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Go into yourself and see how you are feeling. Now go into yourself a little more gently. And now again, a little more gently.
I lay on my back, trying to calm the static in my body. Responsibilities, sounds, desires, fears, a wrestles sense of urgency, and ubiquitous anxiety interweaves into a dense thread that tightens around me. I don’t know if I’m supposed to untangle or rest in the center of the knot.
I am amid, we are amid, one of life’s significant cataclysmic shifts. These uncomfortable sharp turns where we are unable to see around the bend. Where we are holding on with knuckles, white, to a cart careening at reckless speed, we brace against the force, hopelessly trying to keep order, grasping at all the details as they scatter like loose threads out the back of the barrow. Feeling the contents of global and personal strife so close to our face, it’s as if a broad palm covers our mouth and nose. Searing hot winds reach the very center of the heart. Singe the hair of our arms.
We fight and resist like we always do when the world feels too much to bear, and then when we least expect it, we splay ourselves open on the floor, and grace comes from behind and warps us in something that feels like love. We stop our kicking and screaming and fall back into the self that knows somewhere deep: this too is beautiful, this too. This barreling through unimaginable discomfort serves something greater. When we are heaved toward our life against our will, we find our compassionate edge. The aperture of our lens widens to include both our pain and the unbearable beauty breathing beside it, like the fire that comes to renew life. This phase serves a purpose. We sometimes need to burn to reveal the most tender, hidden, and forgotten parts of ourselves.
The smoke was so thick in August it wasn’t safe to breathe the air. We closed the doors and windows. Built puzzles, thanked each piece of food we ate. We busied our self, trying not to stop and stare too long at the ash raining down. “I don’t like looking outside. It makes me feel sick,” my youngest said to me as he asked me to close his blind. Our last thought before sleep: may the elements calm and find peace. We woke in the morning to a steady stream of rain. I lifted my face to the sky and cried. Gratitude never felt so profound. This, too, is beautiful.
My dad fell unconscious to the floor, with no one around. Split his forehead and chewed his tongue raw. He suffered a seizure and remembered nothing. I arrived at the hospital to see him looking like a tiny babe in a big bed. Afraid and holding on, like all of us, to the lip of a tipping cup. But I carried a piece of his home in my hand and pushed it hard against his heart. It was like a panel opened and turned back on the light. This, too, is beautiful.
My tender child, the one who lets the whole world into his heart, is bending into his shape. I set him free as if he was mine, to begin with, into the wild, out of my control. My body aches under the weight of its worry, and yet I am squeezed simultaneously by a love that knows no limits. A love that leaches out from my feet and feeds the soil and seed, I’m sure of it, because of its magnitude. This, too, is beautiful.
The anxious mother alone in her home with new time for herself wonders where she is under all her duties. She wonders what revelations wait in her corners. She stands in the unfamiliar, unnerving place and smiles, for something is awaiting its discovery. It has been calling to her in her sleep. She has time now to listen. This, too, is beautiful. This, too.
Here we meet on a shared road, careening down the same track, united in our determined desire to save the only life that we can. Thank you for being part of my story, and I am blessed to be a part of yours. We are in this together as collaborators of the soul.
Perspective Pivot:
Where can you find grace at the edge of your suffering?
Is there something else besides the challenge that you are receiving and learning?
Can you widen your aperture enough to include the pain, complexity, and love, and not miss either?
Folding In 1