I have a tendency to withdraw from life at times,
To refuse its intimacy.
As if I could hide,
As if I could argue with creation,
Take back my eyes,
Seal off my heart,
Bind the mouth of my feelings shut.
These withdrawals come like seasons and tides,
Almost without warning I find myself in a wrestling match with the divine,
Doubting there is a benevolent universe,
Disbelieving there is any depth or meaning,
As if the whole of life is indifferent and I am alone in it.
I can hold faith for a while,
Carry the conversation,
Bear a steady pressure,
Until a seam gives Something small and terrified inside me trips,
A child that thinks the lights have gone out,
And the old feelings of dread move into the body,
Doubt cracks my faith,
And groundless I fall.
When I look back I can see the pattern,
It begins with accumulation,
Too many realities I don't want to face,
Or better,
Don't know how to face,
Begin pressing in.
My body contracts and narrows,
Blotting out the blue sky,
The silver moon.
Life begins to feel punishing,
A vast tide of love pierced and torn by cruelty,
By suffering that feels unlivable,
Violence takes what love has made,
War shows us children's bones,
The heart is stretched between these extremes,
Who can live in that tension unflinching,
Who can keep their heart open there,
Are you able to?
Some days I can hold both,
And other days my hands feel trembling and small,
And so I recoil,
I retract,
I abandon the practices that root me,
My writing,
My prayers,
My sitting with the trees,
A milky haze settles,
Because I know if I return I will feel even more,
And I will be split and confronted by a deafening silence,
Peeled like the rind of a lemon,
Hung on the branch of the fir tree,
A single seed caught in the web of the spider,
Holding its wild exposed heart.
My God rarely sues me with words,
Only that unbroken silence,
Dense and thrumming,
That listens with the weight of mountains,
Unaltered by my tantrums,
Unhurried by my need,
And yet when I do return to the trees,
To the creek,
To my knees,
I am held,
Not removed from the pain,
But settled in a rhythm that is somehow ordinary,
Safe,
Natural.
When I resume the simple,
Faithful acts of presence I am always,
Without fail,
Restored.
So what is it in me that wants to turn from the very things that steady me?
To carry this heavy body of water into the wilderness and confront what is,
That is intimacy,
That is bravery,
To hand ourselves to creation and let her do what she has always done,
Give birth and take back what she has given.
For this is the law,
That everything born will be gathered back again,
Slowly or quickly,
Whether in peace or in violence,
The law is the same.
We act as if we can bargain with life,
But in the end we are only asked to soften,
To hand ourselves back,
Again and again.
I know this wrestling with life is not mine alone.
There are old stories of those who have fought with the divine,
Who have resisted life itself,
And found themselves wounded and blessed.
There is a story of a man named Jacob,
Alone by the river Jebuch,
And through the night he wrestles with a stranger.
Some say an angel,
Some say God,
And they struggle until dawn,
And as the sun begins to rise,
The figure moves to leave,
But Jacob clings on and says,
I will not let you go unless you bless me.
And the stranger strikes his hip,
Leaving him wounded,
And gives him a new name.
Jacob walks away blessed and broken,
The mark set in his bone.
The limp was the gift.
It slowed him enough to walk with the children,
The herds,
The old.
Really,
It returned him to the pace of love.
And so the work is to stay open in the thick of the wrestling,
To let it teach me,
To draw out what is most alive,
To uncover where my heart leans hardest toward love,
To keep my nerves exposed to the air,
To remain tethered to what is most true for me,
To let the crickets pin me to bark and branch,
To let the grass move me.
And so after a period of being in deep withdrawal,
I return marked and blessed,
The only way I know,
To the trees,
To this page,
To the small steady rituals that show me I am held by a rhythm larger than my refusal.
My journal creaks open,
The penlid clicks off,
I see land and water and sky,
Raven with its great black wings.
I have pushed back,
Stood my ground against life long enough,
Stayed in the ashen,
The sleepy undertow,
Refused the cups of wind.
I would not cross ink to paper,
Would not leave a trail,
Would not come into my life.
I was righteous in refusal,
Until a small voice asked,
Why?
Do you know why you stopped visiting the wild?
Visiting yourself?
Have you wondered?
Crickets stitch their closing song.
They press me against bark,
Fasten my eyes to laurel,
Emerald,
Juniper,
Olive,
Sage.
Rhythmic humming,
They move in this tired body with their sounds and tie it to the real.
And I can hear the question again and again,
Why?
For what?
Where do you go?
And the answer spills only into more questions.
How do I let go without shutting down the heart that loves?
When lost,
Who stays with me?
And where is the voice that shows the way?
You know the tide that carries love away.
You have seen the hands reaching for bread,
Felt war's hunger for innocence.
You know the body's slow undoing,
The edge of anger,
The bitter churn.
And yet there is no greater love.
It threads through us,
Starving us,
Breaking us,
Growing us still.
Life is indifferent to my turning away.
I either diminish or return to rhythm.
I dreamed the other night I was bitten on the thigh.
Three great fangs pierced my flesh.
My legs swelled and began to weep,
Not blood,
But water.
I pressed the wound,
Flushed the infection,
And clear streams poured down my leg.
The dam broke.
My thick skin opened,
Gaping.
There are tales of bodies hardened by grief,
Yet still they weep.
Niobe,
Queen of Thebes,
Mother of many,
Saw her children struck down,
And in her sorrow she fled to the mountain where she turned to rigid,
Unmoving stone.
Yet from her face water poured.
Streams ran down her cheeks,
Unceasing.
Her tears became a spring.
Water cannot be stopped.
It breaks the stone.
As Lao Tzu wrote,
Nothing in the world is as soft and yielding as water.
Yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible,
Nothing can surpass it.
The soft overcomes the hard.
The gentle overcomes the rigid.
And it's not only myth that teaches this.
The poet Rilke,
Writing to a young man afraid of sorrow,
Reminded him that sadness rising like a flood is not a sign of abandonment,
But of life's insistence.
He said,
So you mustn't be frightened if a sadness rises in front of you larger than any you have ever seen,
If an anxiety like light and cloud shadows moves over your hands and over everything you do,
You must realize that something is happening to you,
That life has not forgotten you,
That it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall.
Water through dream,
Water through myth,
Water through the poet's mouth,
It rises and swells and rinses clean.
Eyeless worms swallow the dark.
Rhizomes pull each fear east,
West,
North and south,
Teasing apart the tears I try to swallow.
They waste no time.
They work until I forget I fought so hard and for so long.
Until I am ground into the soft,
Forceful wild.
All I can say is I'm sorry I forgot the way.
Oh body,
How much you are asked to hold.
It does not matter how long I stayed away.
The green hands smooth my face.
Her palms wide and verdant across my back.
She pulls my souls to the earth,
Tucks me into her crook,
My head against her breast and gently she sways,
She steadies.
I catch my strength from her sun.
In this moment,
It's worth saying,
Life has not forgotten you or me and holds us in its hand.
What would it mean to trust that despite where you have chosen to disappear into,
Something is still accompanying you in your unreachable place?
What if your resistance has been a conversation with something that will not let you go?
A wrestling with your dark angel?
You do not need to change a thing.
But maybe just gently close your eyes for a moment.
Enter the space that knows your secrets.
Feel only your breathing for now.
Your still warm body pressed against stone.
If I asked you,
Where in your chest is the river already waiting,
Pressing to be freed?
Light only knows itself by darkness,
As your knowing only sees itself by your suffering.
So,
Beloved brave heart,
These are your seasonal tides shifting.
The rhythm of leaving and returning is the body's own pump,
Its hidden tide.
Yet many leave and leave and leave,
Retreating into a dullness,
A spent spark,
A frightened dimming,
Forgetting that coming back to the table is most important.
Coming back gathers us again.
It softens the extremes and tempers the violent swing of the human drama.
As you go and return,
Small fractures of dysfunction dissolve and erode away.
Truth rises through you,
Claiming more space each time.
Until you glimpse the wellspring,
The shape and feel of well-being,
Of trust and faith.
The path,
Dear one,
Is only ever away and back into the heart.
You are expected to go and come back for now,
Until one day the going stops and all of you know where best to land and stay put here.
Lips pressed to this earth,
In this body,
This kiss.
And when you feel it's time,
When you feel you've wrestled long enough,
Bring yourself to the foot of something kind and soft,
A tree,
A river,
An open field.
The silence you meet may feel intolerable.
Yet it is the doorway to depth.
Listen for the echo of your heart and stay with it.
Engage it.
Here the self becomes known.
The heart stirs awake and the spell breaks.
In this life there is only one road worth traveling and how to go it is very slow.
The hands in streams,
The drum of the blood,
The river of light traveling through shores in shadows.
I know my withdrawal has been its own kind of wrestling,
Perhaps with an angel in the dark or perhaps with love itself,
Refusing the cups of wind,
The grace,
Staying in the ash,
As if by denying intimacy with the world,
With myself,
I could somehow escape love's impossible weight.
How it arrives in so many forms and speaks through so many voices.
How it gives grief its very stage.
The love for this earth,
This blue dome of sky,
This fragile web of being in all our confusion,
In all our forgetting.
It is love that makes living hard,
Love that drives us into hiding in love,
That finds us and breaks us open again and again and again.
Even Jacob,
Limping from his wound,
Had to stop fighting long enough to be changed.
Like Niobe,
I too turned to stone under love's pressure,
But the dream came anyway,
The fangs breaking what I thought impenetrable,
Streams pouring from what I believed was locked away.
There was so much clear water.
The wild helps us when we cannot help ourselves,
But not only the wild,
Love threads through breath and body,
Through cotton and wool,
Through strangers and kin,
Spread on us like skin.
It is the circulation of the heart.
Even withdrawal,
Even refusal,
Cannot stop this love from finding its way in,
From marking us,
From blessing us and from asking us to come awake.
Thank you for listening.
Be well.
