From a Deep, Still, and Often Uncomfortable Place
To subscribe to my monthly emails, click here.
My head and my heart are here
When the people we love suffer, we suffer. when there is suffering anywhere in the world, we are adjacent to that suffering somehow. this is what i believe. we are also connected by the fascia of joy and compassion and service. So here we are - all together in this giant soup. what to do?
At this particular moment, someone dear to me is suffering deeply and all i can do is witness. I am also dealing with my own physical issues at the moment that slow me down - i mean i am sloooooooow on the city streets and subway stairs and it is f-ing weird…..and here is what i am learning (am i re-learning it? i don’t know) : when all I can do is witness pain, and when I slow down enough to be with my pain - in myself and in others, I see the world more clearly. I see all the slow people with canes on the subway and on the street. I am seeing the girl on the train across from me crying , i see peoples’ gorgeous open vulnerable faces in the coffee line, and i even see the vulnerability behind the faces of bravado and defensiveness and all of this - its like an acid trip - or Neo when he sees all the 0’s and 1’s. It’s those glimmers that I think we all have when we see and feel things really clearly, but briefly.
I don’t have any choice but to be slow right now - as excruciating and exquisite as it is moment to moment. And frankly, my dear suffering one will have to be patient too - although I have to credit them with much of this letter. They are the one who described to me - from the pit of anxiety and desperation - that all they could do was have compassion for the people at the root of their suffering. Even the cruelest and most aggressive people suffer - and probably more so.
I am finding meditation impossible right now. Once I asked Will Duncan -the wise meditation teacher - what do do when you are swimming in feeling and cannot meditate? He said, “well then you just pray’……so that’s what i have been doing - a ton of praying and allowing the breath and the tears and the glimmers of joy and ease too…….i won’t say it’s working because that isn’t the point, but I will say that its a lot of work!
In Quaker Meeting at the end of the silent time, you are invited to stand and ask the Friends in the room that you or someone you know be ‘held in the light’. You say their name and then everyone holds that stranger in the light. When you can , stop what you’re doing and hold someone in your life who suffers, in the light. or imagine yourself - still and peaceful and vulnerable - bathed in a shroud of light and at ease, if only for a moment.
I am sending you all love and light from a very still point.