Some beautiful things I have seen lately: People driving around with trucks loaded with food and water, stopping to ask anyone they see if they need anything. Restaurants and food trucks grilling up free meals and serving them out to anyone who is hungry. Neighbors posting information so that those without connectivity can be connected with resources. My exhausted brother, who is organizing rescue efforts from Greensboro, making a special trip out to us to make sure we have enough drinking water, food, and gas.
I had a long conversation this morning with a client who has lost her home. We read the poem below together and grieved the place that held her life and her memories, her plans for the future. And she told me that now the faces of her children are “the bright home in which I live.” She asked me to share this, here.
Because the pain of holding both at the same time—the heart-rending grief of losing “the bright home in which I live/ where I ask all my friends to come” even as she celebrates her family’s survival, knowing “how easily the thread is broken/ between this world and the next” —it’s enough to tear a person in two if we can’t find enough backs to carry it.
We are asked to hold both, now. We need each other so that we can get big enough to do it. It made me think this morning of how we insulate wires with a plastic coating to keep them from sparking each other. All of our insulation is lost, right now. We are touching wire to wire. And sometimes stripping away the insulation of comfort and safety means we feel love and appreciation for our family, our neighbors, the beauty in the world more intensely than ever. And sometimes it means that sparks fly and ignite and grow into rage and fear and scarcity-driven cruelty.
I awoke
this morning
in the gold light
turning this way
and that
thinking for
a moment
it was one
day
like any other.
But
the veil had gone
from my
darkened heart
and
I thought
it must have been the quiet
candlelight
that filled my room,
it must have been
the first
easy rhythm
with which I breathed
myself to sleep,
it must have been
the prayer I said
speaking to the otherness
of the night.
And
I thought
this is the good day
you could
meet your love,
this is the black day
someone close
to you could die.
This is the day
you realise
how easily the thread
is broken
between this world
and the next
and I found myself
sitting up
in the quiet pathway
of light,
the tawny
close grained cedar
burning round
me like fire
and all the angels of this housely
heaven ascending
through the first
roof of light
the sun has made.
This is the bright home
in which I live,
this is where
I ask
my friends
to come,
this is where I want
to love all the things
it has taken me so long
to learn to love.
This is the temple
of my adult aloneness
and I belong
to that aloneness
as I belong to my life.
There is no house
like the house of belonging.
by David Whyte
This is the black day someone close to you could die. This is the good day you could meet your love. When you can, stretch enough to hold both. When it feels impossible, rest.
I offer the guided meditation below for those of you who are feeling your brain spinning and sparking, unable to sleep, caught in cognitive loops. Sometimes the most restful thing when that happens is to reconnect with the wisdom of the body.
(Bodies are all different, and if the meditation does not match yours, please imagine your inner world infused with the capacities described regardless of the form they take, and accept my apologies for my flawed language.)