When you're feeling low...

The first edition of The Dialogues.


I have this one friend who, whenever she doesn’t hear from me for a while, checks out my blog. Then she e-mails me and says, “I can’t tell where you’re at.”

I realize that sometimes the blog allows me to just write some little oddity, like the one I last posted about the push lawn mower. That kind of writing relaxes me. It’s like looking at the small stuff. What my friend sees, I suppose, is that “smallness” … too small a picture to tell her what’s going on with me.

I wrote, in The Given Self, about the wisdom that is there right within our hard times. How our hard times aren’t just a bridge to better times. That there’s something deeper in them…something, maybe, for our souls. My own writing prompts me not to hide out, to go ahead and be vulnerable, to seek wisdom (of any sort at all) in what I'm going through...for me...maybe for you too.

I’ve been having a hard time lately.

There. I’ve said it. Do you think poorly of me? Have I become lower in your estimation of me?

I doubt it.

It’s tough, when you’re feeling frazzled and frayed, depressed, or even “not on the top of the world,” to be public about it. It’s so bizarre – all the things that run through your mind – the sort of loop it gets on when you’re feeling low, and how you can get yourself real confused about that. Wonder if you you’re really missing the mark, need to do whatever it takes to get still…or whether there might be something there that you need to listen to.

When you listen, I feel at least, you begin to get clues to how you need to move. But I’ll admit: it’s a different kind of listening.

Here’s one that really got to me. I wasn’t at home, and didn’t have any books with me, and suddenly remembered that I had my old copy of The Dialogues in the trunk of my car. I don’t know how many of you have that version. It’s white, and it has a painting called “Flood of Compassion” on the front. It was the first edition of The Dialogues and I designed it all myself. It’s smaller than the “blue books”…like a trade edition paperback. I’d decided not to put the numbers on the paragraphs or to make it look like the other books, because I felt it was so different. This one, this third volume of A Course of Love, just wasn’t the same. By then we were to be done with studying. What did we need numbers for? By then, it was personal, equal, a dialogue. I didn’t want it to look heavy and scholarly.

Anyway, I went out and got it.

I wrote an introduction in it, and when I went to bed that night I read it. It was the weirdest thing. It sounded like something I could have written now, even though I’d written it eight years ago.

Next morning, I’m reading how my favorite editorialist, Leonard Pitts, is about to turn 53. He’s writing on the first, second and third arcs of life. He claims the first to be finding yourself and getting your education, the second the rat race, and that the third is for “having some fun, trying something new, for being of service, and for doing some of those things you always said you’d do, someday.”

It reminded me of what I was writing at 47 but the arcs would look a little different in that I’d put “finding yourself” in the third arc. I'd written about the change of life during menopause as described by Christiane Northrup:

“Many of the changes she was describing as menopausal mirrored the changes I’d been feeling as a result of The Dialogues. Northrup spoke of menopause as a transformation, as a giving up of illusions, as a crossroads where an old way and a new way merge and must be chosen between, and as a rekindling of youthful fire, spirit, and creative drive.

“She also spoke of menopause as a time marked by impatience and intolerance with “life as usual.” As a forty-seven year old woman, I suddenly became aware that my body, along with my brain, my mind, my heart, and my soul, were all undergoing similar transformations. It was no wonder that my experience of The Dialogues felt so total and all encompassing, as if there wasn’t a corner of my life or psyche that had not only been touched but rewired.”

Change. Transitions. Irritability. I didn’t know whether to see an old pattern, to feel as if I was stuck and hadn’t changed in years, or to feel as if I’d gotten something I needed. But that was my mind talking. My heart felt comforted.

These are the things that can bring me joy when I’m low. Getting up to close the window and spotting a bright crescent moon in the dark 4 a.m. sky, finding an editorial that mirrors my thoughts, reading something surprising.

Then I was on-line, researching something, and found this amazing little paragraph in a blog that I can’t remember how the heck I got to:

House of Prayer Blog

I’ve been thinking about our spiritual work…. There seems to be a kind of shift going on amongst us. A movement into the depths is the way it feels. I know it means letting go of pet beliefs and even "orthodox" ones sometimes. This is often expressed, however, by uneasiness or discontent. This reminds me of what Jesus said about us becoming “as little children” in order to enter into the Kingdom of God. I suspect this is also what Meister Eckhart means when he emphatically teaches that IF we are to come to an experiential knowledge of God, then we also have to come to a place of “unknowing.” How does one do this? How do we go back when we’ve come so far? How do we become “little” again? How do we “unlearn” when we’ve spent so much of our lives seeking intellectually, believing rationally, and holding tightly to our so called “truths”? It feels to me that this is what is being experienced by many of us. We just don’t know things the way we once did. We are no longer clinging so tightly to our belief systems and entrenched positions. There’s a loosening of sorts; a release from the moorings of security. We’re launching out into deeper, unknown waters. And we’re also feeling the cost of that . . . “coming to an unknowing” place.

Ward Bauman, House of Prayer Blog, Episcopal House of Prayer

"Feeling the cost of that." Feeling the "unease and the discontent."

I call this kind of thing intuitive listening, sort of going where you’re led. Getting reminded of what you know. There’s nothing quite like it to make you feel gifted and heard – as if a power greater than your own, or a bigger ear, is listening and even answering.

This is not about heart alone. This is about the combining of mind and heart, and I swear that once in a while, when your heart is feeling in the dumps, your mind can shed a little light on why this is so. You might not want to hear it, but it’s there…rattling around amidst the rubble.

You’ve got to do something else then, to start the movement, and that is, for me, the hardest piece to find when I’m low, and that's what I was feeling tonight when this arrived in my e-mail in-box:

Come to me all you who labor and are burdened
and I will give you rest.
-Matthew 11: 28

"Rest refers to interior quiet, tranquility, peace, rootedness
of being one with the Divine Presence.

Rest is our reassurance at the deepest level that everything is okay.
The ultimate freedom is to rest in God in suffering, as well as in joy.
God was just as present to Jesus on the cross, as on the mountain of the
Transfiguration."

-Thomas Keating, Reawakenings

Sometimes, when you’re low, you’ve just got to rest. Message received.

Doing The Days 2: Transition

I’ve really wanted to finish Andrew Harvey’s book “The Hope” and maybe write a real review of it. I promised myself one, more or less, when I began it. I was highly hopeful. So far it’s been good in that way I was anxious for it to be. It’s got a lot of Andrew Harvey in it. But other things break in like the smell of Earl Grey tea. Like grief. I guess I’m not quite done with either of them yet.

I’m fully stuck on my old-friend book “Early Morning,” now, but before that it was "The Dialogues," and then the feeling of needing to read a snippet or two of Elizabeth Lesser’s “Broken Open.” Today I remembered that I wanted that book for hearing Elizabeth say on the radio that she loves grief. It came back to me in that same way grief-related things have been doing. The last few days.

The last few days.

When I put down Andrew Harvey’s book he was talking about suicide, a sort of living grief that makes you want to die, and the danger it can be to the activists who come to know too much about suffering. It’s one of the reasons he chose to add “sacred” to activism – the idea of being really grounded in the sacred before you take on too much. If you take on too much without that grounding you can grow bitter, angry, despondent, or just plain hurt too much to go on.

The thing is, when a wave of grief hits you almost three years later, about a year-and-a-half after everything started to feel less raw and tender, you wonder more about it and if it has something to do with the present.

You wonder, What’s going on inside of me?

That kind of question can get too heady, almost like a means of escape from feeling what you feel. “Let’s root out the source. Let’s understand it and be done with it.”

Maybe I’ve already done some of that. Maybe I’ve said enough or too much. It feels gentle though, and I say that because of a letter I got today: a Course of Love reader asking me how you know. How do you know your feelings as they are? Without thinking about them? I said, in that way that surprises me sometimes, (as if I’ve found the right thing to say by accident), that you can tell by the gentleness.

A feeling like grief can feel awful and still be gentle…even when you’re thinking about it.

So I’m re-visiting grief. Or it's re-visiting me. Gently. That’s what I’ll say. We're sharing a visit. And I’m aware that we're visiting for a reason. I don’t know what it is, (even though I’ve had some clues) but I’ll accept that I don’t know.

I hope the grief doesn’t have anything to do with the fights I’ve had with my daughter the last few days, but it might. How do you know (when you don’t know)?

We suffered a loss the other day because of our general financial situation. Our finances seem all intertwined and that gets to you for one thing. But a loss is a loss. My husband, with more Course of Love-like language than me, says it’s no loss. My daughter doesn’t see it as much of one either. Me, the perennial worrier – the “spiritual” person who shouldn’t be this way – is feeling the losses.

Transition

So tonight “The Dialogues” joins the list of signs (or whatever they are). Doing another day of the 40 Days, what do I notice? All the talk about transition.

At this point, all I can say is that “transition” sounds a lot better than change and loss. We go through what we go through for bigger reasons than appear to be. This much I know.

Doing the Days

Practicing Acceptance?

Had to follow up on my last post and give a new weather report. The snow came today. October 10. Doesn’t beat the earliest snow I remember (September 30, year somewhere near 1962), but it beats most first-of-the-year snow falls by about a week. Besides that, it stayed all day, even though it was only a dusting. Donny went out and picked the rest of the apples off our trees and when he came in said he’d remember that – how cold it was as the snow fell on him each time he pulled one.

I knew I had to write about the snow but then I realized I had something else I needed to add, a sort of additional addendum to my last musings on complaints.

I’ve got a few e-mail buddies and one of them is a woman who wrote me after seeing an article I’d written that had one sentence in it on solitude. She wrote saying she wanted to hear more and we’ve been friends ever since. It’s been nearly a year now.

Recently Chris wrote that she was starting the Forty Days of The Dialogues and wondered if I’d “do the days” along with her. I said I would. I’m pretty sure it was the 9th day when there was this one paragraph about acceptance that really spoke to me in a new way. I knew all about it (ha ha!) for having written the thing, and more by way of it being among my favorite ideas – one that says acceptance isn’t about accepting the way “things” are, but about accepting how you are – how you feel in the present moment.

It was after that when I got this startling idea that complaints might just be about accepting the way you feel. Try that one on for size, I told myself. Oh, I know that when you feel wonderful you’re not going to call it a complaint. I, at least, don’t have too much trouble accepting my wonderful feelings. I’ve got that down pretty good.

But I don’t always feel wonderful. I’ve got things that bug me. And they’re not all like the early fall of snow that you might complain about while secretly enjoying. Some of my complaints are about how I feel when I’m not secretly enjoying something and just grousing for the sake of grousing. These complaints usually get admitted amongst friends. “Man, when that happened, I really felt…lousy” or troubled or worried or frustrated.

If you’ve ever done what you call complaining and then felt like you shouldn’t have complained, try my idea out for yourself. What if you’re practicing acceptance?

Revelation

I was lying on the couch with the television on mute and a book in my hand when I fell asleep in one of those really exhausted stupor kind of sleeps – both really deep and light at the same time, and that you wake from disbelieving that only a couple of hours have gone by, because you know something you didn’t know before. You open your eyes wishing you had a pen before this new thing you know fades – and you open them and there’s a pen right in front of them, on the TV table, at eye-level. On the floor, but still in reach, is a book marker that fell out of the book, and you take the pen and the paper and you write it down and wonder why it felt so life-changingly profound and yet you’ve already got a vision of tacking it up on your mirror or your computer even as you’re scrawling it, and you like the way the scrawl looks, almost indecipherable like an M.D.’s prescription, the kind you used to get before they printed them out, and that feels just right too.

The scrawl said, You can’t bring the thing with you fully formed.

I don’t know what it means…and I do…which is what all the great realizations are like. In “The Dialogues,” there’s this expression: Carry it with you as a pregnant woman carries her child. This editor friend of mind is always asking What’s the antecedent? What’s the it? In the sentence, “carry it with you,” he’d ask what’s the it? I’d say something like “the vision,” and he’d ask, What vision? Well, that’s the fill-in-the-blank nature of the thing…what’s your antecedent? What’s your it; what’s your vision? I always thought of that “carrying” thing as no separation, you don’t carry this new knowing like information or a book you can pull from a bag. It’s you. It’s in you. This was like a second piece of that. You can’t bring anything with you fully formed. … like you’re the carrier of an incompleteness that finds completion…like you have the answer without the question. What the revelation refers to remains unknown, there’s no logical progression of things.

You’re not exactly meant to “get it.” You dwell with the ungraspable. That’s pretty much what it’s all about. You don’t know “stuff.” I met this one guy I thought was pretty admirable one time and mentioned him to a friend. My friend said, “Oh, Tom? He just likes to know stuff.” It’s not that kind of thing – not that way. Not a bunch of information or right answers. The heart “stuff” isn’t definable. It might be describable but not definable. That’s its beauty. It gets you living with description rather than definition. That’s a little kid kind of thing…that’s being like the little children. Seeing something or knowing something as a describable event of feelings or senses and not as a concrete answer. There’s no concrete answer or definition for love…you know?