Tag: fear

Woman peers through venetian blinds

Kindness

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Foreigner, come.
Enter my house.
My door has been tightly closed in these times.
Plagues are about,
and there is much pain to fear.

You have been there, outside,
for a thousand and more days now.
I catch you watching me through the windows.
Patient, attentive, and curious.

Yet I keep out anyone new.
Those I don’t know well enough,
to trust,
to rely upon,
to admit to my shelter
against the pain.

Today, though, something changed.
Today, my fears were upended
for one brisk moment,
worn down,
by a curiosity
of my own.

I suppose I could not hold back the smile on seeing you.
How, after all, could you wait so long?
so patiently?
so interested?
so willing?
yet so peacefully un-insistent?

What in this world does that?

I can see now,
you have been the friend all this time
who came knocking
because of the grave circumstances.

And all the while, I closed my door to your goodness,
I guarded myself against the unfamiliar.
How foolish to keep out
the best friend I will ever know.

You bring no danger.
You are generous and ask for nothing.
You are gentle, spirited, and light-hearted.
Your touch is so delicate
it breaks hearts open
to God.

Come then, friend,
enter my home.
Become the warm tea I will drink
and the comfort we discover as
– in meeting –
we arrive at our true purpose together.

After all, we were made for each other
you and I,

pain

and the kindness that waits for it.

I made my soul familiar — with her extremity —
That at the last, it should not be a novel Agony —
But she, and Death, acquainted —
Meet tranquilly, as friends —
Salute, and pass, without a Hint —
And there, the Matter ends —

– Emily Dickenson

In front of a faded wall mural of Donald Trump with an American flag background, a real hand holds up a real flag

America, the Irrational.

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In the past two weeks, I’ve been unreasonably addicted to the impeachment hearings. They’ve taken over my life, dispiriting me, swallowing up precious windows of time. Driving my children home from school, as the chatter slows down and we could settle together into silence, I turn up the volume on the radio. Instead of focussing on a writing project beckoning my attention, I’m one-hand-coffee-one-hand-remote in front of the TV.

It’s big news, of course. History-making. As a citizen, I’m called to witness that history, but let’s be honest, there’s a deeper story here. My unreasonable, addictive preoccupation with the impeachment hearings belies a hope that if I watch for long enough, some ‘truth’ or ‘fact’ might magically jump off the screen to save us all. Continue reading “America, the Irrational.” →

'Girl With Balloon' wall stencil by the artist Banksy showing a girl in black with her hand outstretched towards a a heart-shaped balloon flying just out of reach.

PART TWO: Separation and Reconnection (2 of 5)

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Each experience of love nudges us toward the Story of Interbeing because it only fits into that story and defies the logic of Separation. ― Charles Eisenstein

I start on the screen of my choosing. I am on a zoom call, Dec. 6, 2017. Here, in encountering my isolation I forge two new relationships. The first was with the woman on the screen, a therapist and member of what Glennon Doyle in her best-selling memoir Love Warrior refers to as “the universal underground of sisterhood.” The screen is a compromise on our being together in physical presence, but this does not stop something memorable from happening that day because this is where it started. This is where the second relationship was born with the part of myself that had been trapped in the wallpaper of my own life for decades. Continue reading “PART TWO: Separation and Reconnection (2 of 5)” →

PART TWO: The Inward Turn – Exploring the Soul of Citizenship In The Trump Era (1 of 5)

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Madness in Mad Times

In 1892, Charlotte Perkins Gilman published a short story titled The Yellow Wallpaper. Gilman’s female protagonist was relegated to an upstairs room by her husband, a doctor, for a ‘rest cure’ to address her ‘nervous depression, despair, and hysteria.’ (Gilman had been given this “treatment” for depression herself, by a Dr. Silas Mitchell).

Enclosed, trapped, powerless, and pathologized (gaslighted), Gilman’s character became intoxicated by the wallpaper in the room. In the first third of the story, we find her in what seems like a petty preoccupation with the wallpaper, irritated and angered by the pattern in it, the sallow, yellow color, the sheer incongruence of the design. But as the pages turn, her intrigue with the wallpaper grows, over time ‘finding’ a woman trapped within its patterned contours.

The story continues to chronicle the protagonist’s building ‘madness,’ as she alternates between self-doubt and engagement with the woman (sometimes women) she is able to discern in the wallpaper. The protagonist refers to the guidance of those who are taking care of her, guidance she originally obliges but comes over time to question, then confront. Before long, you can’t help but join in her mounting irritation with the way they dismiss and minimize her distress and coddling her into ‘recovery.’ Over the course of the story, Gilman’s character builds the capacity (in a kind of defiant, madness) to dismiss these ‘caretakers’ who pity her condition (again, gaslighting). She finds an intimacy with her direct experience, learning to trust what she is seeing, feeling, discovering in a conscious awakening to a self-authorized reality of her own.

A feminist is any woman who tells the truth about her life. – Virginia Woolf

Gilman’s story culminates with the protagonist successfully stripping the wallpaper off the walls setting free, to her great satisfaction, the woman she sees caught there. When her husband opens the door in the final passage, he finds his wife proclaiming in delight: “I got out at last, I got out at last!” Said husband then faints and we are left with the image of a woman crawling in circles around him in the room, ‘mad’ and elated. We are also left with a disturbing but strangely intoxicating paradox about the relationship between a woman’s madness and her liberation. Continue reading “PART TWO: The Inward Turn – Exploring the Soul of Citizenship In The Trump Era (1 of 5)” →

PART ONE: One Woman, Post-Trump Stress Disorder & the Whole Catastrophe – The Political Just Got a Whole Lot More Personal

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November 9, 2016 – USA. Over the last half-century, a number of stark memories have been seared into America’s psyche so shocking or painful or unexpected that they live largely unmetabolized as an image, a recollection, something we turn to each other to say: “Where were you when it happened?”  The images of the balcony of the Lorraine Motel the day after Martin Luther King was shot. The slowly driving motorcade and Jackie O. scrambling to climb back over the front seat towards her husband.  Two planes flying into twin towers and their slow, knee-buckling collapse into clouds of billowing dust. And, now, the day Donald Trump was elected.

My husband and I were at the theatre. The play was about Haitian immigrants in America, a powerful and touching story about racism and its overcoming. In spite of the standard request to turn off our cellphones, the news flickered on screens through the audience and ‘broke’ somewhere halfway through the second act.  Surely the actors must know, I kept thinking, watching them come back on the stage after leaving a scene.  I kept wondering how they came back to perform, devoted to their craft, following cues they returned while something inside them was surely collapsing.  “The show must go on” I kept thinking to myself, along with the spirit of the arts and our desire to digest, give human meaning, and resurrect love in the face of the history’s horrors. But the memory I have of the morning after is the one that stands out more fully, perhaps because it took at least the night for the reality to have the first opportunity to sink in.

I sat on the leather couch in our living room staring at the television with the sound on mute. My children had just left for school, boisterous and blissfully naïve about the bomb that just detonated in America’s constitutional soul. I stared at the talking heads on CNN, my awareness focused inward.

Something important is happening in our world that you will not read about in the newspapers. I consider it the most fascinating and hopeful development of our time, and it is one of the reasons I am so glad to be alive today. It has to do with our notion of the self. – Joanna Macey

Like others, I was still in shock but settled between the various pesto smudged stains and illicit pen marks on our family room couch, I could sense, next to my disbelief, something else hovering in my awareness. It seemed like inside the hollow silence created by this news some part of me was assessing the size of the test we were about to be put to, one that carried the potential to either break us as a nation or to birth something new – in me and in Americans. Whatever birth might be possible, however,  was going to depend on a pending breaking point, but I had no idea what that meant, what the timing would be, or what it would look like. Accompanying this intuition was also the haunting sense that everything in my life had somehow prepared me for this moment. Continue reading “PART ONE: One Woman, Post-Trump Stress Disorder & the Whole Catastrophe – The Political Just Got a Whole Lot More Personal” →