How to Hold What Harrows You

We are shaped by all we have suffered — by what harrows us — and in turn shape our lives by how we hold our harrowing. Harrow shares its Middle English root with harvest. It is by suffering, and by what we make of our suffering, that our personhood ripens in us, that we come to reap what evolution sowed long ago when mitochondria first set out to become mind — our capacity for empathy, for doubt, for art.

Harrowing may be the hallmark of our humanity — an AI cannot be harrowed because it does not have hopes, only directives. This may be why John Steinbeck considered hope “the tragic miracle of consciousness” — miraculous because it violates the laws of probability to consecrate the possible, and tragic because it is constantly colliding with the will of the world, constantly devastated by the impartial brutality of time and chance. Harrowing is the price we pay for hope, for being fully human.

And so, a poem:

HARROWING
by Maggie Smith

This world is harrowing, harrowing,
all harrow, as if harrow were what
the world is made of, what we are
made of, as if harrow were strings
to be strummed, tendons and veins
to be strummed, as if harrow
could be snapped between the teeth,
the word one letter from the white meal
inside our bones, the meal we could make
of ourselves, harrow, two letters
from the bird who might strum
with its beak what the body is made of,
what the world is made of, and in that
strumming become the song.

“Harrowing” comes from Maggie Smith’s benediction of a book Good Bones (public library). Couple it with Nick Cave on how to use your harrowing, then revisit Marcus Aurelius on turning your suffering into strength.

donating = loving

For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.

newsletter

The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.