This Is What Things Can Teach Us

I'm fairly certain that I've never shared this before. Because I haven't shared yet how the aftermath of the tsunami roiled every corner of suppressed grief I've ever tucked away. And because I don't usually bring up my father. Since I was seventeen years old, I usually let people converse and refer to "your parents" as in parents plural without correcting them.

I wasn't positive whether I could keep my composure if I spoke up or if they probed. I had never left the shock stage of grief.

Grief counselor and author Alexandra Kennedy says that grief lives in our bodies. It's very physical. We're half-dead if we don't face it because we unconsciously avoid situations that might trigger feelings.

Composure? Composure went out the door after the tsunami.

The dam I'd built over decades gave way. I know Shel Israel says I wrote the only blog post that's ever made him cry. There have been only two that made me cry.

We succumb to grief so we can fully live. - Poet Mary Oliver

~

There was a tundra that was my life. In the Italian side of the country foothills of Mont Blanc that sticky August summer of 2003 an Italian healer was clearing my chakras. (It was part of the whole two-week cultural immersion program I'd signed up for.)

She was very silent in her magical work as I lay there on the massage table wondering exactly what the alchemist could possibly do internally invisibly. And yet I could literally feel my heart. No, I don't mean the rythmic thump thump. But physical bursting. Expanding.

Her first words: "What trauma did you have as a child? All your chakras from your heart up were cut off."

Only through heartbreak in the last few years did the glacier of my heart yield. One doesn't feel frostbitten limbs. When stiff fingers are coursing blood and coming back to life they ache. Thawing aches. But I wouldn't choose to go back to the tundra. (Truth be told I couldn't choose to go back. It's a one-way ticket.)

This spring I was walking in the verdant hills above Los Altos in a purposefully s-l-o-w meditative stroll. I was adapting Father Keating's centering prayer in my mindful walk.

When you become aware of thoughts, return ever-so-gently to the sacred word.

The sacred word I'd chosen was abba: Aramaic for "daddy" and the intimate term of endearment Jesus used for his Father.

Abba, abba, abba, I started to chant as I wend my way through sagebrush, chamise, monkeyflower, silktassel, gooseberry, shrubby oaks, and toyon.

And he said, Abba, Father, all things [are] possible unto thee; take away this cup from me: nevertheless not what I will, but what thou wilt. - Mark 14:36

Abba, I continue. I love the round sound of it. Abba. The backwards-forwards folding of it. Abba. I love the way I could imagine a little toddler saying "abba" the way infants gurgle "dadda."

"It's a journey I'm going through right now," the boy with the engine-red plastic firefighter's hat tugs at his mother's straw-blond strands as he sits in her lap. She talks intensely to her own weathered father sitting across from her on the patio area. It's the only slice of their life I get as walk past and open the door to the San Rafael Starbucks this past Sunday morning.

Abba, abba, as I continue to climb the switchbacks at Hidden Villa that crisp spring.

Abba.

Somewhere in the middle of lifting my foot, a blast of sorrow sneaked in between the branches and nearly knocks me off my feet.

In that wave of energy, my dad's presence was felt. Papi's presence. Clear as the sky was aquamarine that day. And as the moss and ferns were emerald.

Bittersweet: There is no conversation one could actually overhear with my father in any sidewalk cafe. Pure: There is a communication that transcends atoms.

~

There are layers to grief, Alexandra Kennedy says, the deepest our seeming separation from our source.

One day the heartbreak leads you to touch the collective wound, the collective suffering of the world. And you are impotent in the face of that. You can't run out there and say something to make it all better, says my teacher at this weekend's "workshop" (for lack of better word).

"So what can you do?" asked my teacher to his own teacher years and years ago.

"You let your heart break. Let it completely break. Let it break open. And a lot of you breaks also. And there's something beautiful in that also."

Most spirituality is a way to manage the heartbreak, my teacher says (very very) curiously after a Sufi master's discourse ("you are a Sufi when your heart is as soft and warm as wool") on the tsunami and the tribal fishermen who escaped the deadly tidal wave due to their attentiveness to signs. "The dolphins went to deeper waters. And so did they."

"The way back is the way you came - through heartbreak." My teacher is piercing when he speaks. The woman in the wheelchair whom asked about The Heartbreak replies, "So the heartbreak is the call home."

"Only then do we see we're knocking from inside the door."

"That makes me want to cry."

"That's it. That's the heartbreak."

You are the deep innerness of all things,
the last word that can never be spoken.
To each of us you reveal yourself differently:
to the ship as coastline, to the shore as a ship. - Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Pilgrimage, II, 22

On the second day of the event my teacher finishes his fourth grade teacher story, "He didn't make it to the end of the school year. Nearly did."

"He had cancer. I realized he must have lived with the cancer the whole school year. The whole time he greeted us with hugs when we came in the door and when we left for the day. We never knew he was sick."

"When he died I didn't feel a great pain."

"It was more like a great being had passed."

This is what things can teach us:
to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly. - Poet Rainier Maria Rilke, The Book of Pilgrimage, II, 16

p.s. This post inspired by progenitor, rest in peace.

The photo is of Hidden Villa where I was swept by the unseverable presence of abba.

Comments

[Jory Des Jardins]

Evelyn, I might have been one of those people who assumed "parents", with an "s". I found your story of healing so inspiring, especially now. Thank you for sharing a model for healing and a piece of yourself. Ironically, giving ourselves away makes us feel more whole.

[TonyD]

How strange that we only recognize what's been given us after its gone.

My brother-in-law led a very challenged life. He was often depressed and struggled with spiritual issues every day. He often asked me for spiritual advice, which I did my best to provide. One day I confided in him that I was depressed and often felt lost. He though for several minutes. After that long silence he advised me to pray every day first thing in the morning.

That prayer has become my anchor. My brother in law's funeral was full of people whose lives he had touched-people we didn't even know he'd ever talked to. It turned out that the spiritual seeker was a spiritual adviser to dozens of people. We miss him.

[Marilyn]

Beautiful post, Evelyn. Reading it, I began to realize that some of what I've been feeling the past few weeks--a sort of vague depression--has possibly been a touch of grief. Unlike you and Jory, my father is still living. I suppose what I'm grieving is that at 50 it's finally really sinking in that I will never feel loved by him...and so must let go of that NEED. What I'm grieving, I think, is not the love itself...but letting go of the need for it. I have no choice though if I want to move forward, since his lack of approval and attention has been such a source of shame for me that it's paralyzed me in many ways...feeling shame as if somehow it's been MY failing and not his. We find our truth where we're meant to find it...thank you for giving me a moment of it here.

[Evelyn Rodriguez]

Jory, Yes.
Tony, I'm reading Rilke's Book of Hours (new translation by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy):
"(To that younger brother)
Now pray,
as I who came back from the same confusion
learned to pray."
Most of my epiphanies come from ordinary times and ordinary people. One day we're wise and in tune with universe. And other days it's their turn and they buoy us. Thanks so much for sharing.

Marilyn, Loss is loss is loss. It can be as abstract as loss of dreams even when we get to mid-life. And sometimes someone being alive and lost to us is even more poignant in sorrow. I recommend Alexandra's website too - there's a part in there about daily loss. I find somehow in the next two weeks I need to write my notes from Kennedy's workshop and share them.

p.s. there's many layers to this post, and abba too

[Claudia]

Beautiful.