A few years ago I was on an extended solitude retreat on an island off the coast of Washington. With no books, television, music or other people to distract me, I spent the better part of three weeks praying and, for lack of a better word, feeling. As the days passed, I found, to my surprise, that the words that articulated my prayers and emotions were most often not my own. Hopkins, Tennyson, Longfellow, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Dante all wound their way from my subconscious—the graveyard of dozens of advanced English Literature classes—and became a language I didn’t know I had.
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