When It’s Dark

When it’s dark inside, I am never quite sure how to handle myself other than to use my survival skills. I have some that I’ve collected along the way, and the ones that work for me are:

1. Breathing. I just keep breathing. Breathe in the Buddhist sense, being aware of the beginning, middle, and end of every breath; I’m glad I am alive. I thank God that I am here in this moment, breathing. Thank you, God, for this breath of life.
2. Gratitude. Thank you, God, for this breath of life leads me into the bounty in my life. I am healthy today; I am sane; I am surrounded by people who love me (or else, they are very good actors). I have shelter, warmth, cool when it’s hot outside, food, clothing, medical care. I do not have to work for a living. I have so much. I’m grateful for everything I have in my life, all the good.
3. Knowing God. I remember what I know about God, about all the hard times we’ve gone through together, the times He has carried me through. I think of how old I am, and how never once has He ever let me down. I think of how in His mercy He has broken and healed my heart so many times. I think about how “though my mother and father forsake me, the Lord will take me up.” I recall how, when I was helplessly squirming in my blood, He passed by and picked me up, and called me His. I think of the day I will stand before Him in glory. I think of casting my crown at His feet. I love Him, and every day when it’s dark, I still see Him by the light of faith.
4. Having Children. Having children saves me, which reminds me of the Bible’s teaching that women “shall be saved through the bearing of children.” I do not mean just physical bearing, either, for every child I have ever carried in any way–children I have birthed, adopted, children I have carried in my prayers, child clients of mine in the past–every one has helped to redeem part of me somehow. Being around children is a saving grace for me.
5. Ritual. Rituals such as taking communion, attending Mass, lighting a votive candle, wearing a certain bracelet to remind me to pray for someone or something, writing in my journal, getting on my face before God, kneeling in prayer, blessing myself with holy water and thinking about how all the springs of the earth, down to the innermost deep waters of our planet, were blessed when Jesus Christ went down into the water to be baptized (an ancient teaching of the Church); all this ritual sustains me and re-creates my heart when my heart is weary and everything seems so dark.

What are your survival skills? When it’s dark inside and you stand on the abyss of that black hole of aloneness and end-of-life, what keeps you grounded? What gives you light in the darkness?

rough week

I won’t lie about it: this has been a rough week for me. Yesterday I stood in the shower for an hour and cried my eyes out. Later that night, I cried again as my husband and son and I prayed together. As I sat praying and heaving with sobs, suddenly I felt my silly little chihuahua’s tongue on the end of my nose, licking the tears and snot. Moments like that put anguish into some kind of human perspective, don’t they?

I’ve wondered lately how to write about my despair, feelings of hopelessness, and grief when they occur. I don’t know how to write about them here or even whether I should write about them at all. But then I recall my own purpose in blogging, which is to write what is real for me as it is real, whether it’s thoughts or things I’m thinking about, immersions, obsessions, passions. This week it so happens that I am feeling mighty low. I can write about any number of things when I’m feeling low, but today I decided to just write about feeling low. Why not? Because it may drive people away? Well, I am existentially alone, anyway.

Bring me my pariah cloak, I am going maudlin on you, dear readers.

I cannot say that I’m hopeless; that would be a lie. I have every hope and expectation, because at my core I am a deeply faith-filled person. Or maybe I’ve gone past faith to knowing; because I do not have to apply a lot of faith any more. As some old-time preacher used to say, “I know that I know that I know that I know.” Or, as Carl Jung said when asked if he believed in God, “Believe? No. I do not have to believe. I know.”

In spite of knowing God, I still sometimes feel despair and grief. I feel betrayal when it occurs; I feel it very deeply. There is a very dark pit in some part of me that has been there pulsing for five or eight years now. I thought my daughter’s death caused it, but in retrospect I’d have to say that I have noticed it off and on my entire life, whenever I’ve been able to knock my ego out of the way and see beyond her.

I have watched as my adult children get wise to their ego-based lives, too, and I notice that it seems to leave a person empty and longing. I would like to be able to take comfort in what was comforting in the past, but this doesn’t help any more. There is no refuge for me where refuge once was.

Frankly, I have some moments when I know that the only reason I continue to want to live is because I have children who need their mother. I see no practical sense in this stupid life in a world that is so self-destructive, so filled with people who are blind, and everything and everyone careening toward death anyway. I see it, all right, but I have yet to do what the monks and nuns in all traditions are trained to do, which is to daily look into their own mortality. I do not do this daily (yet) because I think a part of me is fighting the death mask out of fear that its black maw will swallow me.

stuck at “what’s the point?”

Right now, I sometimes become stuck at depression and despair; the terror is kept at bay that way. I am at the “what’s the point?” point of life today. I know that this will pass and tomorrow, or the next day, I will feel differently. I will most definitely feel differently tomorrow as I hold my granddaughter, because she is so new and beautiful, so trusting. Her “isness” is all one needs to see to recall one’s self to oneself. Perhaps I need to hold babies regularly as therapy. Or maybe visit funeral homes and sit with cadavers.

In any case, I wanted to admit that I am suffering. There is nothing to be done about this; it will not and should not just “go away” or be solved simply, because that’s not the way it works. Everything I know about God, spirituality, mysticism, and analytic psychology tells me that I must be here, and I must go through this. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil; for Thou art with me.” I have written before about the “dark night of the soul” of Saint John of the Cross. All of the great mystics, Christian or Buddhist, Hindu or otherwise, have believed that we have to confront the darkness by going into it. If we can go into it, go down to the River Styx and buy passage over, we can finish the hero’s journey. I believe this, too; I am just finding it difficult to stay in my developmental loss, grief, reality, powerlessness, waste, shame, regret, and mortality. I am finding it difficult to pay for my passage across this dark river, because I fear never reaching the other side, or never coming back to the land of the living. What if I perish in the underworld? What if I am not enough of a human being to be the hero in my own myth? What then?

Times like this call for poetry and music; Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Mahler, Wagner.

the first elegy, duino elegies

Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic

Orders? And even if one of them suddenly

Pressed me against his heart, I should fade in the

Strength of his stronger existence. For Beauty’s nothing

But beginning of Terror we’re still just able to bear,

And why we adore it so is because it serenely

Disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrible.

And so I repress myself, and swallow the call-note

Of depth-dark sobbing. Alas, who is there

We can make use of? Not angels, not men;

And even the noticing beasts are aware

That we don’t feel very securely at home

In this interpreted world. There remains, perhaps,

Some tree on a slope, to be looked at day after day,

There remains for us yesterday’s walk and the long-drawn

Loyalty

Of a habit that liked us and stayed and never gave notice.

Oh, and there’s Night, there’s Night, when wind full of

Cosmic space

Feeds on our faces: for whom would she not remain,

Longed for, mild disenchantress, painfully there

For the lonely heart to achieve? Is she lighter for lovers?

Alas, with each other they only conceal their lot!

Don’t you know yet? – Fling the emptiness out of your arms

To broaden the spaces we breathe.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke