(Written in October 2003)
Dear Spirits, please help me. I’m so scared and sad.
Dear Jenny, the sadness is grief for losses of the past, and you are afraid it will never change. Dear one, it changes all the time. Relax. We love you and we are gathered around you right now. It’s good to move with your fear and sadness, and it’s also OK to do nothing. This is a long journey, a process, and what’s most important is the compassion you are able to bring to yourself. Try to observe yourself without judgement. We see a woman who is sad and scared, and who is making herself wrong for being this way. But this is just how it is right now. Of course you don’t want to feel like this, it is painful, and the stuck quality triggers panic and helplessness. Remember that you can “do” stuck — but we see that this idea is not helpful right now. “Stuck” is being very scary for you. You are like that baby who is down in the well — a process is in motion to bring you out of it, and it’s OK to wait with patience. There, there, dear, we are so sorry you are having such a hard time.
Everything feels impossible right now. I don’t know what to do. It’s OK to not know what to do. It’s OK to wait in the place of not knowing.
There is a process in motion.
My intent is to heal by facing into my fear, grief, and despair,
and to be open to what they have to teach me.
Feeling how torn apart, or double-bound, I am by the two voices/energies. 1) I want to face into my feelings and really feel them, I am willing to do this, willing to feel the pain, I offer myself to this process. 2) I wouldn’t be depressed if I had something to do so I should just keep busy, there’s plenty of housework, etc.
Well there’s certainly more energy for choice 1. When I think about making myself do laundry I just feel sick and weak and weighted with lethargy. But when I try to face into the pain I just feel helpless — the helplessness is so painful. I think of being a baby whose mother doesn’t come.
But how to be with the feelings? There must be women in Iraq feeling as hopeless and helpless as I do right now: facing another day of the struggle to find food for the children, to keep them warm, to keep them from running out into danger, trying not to think of the bomb that might fall or the machine gun that might rip through the village, grieving the deaths of loved ones, caught in the pain of not knowing what’s happened to others, worrying about what kind of future there will be for my children… Writing that seems to ease it — maybe I don’t feel so alone with it. I suppose it’s a little like tonglen — breathing in the world’s sorrows. There must be women in New Hampshire — in Gorham where the mill closed, wives whose husbands have lost their jobs. Struggling to feed their family (on what? Welfare?) to keep the house clean, trying to stay cheerful, worrying about the refrigerator that’s on its last legs — we can’t buy a new one now — and how will we pay our fuel bills… And the children feeling hopeless and frightened, facing another day of humiliation at school, another night of sexual abuse, coming home to find Mom unconscious on the couch, afraid that Dad will get violent again… So much pain. And then all the people with chronic or fatal illnesses — the woman last night with chronic fatigue, Judy with her throat tumor, Lynelle struggling with her joint pains and her painful hands… Then I think of Mom & Dad and their lonely deaths, Mom especially trapped in her pitiful isolation, and me and Dana, supposedly loving each other but feeling more and more distant as our lives diverged — and I want to scoop up all these people and cuddle them like frightened children and say “Everything’s going to be all right” — but do I believe that? Where is the Ocean of Compassion? Are we all resting in the hands of god? I know this at some level even when I’m feeling most despairing. I know that our pain-filled world is held within compassion.
So then what is my despair about? It’s about not knowing what to do. So if I sit here, with this pain in my heart, and I know compassion holds all of us so I don’t have to do something about the pain right now — then what do I do next?
The next thing is to make rice cream for breakfast.