For When People Ask
I want a word that means
okay and not okay,
a word that means
devastated and stunned with joy.
I want the word that says
I feel it all, all at once.
The heart is not like a songbird
singing only one note at a time,
more like a Tuvan throat singer
able to sing both a drone
and simultaneously
two or three harmonics high above it—
a sound, the Tuvans say,
that gives the impression
of wind swirling among rocks.
The heart understands the swirl,
how the churning of opposite feelings
weaves through us like an insistent breeze,
leads us wordlessly deeper into ourselves,
blesses us with paradox
so we might walk more openly
into this world so rife with devastation,
this world so ripe with joy.
-Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
There’s a paradox here that many of us are experiencing. Within the deep grief, within the losses and anger and exhaustion, there are glimmers of beauty that we are not ready to walk away from. Devastation and joy walk arm-in-arm through the streets of Marshall and Swannanoa.
As my executive function slowly returns, I’ve been able to pick up Michael Meade’s book Why The World Doesn’t End. It’s well-loved; nearly every page is scrawled over with notes I made when I used it to navigate the COVID pandemic. He writes that the term apocalyse comes from the Greek apokalyptein, meaning to uncover, disclose, or reveal.
Apocalypse doesn’t bring the disaster. It reveals that we are standing on a thin veil beneath which seethes at all times the possibility of loss, grief, calamity. It’s always there. During times of apocalypse, the veil tears and we experience that second layer of life directly.
In his book Meade suggests that there is yet a third layer beneath this terrifying reality of what the world can do to us. In this third layer we find all of the treasures we’ve been experiencing here in the mountains amid the loss and grief: the generosity, the authenticity, the beauty in ourselves and those around us.
We don’t have a choice, in times of apocalypse—the veil tears. But we can choose, continue to choose, not to repair the veil. We can continue to choose not to turn away from that terrible second layer of life, to journey through and with it to that third layer where we find the truth of what we are capable of. We don’t have to climb back up onto the thin crust of what we had called normalcy and agree to keep our lives that thin. We can choose to bear the second layer as a way of accessing the third.
In alchemy, they call this stage solve et coagula.
The hardest part is facing the solve, the dissolution. It’s so hard not to choose comfort when comfort is available—even if, cognitively, we know that we cannot be comfortable and transform at the same time. But in times of apocalypse, solve is chosen for us. Comfort is not on the table. We are all flung into that second layer whether we will or no.
And now, we can choose: do we climb back up to the thin crust of “the way things were before”? Or do we stay—do we hold the tension here, the old way dissolved, waiting to discern what it is that we want to crystallize around? Do we take this moment to discern what we wish to send away with the solvent, and what we wish to keep? Do we keep sinking through this experience until life rests in that third layer?
We have a moment of opportunity. The solve has happened. What shall we crystallize into?
Don’t hurry into what’s next. If we are patient, if we ask the right questions, we can take this moment to re-form ourselves into shapes that are closer to the ones we wanted to be all along.
In Blackwater Woods
Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars
of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,
the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders
of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is
nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
-Mary Oliver
