A Certain Devastation
I’d been undertaking self-care this past week, though I don’t love that term. I was following the black dog into the shadows because if you can’t beat ‘em join ‘em. I was reading the Dhammapada, Pema Chodron, the usuals. I’d been reading Rilke. I had driven a friend home one evening and we were talking in the car in the dark about a similar loss that we’d each suffered. Hers more recent and mine quite far in the past. I wanted to offer something comforting and I wanted to say that time healed. And time does something, but it struck me that this past week was the 30th anniversary of my loss, and it was hitting me hard! and that time is trickier and wilier than all that. Because of the way that losses and griefs and disappointments will accumulate and compound and because of the way that our understanding of any of those large moments in life is an intricate and changing architecture. The loss, the finding out, for me, was suddenly raw again when for years it hadn’t been at all, and it felt like yesterday, however cliché that sounds, that I answered the early morning phone call, and then dressed and went to my university class in 18th century literature with the kind professor looking at me sidelong from time to time as he lectured, knowing, I felt, that something wasn’t quite right. In short, this experience made me realize and not for the first time that I know absolutely nothing. Who am I to offer consolation for grief when I scarcely know what to do with my own? And isn’t it interesting how all of those contradictions and minor and major griefs of the pandemic have acted upon the usual grief cycles. (And when I say interesting I mean damn it’s a bitch). My current theory has something to do with the darkness healing more than time does, but I suppose they’re working in tandem.
As an aside, because of the kindness of this particular professor, I took a LOT of classes in 18th century literature. Like, a weird number of them. I just trusted that prof.
So let me say that I’m truly a new kind of bone weary exhausted. But that I’m also making headway. I’ve been embracing the darkness and the shadows, which I think at times is the truest and healthiest way to work things out. I’m concentrating on the shadows, knowing sure, the light is there, but I don’t really want it right now. I’m going into the dark alone. But not alone. You know, you who have been in the darkness and come out. I’m not ready to squint in the brightness yet. But let me share my companions with you. The book A Healing Space, by Matt Licata is the one new one, the rest are re-reads. Licata talks about “spiritual opportunity” and how it comes with “a certain devastation and it is not something we are likely to enjoy or call forth voluntarily.” He says it is “a required darkening we must go through to begin our work anew, with fresh vision.” I find this very helpful, at the same time as yelling into the void: “I’ve really had it with your spiritual fucking opportunities!!!!”
In The Light Inside the Dark, John Tarrant says, “Darkening the darkness need not be done consciously — night will come to us of its own accord.” He quotes Eavan Boland: “If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift.” So there’s the idea of the darkness yielding gifts which I’ve found to be true in the past. He also says, “Soul does not abolish the difficulty of our lives, but brings a music to our pains — its gift is to make us less perfect and more whole.” And then, “When we are in pain, it is amazing how much tenderness we are capable of, and how much joy we can take in the happiness of others.” And that’s a reassuring thought right now. Because I do still very much want to take in the joy of others. I don’t want to lose the possibility that I’m still capable of tenderness….
So from there I had a listen to an On Being podcast….on Rilke. If you don’t know Rilke…well, I can’t live without Rilke. I had been thinking about how many lines from his prose and poetry rattle in my head on a daily basis. “You must change your life!” for example.
From the podcast:
“Don’t let your solitude obscure the presence of something within it that wants to emerge. Precisely this presence will help your solitude expand. People are drawn to the easy and to the easiest side of the easy. But it is clear that we must hold ourselves to the difficult, as it is true for everything alive.”
This part where Joanna Macy speaks really got to me:
“Well, it seems clear that we who are alive now are here for something and witnessing something for our planet that has not happened at any time before. And so we who are alive now and who are called to — who feel called, those of us who feel called to love our world — to love our world has been at the core of every faith tradition, to be grateful for it, to teach ourselves how to see beauty, how to treasure it, how to celebrate, how — if it must disappear, if there’s dying — how to be grateful. Every funeral, every memorial service is one where you give thanks for the beauty of that life or the quality of what — and so there’s a need, some of us feel — I know I do — to what looks like it must disappear, to say, “Thanks, you were beautiful. Thank you, mountains. Thank you, rivers.”
And we’re learning, how do you say goodbye to what is sacred and holy? And that goodbye has got to be — has got to be in deep thanksgiving for having been here, for being part of it. I kind of sound like I’m crying, and I do cry, but I cry from gladness, you know. I’m so glad to recognize each other. You can look in each other’s face, see how beautiful we are. It’s not too late to see that. We don’t want to die not knowing how beautiful this is.”
Rilke has a way of leading us in the darkness to what is sacred and holy, what is beautiful. In another book on Rilke I have by Stephanie Dowrick, In the Company of Rilke, she says, “what we pay attention to will grow stronger in our lives. What our “subject matter” is, what our obsessions are, shape us and may eventually describe us. To a remarkable degree we reflect the objects of our attention and, conversely, the objects of our attention reflect the direction in which we are choosing to gaze.” I’ve been reminded that the word “heartwork” comes from Rilke, as he exhorts his reader: “begin heartwork now.”
It’s Rilke who taught me this feeling:
“I would like to step out of my heart
and go walking beneath the enormous sky.”
Rilke who said:
“Lord: it is time. The huge summer has gone by.”
and
“Whoever has no house now, will never have one.
Whoever is alone will stay alone…”
It is Rilke who showed us how to transform emptiness and longing into something beautiful:
“Don’t you know yet? Fling the emptiness of your arms
into the spaces we breathe; perhaps the birds
will feel the expanded air with more passionate flying.”
I’ve gone on at length. As one does when one is trying to maneuver in the darkness. I’ve also been reading my Joseph Campbell, but that’s for another day perhaps. In the darkness, still one is pulled by various forces — beauty, love. And so I’ll end with more Rilke, from Letters on Life; I’ll end on love:
“There is no force in the world but love, and when you carry it within you, if you simply have it, even if you remain baffled as to how to use it, it will work its radiant effects and help you out of and beyond yourself: one must never lose this belief, one must simply (and if it were nothing else) endure in it!”
Here’s to sitting in the darkness, then, with beauty and love, just sitting on our laps like cats — an orange one and a gray one.
March 24, 2022
