Margaret Atwood on the Self as verbal relations

This is your hand. . .

A couple of years ago I came across a documentary on Margaret Atwood, and in it there is a reading of a poem that I had never heard before. I nearly fell off the couch when I heard it because the poem is as beautiful an introduction to RFT and the Self that I’ve ever heard.

Here is the poem in its entirety:

You Begin by Margaret Atwood

You begin this way:
this is your hand,
this is your eye,
that is a fish, blue and flat
on the paper, almost
the shape of an eye.
This is your mouth, this is an O
or a moon, whichever
you like. This is yellow.
Outside the window
is the rain, green
because it is summer, and beyond that
the trees and then the world,
which is round and has only
the colors of these nine crayons.
This is the world, which is fuller
and more difficult to learn than I have said.
You are right to smudge it that way
with the red and then
the orange: the world burns.
Once you have learned these words
you will learn that there are more
words than you can ever learn.
The word hand floats above your hand
like a small cloud over a lake.
The word hand anchors
your hand to this table,
your hand is a warm stone
I hold between two words.
This is your hand, these are my hands, this is the world,
which is round but not flat and has more colors
than we can see.
It begins, it has an end,
this is what you will
come back to, this is your hand.

There is so much power in these words that I structured an entire RFT training around them, and use this poem as supplemental material to help people understand the birth of the Self through verbal ability.

When we are babies, adults begin labeling the world around us, as well as narrating what we are doing. In the beginning these words are nonsense to us, but as we grow we start to associate the words with concepts and experience. It is this process, which takes over a year, that results in the formation of the Verbal Self—or the Deictic-I—which remains at the center of our experience as a point of relation forever. The center circle in the ACT Matrix represents this concept.

I often say that we have two births.

The birth of our Body, which is capable of sensory perception and motivated by basic survival needs.

And the birth of our Self, which comes a little bit later, and is constructed through relationships between a stable observer and the world around us and within us.

I hope you find these words as beautiful as I do.

Respectfully Submitted,

Jacob Martinez // Through The ACT Matrix