Too often, we only have indifference, neglect, or even contempt for ourselves. Yet it is self-compassion that opens our hard shells to new beginnings and out of the illusion of futility. It is imperative in these times that we show ourselves the compassion we wish others would show to the suffering. Who among us is not suffering at times and who among us is not worthy of compassion?
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Prescription for the Disillusioned
by Rebecca del Rio
Come new to this day. Remove the rigid overcoat of experience, the notion of knowing, the beliefs that cloud your vision.
Leave behind the stories of your life. Spit out the sour taste of unmet expectation. Let the stale scent of what-ifs waft back into the swamp of your useless fears.
Arrive curious, without the armor of certainty, the plans and planned results of the life you’ve imagined. Live the life that chooses you, new every breath, every blink of your astonished eyes.
A poem by Jan Richardson tells of the luminosity that can come from integrating one’s grief and letting it set fire to the fractured parts within. As caregivers to loved ones, nature, the world, we are burdened with an enormous responsibility that may feel like a suffocating weight. However, this weight can be used as alchemy to form diamonds.
Click the picture for the video or read the poem below
How the Stars Get in Your Bones
by Jan Richardson
Sapphire, diamond, emerald, quartz: think of every hard thing that carries its own brilliance, shining with the luster that comes only from uncountable ages in the earth, in the dark, buried beneath unimaginable weight, bearing what seemed impossible, bearing it still.
And you, shouldering the grief you had thought so solid, so impermeable, the terrible anguish you carried as a burden now become— who can say what day it happened?— a beginning.
See how the sorrow in you slowly makes its own light, how it conjures its own fire.
See how radiant even your despair has become in the grace of that sun.
Did you think this would happen by holding the weight of the world, by giving in to the press of sadness and time?
I tell you, this blazing in you— it does not come by choosing the most difficult way, the most daunting; it does not come by the sheer force of your will. It comes from the helpless place in you that, despite all, cannot help but hope, the part of you that does not know how not to keep turning toward this world, to keep turning your face toward this sky, to keep turning your heart toward this unendurable earth, knowing your heart will break but turning it still.
I tell you, this is how the stars get in your bones.
This is how the brightness makes a home in you, as you open to the hope that burnishes every fractured thing it finds and sets it shimmering, a generous light that will not cease, no matter how deep the darkness grows, no matter how long the night becomes.
Still, still, still the secret of secrets keeps turning in you, becoming beautiful, becoming blessed, kindling the luminous way by which you will emerge, carrying your shattered heart like a constellation within you, singing to the day that will not fail to come.
Today I share with you this poem by Marie Howe, “What The Living Do.”
During those mundane days when I feel trapped in an ordinary life and perhaps feeling the losses more strongly, I find myself repeating the title of this poem. This is what the living do.
Life is a container for both our gratitude and grief. And it is grief that is felt most strongly in the repetition of tasks and the silence of the night. It is the way back to gratitude. And it is what the living do.
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Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there. And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up
waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we spoke of. It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through
the open living-room windows because the heat’s on too high in here and I can’t turn it off. For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,
I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,
I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it. Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.
What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it.
But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass, say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep
for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless: I am living. I remember you.
A short contemplation of nature and now for this Sunday morning. This is where I find divinity and strength, though hard at times it may be. I sit or take a walk outside if even for a few moments, and notice the smallest of creatures in flight or running across the path. And I remember, everything is divine, everything will pass out of this world. This world is so beautiful if I can just stop and breathe into it.
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One or Two Things
Mary Oliver
1 Don’t bother me. I’ve just been born.
2 The butterfly’s loping flight carries it through the country of the leaves delicately, and well enough to get it where it wants to go, wherever that is, stopping here and there to fuzzle the damp throats of flowers and the black mud; up and down it swings, frenzied and aimless; and sometimes
for long delicious moments it is perfectly lazy, riding motionless in the breeze on the soft stalk of some ordinary flower.
3 The god of dirt came up to me many times and said so many wise and delectable things, I lay on the grass listening to his dog voice, crow voice, frog voice; now, he said, and now,
and never once mentioned forever,
4 which has nevertheless always been, like a sharp iron hoof, at the center of my mind.
5 One or two things are all you need to travel over the blue pond, over the deep roughage of the trees and through the stiff flowers of lightning—some deep memory of pleasure, some cutting knowledge of pain.
6 But to lift the hoof! For that you need an idea.
7 For years and years I struggled just to love my life. And then the butterfly rose, weightless, in the wind. “Don’t love your life too much,” it said,
Over the past two years, I have experienced more loss than my entire life before this time. I know I am not the only one. It has been a dark night for our world, a darkness we must walk through in order to exit, hopefully, wiser and more compassionate. There is a quote I like that helps me remember that the darkness must be embraced and listened to for the alchemy to transform ourselves and our world. “The only way out is through. The only way through is in.”
However, this is only half of the alchemy. We have been taught in our culture that, after a short time, the only acceptable way to grieve is behind closed doors, alone. And it does not address the daily grief that those in caregiving roles shoulder almost daily. We have been taught to “get over it,” “move on,” “do not burden others.”
What we have forgotten in our culture is the other half of the grieving process, the way in which the transformation can happen for us as individuals and as a society. We in the “modern world” have lost the communal experience, the vessel in which we come together as a community and hear and hold each other through our grief.
This poem by Rainer Maria Rilke may speak to that reaching out. Whom is he asking for help? A divine presence? A loved one? His ancestors? His community?
I hope this poem gives you some solace and perhaps an answer for your own situation.
It’s possible I am pushing through solid rock in flintlike layers, as the ore lies, alone; I am such a long way in I see no way through, and no space: everything is close to my face, and everything close to my face is stone.
I don’t have much knowledge yet in grief so this massive darkness makes me small.
You be the master: make yourself fierce, break in: then your great transforming will happen to me, and my great grief cry will happen to you.[1]
This is another poem that I contemplate almost daily, The Art of Fugue VI by Jan Zwicky. Why is it that the patterns of our lives repeat themselves? What is it that we need to understand, hear, or learn? I listen more intently now to the quiet between the moments of my noisy life. Perhaps someday, I will hear what I need to hear.
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The Art of Fugue, Part VI Jan Zwicky
Once again, the moment of impossible transition, the bow, its silent voice above the string. Let us say the story goes like this. Let us say you could start anywhere. Let us say you took your splintered being by the hand, and led it to the centre of a room: starlight through the floorboards of the soul. The patterns of your life repeat themselves until you listen. Forgive this. Say now what you have to say.
Recently, I have found much comfort in this 12th-Century poem, especially during this time when everything seems to be changing and out of our control. In order to truly feel the depth of appreciation for those people and beings we love, whether a parent, a pet or a flower, it is necessary to see that their end will come as well. Everything we love, we will lose. It is an unchanging law of this physical world. I try to walk the path of holding these two seeming opposites in my hands. Grief and gratitude. They are twins of the same mother, love.
Here is the 12th-Century poem in written and video form (click the picture above). The author is unknown.
The Grace Tree 