"Stop"
[image error]It was unfamiliar, the strong, clear inner voice that spoke so sternly to me yesterday morning as I woke up from the first good night's sleep I've had in weeks.
And the words surprised me. "Stop. Just stop."
I lay quietly in bed for a while, letting the instruction sink in.
Grief is still new territory. Well-meaning friends ask, daily, "How are you?" and I pause, tongue-tied, unsure how to respond. How can I explain that, though life is apparently back to "normal," no place quite looks like itself? Everyday things feel strange, my own inner landscape foreign and fragile. My thoughts veer between scattered and obsessive, so that I can't trust my own heart -- fine one moment, ambushed the next. What am I to make of emotions that are so misplaced and unpredictable that each day feels like its own new roller coaster ride, twisting and turning through an unpredictable course of peaks and plummets. I have no idea how I am.
What I do know is that there is a hole right at the center of everything. And I've been been circling around its rim like a dervish, trying in vain to fill that terrible, empty place. As if by reaching out to every single person in need, reconnecting with every old friend who's fallen out of touch, answering every email in my in-box, grabbing for dear life at every friendly hand extended in my direction, I might somehow manage to dispel the darkness and avert my attention from the void.
This is my brain on Concern Overdrive: If I'm busy and distracted enough, perhaps I can escape the sadness. If I'm needed enough, and if I'm helpful enough, perhaps I can strike a bargain with pain: give more and do more, in order to feel less. And if I can throw enough stuff into that dark chasm, perhaps it won't seem quite so deep anymore. So, I've been keeping busy. I've gone to yoga class and book group and out to lunch with friends. I've hosted house guests and visited my mom and driven to see Jack on his birthday and baked bread and written sympathy notes and read friends' kids' college essays and put on dinner parties and taken walks and edited papers and written recommendations and read manuscripts and returned phone calls and donated money to good causes. It's all a bit of a blur. I wonder if I've babbled, or acted weird, or been inadvertently rude. I honestly can't remember. Part of me has been visible, present, making an effort; but another part of me has been absent altogether, out to sea, riding the dark waves of sorrow and confusion.
I'm not sure where yesterday's firm voice came from, or even who it was that spoke the word "stop" to me with such conviction. But I was just awake enough to get the message. To struggle, to feel sad, to know loss -- this is all part of life. And so I paid attention to that knowing voice, and today I remind myself to be quiet and still instead of frantic and preoccupied. It's a challenge, to give this time of death and transformation its own mood and space. And yet, I don't want to run from what is real. Not when my soul is urging me to turn inward and to settle into some peace with what is -- this human mystery that is, after all, as natural as day and night, sun and moon, summer and winter.
A couple of weeks ago my son Jack wrote me a note. Somehow, at the time, I managed to read his words without absorbing the simple wisdom he was trying to offer. "Feeling sad isn't a waste of time," my eighteen-year-old spiritual teacher suggested. "You shouldn't try to distract yourself from the sadness, it's going to come out one way or another. And the longer it is before you start to feel it and process it the harder it will be."
We learn, as Roethke observes, by going where we need to go. And sometimes, we learn by staying where we need to be. Right now, I sit at my kitchen table, watching the skies clear after a night and morning of driving rain. The clouds lift from the mountains like luminous shrouds, dissolving into light.
As always, I find comfort in the view beyond my window, and in the pages of the books I love, the words of the poets, priests, and seekers who have journeyed through and survived their own dark nights of the soul. "Sorrow will remain faithful to itself," John O'Donohue reminds us.
"More than you, it knows its way
And will find the right time
To pull and pull the rope of grief
Until that coiled hill of tears
Has reduced to its last drop."
