake, and you look at me, sea wind I breathe from you and living Alps.”