In 1988, while I was living in Berkeley with my husband Kurt, who was on a computer network assignment, I came across a book: The Enneagram: An Ancient system for Understanding Yourself and Others in Your Life,by Helen Palmer. I couldn’t put the book down as I read descriptions of nine personality types and found one that sounded exactly like me discussing myself and the world as I see it. I called Kurt over and he found a description in the book with images and language just like he uses about himself and his activities.

When we returned to our home in Seattle, we enrolled in courses taught by a couple who had studied with Helen Palmer. I also discovered that Jesuits were teaching courses in the Enneagram through Seattle University. I went to several of the intensives, and I learned quite a lot more about the system, myself, my spirituality, and how writing was a part of my spirituality.

I learned what scholar Charles Tart meant when he wrote that the teachings stressed “the existential and spiritual virtues that could be developed if we recaptured the essential life energy that was going into pathological defenses against our real nature.”

I had already discovered for myself by learning to write poetry and studying with master poets as I approached 30, that writing was my ticket to authenticity, to knowing myself and behaving as myself in the world. It was my way of relating to the people I knew in the world. Discovering the truths that finished poems bring had been both frightening and life enhancing. Through poetry, I was saying what I was perceiving, when all my life up until then, I had tried not say too much. I had grown up the child of first-generation Americans (my parents were born in New York to Russian, Polish and Austrian immigrants). The whole family was caught in the conflict between old world traditions and the demands of assimilation. Emotions and restrictions and fears of having the wrong image ran high. Guilt was both a motivator and an inhibitor; to examine oneself and oneÕs careless and damaging intrusions into other family member’s lives and psyches was not allowed. In my childhood, I had never wanted to be an apple cart upsetter, but coming of age in the 60’s and then writing in the 80’s and 90’s made me one.

In the Enneagram there are nine personality types, each with a chief feature that defines an habitual mode of attention, similar to a neurosis or a defense, that covers up oneÕs spiritual essence. I am point two: “the giver.” Givers were raised with the understanding, Helen Palmer writes, that survival depended on the approval of others, and that relationship is the most important area of existence. Twos alter themselves to meet other people’s ideas of desirability. Twos work hard to help others and make themselves indispensable to the goals those others are trying to attain. Thereby, twos can sometimes leave themselves little time to know themselves.

My mother was the first person I was hooked into helping. I could feel her wishes as if they were my own. And I tried to keep myself from going against any of them. What a departure and “disturbance of the peace” (as Jack Gilbert calls poetry) my first real poem was, and how scared I felt to publish it when Writer’s Forum in Colorado accepted it. And how absolutely fitting this was as my first poem because it was a bulldozer, a plough, a machine for space clearing. It was an announcement.

My Mother Was Here Today

My mother was here today to try on the children
like garments in Bloomingdale’s,
her praise stalking them for lines to flatter her,
while coins spilled from her fingers and perfume
crowded the heavy aroma of feelings.

Near the light my daughter crayons. I concentrate
by the window where silver dollar plants
and bear grass arrange my eyes.
“Emily,” I ask my daughter, “what shall I
give to a 50 year old woman who makes
my eyes suddenly hard as diamonds?”

earrings, I am thinking.

“Mom,” my daughter asks me, “what can I draw
for a 29-year-old woman
who knows I won’t do a flower or a truck?
We decide on a girl dangling from the moon.
Spreading arcs of yellow my daughter
works to make the sky larger.

The news this poem delivered was that I was going to embark on an adventure that would not meet with approval, that was hooked to the moon and therefore creativity and would require a bigger horizon. And I had the support of my very young daughter who has always felt and known truth.

Every number in the Enneagram is working to overcome a particular Òchief passionÓ or ÒsinÓ that defines their unevolved mode of attention. To evolve, a two must achieve the virtue of humility and no longer pridefully jump to thinking they are indispensible. I wrote my way, first in poetry, and later in essays, from living through others by helping them and getting their approval to understanding myself and my own needs. In fact, I understand now, with help from the Enneagram studies and life experience, that knowing my own needs allows me to extend just the right amount of giving to others — exactly what is required, no strings attached.

Eighteen years after I published the poem about my mother, I wrote this one for my daughter:

For My Daughter Who Has Gone to Study in Japan

Second full moon in one month tonight.
Through my skylight, I watch
it take its high place before I set binoculars
outside on a tripod and search its bright surface.

I see a navel on the moon as if it hung once
like a large fruit, white lines holding
its roundness like the ones on an orange under the peel.

I think of your arms growing tight around me
as your flight’s boarding began and remember
to you the moon was always a brave soul,
lying on its back with its tiny little toes in the air,
alone in the big blue sky and the funny moon didn’t care.

I sang these words to you and never wondered
if the planet that gave birth to the moon
was as brave as her offspring, if vines and trees
mourned the dropping of their ready fruit.

As the first fall fog rolls in from Puget Sound, I walk
toward our front door crunching the fallen berries
of our mountain ash trees, almost believing
you will be inside, a girl once again under table light
folding origami paper into cranes, crossing cooking
skewers for a mobile to hang them from.

I sit awhile on the front porch staring into wet leaves,
listening for the quiet song earth sings, her belly
full of stems, her daughter far away and bright.

The moon is still an important linking symbol for me to my daughter and to creativity. The sky is larger in my life with her than it was in my life with my mother–I can let her go with all the joy and poignancy which that act demands of me. She is not here to serve my needs, although my love for her serves my poetry.

It is perhaps no surprise, since I am a two, the helper, that my muse insists I be a teacher and facilitator of writing as well as a writer. In this area, also, I am learning when to help a student and when to hold back, when what I have to say will be helpful and when listening is the better idea. I am compelled to write because I can’t understand my life without writing, and I am honored to teach others.

****

Poem of Sustenance

This is the poem that stands
in the moonlight singing,
that rises from sleep
because in darkness stars
are seen, because in darkness
you see what you will
and in darkness you dream.

And when fear washes
you away and the moon
is a cold light vanishing,
this is the poem that swims
among the coral casting
its net for the small
yellow fish or the stars.

****

For more information about poetry and the Enneagram visit: http://www.breakoutofthebox.com/table6.htm

For more information about the Enneagram and the history of teaching this system of thought in the United States visit:
http://www.enneagraminstitute.com/
http://www.internationalenneagram.org/history/History_of_the_IEA.html
http://www.heall.com/enneagram/articles/newsweek.html