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Dear friends and readers,

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Madeleine

Facing challenges

I sat up on the vaulting horse, fighting tears. A little voice inside me was crying, “I can’t do this, it’s no use!” My riding instructor read my desperate face and smiled encouragingly. “Let’s try again,” she said, gently.

At the age of 65, learning to ride a horse is not easy. Especially if you, like me, have memories of a clumsy childhood, taunted by other children and even parents. During my first lesson, I loved being on the horse, moving with its cadence. But mounting and dismounting had been a real challenge and I had misgivings about the whole thing. The instructor decided to help me master this part first.

After maybe 10 mounts and dismounts, I suddenly got the trick of keeping my feet back and down, keeping my arms straight, and shifting my weight. I swung my leg up and over effortlessly. An elated instructor gave me the high-five. After a few more practice runs on the vaulting horse, I was ready for the real thing. Mounting and dismounting went like a dream. The next day, I went out and bought myself riding breeches.

When we run up against a real challenge, there is always a moment that we want to walk away. There is always a little voice inside, whispering, “It’s no use, don’t even try.” Scolding the voice, pushing it away, usually doesn’t help. We end up angry, frustrated, sometimes even damaged.

Gentle patience is needed. I have found this true of everything: the relationship that isn't working, the painting that doesn’t seem to be working, the text of a blog that doesn’t sound right, trying to build a new website with WordPress. Take a deep breath, take a short break, think about what you might be doing wrong, and go back to it. Be as kind and patient with yourself as you would wish others to be with you.

And yes, I am facing another challenge as well. In preparation of the appearance of my new book, Passage of the Stork, this coming spring, I decided to build a new website. It will integrate both this blog and the information on my present website. It means mastering the intricacies of WordPress and calls for patience and gentle persistence. The changeover will be announced on the blog as soon as I’m finished.

Photo courtesy of Yvonne Roosen.

Choices

A client, musing over her life, told me, “Happiness is a choice.” She continued, thoughtfully, “Feeling unhappy should be a choice as well. But when I feel unhappy, I lose sight of any other choices.”

Which I think is a perfect description of what happens when life overwhelms us. We lose sight of our choices and can only perceive a dark tunnel, leading nowhere. The choices are still there, it is our perception that has changed. If you have ever felt depressed and had someone tell you that you will feel better eventually, you know how strongly despair can hold a person in its grip.

Desperation often feels like, “I could be happy, if only…” A list of conditions follows: the relationship you had hoped for, the job you wanted, the clean air, water, and soil you wish for the world.

In the face of the desperation I sometimes feel about all that is so terribly wrong with the world, I have to remind myself to look at the beauty in the world as well. It means learning to live with the paradox: I’m a member of the human race, which seems to be bent on destroying the world we live in by any means possible. I am also filled with wonder at how beautiful and precious life on earth is. Including human life in all its complexity.

Instead of losing myself in one side of the paradox, I choose to consciously stand in both sides. For me, the best antidote to despair is to go out into nature and stand, breathless, at the sight of fragile, beautiful things. Like spider webs in morning dew or tiny birds, fluttering through the bushes in the garden. And then return to the problems at hand, determined not to turn my face away.

Yes, happiness is a choice. We can choose to close our eyes and turn our face away. We can also choose to constantly remind ourselves of life’s beauty. We can choose to do all that is within the limits of our possibilities for the things we believe in.

Listening carefully

One of my favorite David Whyte poems begins like this:

“Sometimes
if you move carefully
through the forest

breathing
like the ones
in the old stories

who could cross
a shimmering bed of leaves
without a sound, […]”

I find this quality of being quietly present in the world very challenging. Even when I’m alone, I tend to be caught up in projects, inner chatter, doing things… anything but silence.

And so I practice sitting silently for at least a half hour daily, listening attentively to those very quiet voices deep inside me that otherwise would not be heard.

When, a few weeks ago, I got so caught up actively “doing” in the world that I started skipping this practice, I was gifted with a dream:

I’m walking through a sand-dune landscape. I stop to rest and hear very faint rustling. When I look carefully, I see two translucent puffball shapes, very similar to dandelion puffs but larger. As I gaze at them, I see beaks and eyes starting to emerge. I realize that this is the (dream) way that baby swans emerge into the world. But when I make a movement, I startle the swans and they disappear into thin air. I study the ground carefully and see traces of down forming a faint trail. I walk softly, following the trail to a hollow space in a rock cliff. A bush is growing in the hollow with similar downy shapes on it. I realize that the 'baby swans' have found this place to hide and feel relieved that they are safe.

The dream was reminding me to sit quietly again, to listen to what is almost inaudible and see what is almost invisible.

David Whyte’s poem continues:

“you come
to a place
who’s only task

is to trouble you
with tiny
but frightening requests

conceived out of nowhere
but in this place
beginning to lead everywhere. […]

When we do sit quietly and listen carefully, we hear things that can shape our lives and lead us to where we really need to go. Which is not necessarily where we’re heading right now. It is a challenge and a blessing.


(Poem Sometimes by David Whyte, from River Flow: New and Selected Poems, Langley, Many Rivers Press 2012)

Grief and loss

The death of anyone or anything is tragic. Whether we are directly involved or witnesses from a distance, the presence of death resonates inside us and reminds us of the impermanence of our own lives. And so, the sight of a dead swan, lying half-submerged in a marsh, tugged at my heartstrings. But it was the response of the swan’s mate that really brought a lump to my throat. She (or possibly he) would not leave to join the other swans but swam for days in the vicinity of her mate. I could feel her sense of loss, of not being able to grasp exactly how her world had suddenly changed so drastically.

This incident, and the death of an eagle chick at a nest with a live webcam, triggered a debate among my bird-watching friends. Do birds mourn? Do they experience emotions of grief and loss? Or are we just projecting this? On the far side of the polemic are the people who are certain that birds and animals have the entire gamut of emotions humans do and maybe more. Way over on the other side are those who pronounce any attempt to ascribe human behavior or emotions to birds as anthropomorphizing. There is little understanding between the two groups. There are, however, attempts to find a middle way.

There was a shocking, or maybe touching, moment at the webcam when the mother eagle fed a bite of the flesh of the dead chick to the remaining chick. Then she removed the body from the nest. Was it a practical solution? Or a farewell ritual?

At the core of our experience of grief is the feeling that something that had formed us, has now vanished, leaving us unformed again. The partner we were building a life with is gone. Who are we if we are not in that life? The child we had nurtured is gone. Who can we nurture now? I can remember, when my mother passed after a long illness, I felt as if the glue that held me together was dissolving. I didn’t understand my reaction, she was old, very ill, and her death came as a welcome closure. The essence of my grief, of this dissolving, was incomprehensible.

When we try to understand our grief, we start creating stories around it. The stories help us soften the sense of loss so it doesn’t feel as raw. But in doing so, we go away from the grief. We don’t allow it to cleanse and heal us. Grief is a very important and very honest emotion.

And so I do think the swan felt the essence of grief. Her existence as a swan with a mate had changed in some terrible, inexplicable way and she was lost. Numbly swimming near her mate until the tug of biology would tempt her to rejoin the other swans and begin again. The biggest difference between birds and humans is that we build stories around our grief, trying to understand it and basically numbing ourselves to the devastating pain. Birds and animals undergo it, without understanding, and eventually move on.

Terror

When I try to imagine people so caught up in their sense of righteousness, so filled with intolerance and hatred of “the others”, that they are capable of murdering in cold blood for an ideal, it terrifies me.

And when I try to imagine how intolerance and hatred simply breeds more intolerance and hatred, keeping mankind imprisoned in a chain reaction, a spiral of violence and terror that seems to have no end, it terrifies me even more.

This evening a memory popped into my head: during a performance of Béla Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, my mother turned to me and whispered, “Can you hear the world crying?” During the past 24 hours I have heard the world crying.

I want to turn my face away, forget that it’s happening, hug my loved ones, and contemplate the beauty of a single flower in the early morning sunlight.

I think that many of us feel this way. It’s almost too much horror to take in. I can only feel anguish and despair… and this incredible terror… for the world.

Others react with anger. Powerless anger, blindly seeking an outlet. And there are those who do turn their faces away in helpless denial.

The only thing I can do is to allow myself to feel the anguish, allow myself to hear the world crying. As I close my eyes, I see people torn apart with grief and unbelief. I see fists clenched in rage and powerlessness. I see a mother weeping over her dead son, screaming out to her God, how could he allow this to happen? I see a father, bowed with grief, because he knows that his God does not want this, this terror that his son is a part of.

I breathe all this in, trying to take it into my heart, crying for the world. And I breathe out gentle compassion, sending loving kindness to all of us who need it. I repeat this over and over again. This is a Buddhist practice called tonglen. Is it sufficient to heal the world? Probably not. But it’s the only thing I can do that makes any sense to me.

The most important thing we can remember is to allow ourselves to feel the distress. Don't push it away or block it. Keep feeling.

Afraid of the dark

I had planned to write this blog during the holidays. The theme has been bouncing around in my head since the Winter Solstice. I kept postponing the moment to sit down and write: until after the cookies were baked, after the Christmas visits had been made, after my trip to France for the New Year’s celebration. Now it’s January and I’m only now sitting down to write.

A little nagging voice in my head keeps saying, “It’s always like this! You never keep your own promises to yourself. You postpone everything. You’re always messing things up!” I know this voice, it complains a lot. Like a tiresome parent or an grumpy lover. Telling me that I never do things the way I should and that I am, simply, insufficient.

I could deal with this voice in different ways. I could believe what the voice is saying and feel terrible about myself. I’m sure we all remember feeling guilty about ourselves because the little voice in our heads tells us that we should feel guilty.

I could turn away gently, ignoring what the voice is saying, knowing that it isn’t true. Aware that it is the nagging voice of a critical parent from my past, I could tell it to go away. It probably would... briefly. The fact is... it does keep coming back.

What I choose to do, is to sit down with the little nagging voice and listen to it. Let it have its say, let it rant and rave at me until it has said everything it needs to say and more. And then, simply, acknowledge it. “I hear you.” No discussions, no right or wrong, just let that part of me know that she has been heard.

Which brings me to the theme of the blog. We all are afraid of the dark, in so many ways. We exorcise our terror of the dark by building a fire, turning on the light, going into a lit room. But the dark doesn’t go away, it’s always out there somewhere. And we never learn to orient ourselves this way, never develop cat’s eyes to see where we’re going. We remain dependent on flashlights and fires to survive in the dark.

We exorcise our fear of our own dark places by telling ourselves that they aren’t true, we aren’t like that. And our dark places simply continue to pop up and bother us every time we’re tired or unprepared. The practice here is to befriend our dark places, our shadows, to acknowledge them. We don’t have to agree with them. But, just like grumpy lovers, if we take the time to listen to what they have to say, they eventually stop complaining.

The little nagging voice in my head is quiet now. Happy that I have finally written the blog but also happy that she was heard.