A Week of Pain...

The imagery on TV of people on the East coast left broken and broken-hearted – calling out for assistance, as if they have been abandoned - has touched my heart, touching that same feeling of abandonment deep within myself somewhere.  And I wonder, how could I live in a contemplative bubble that I am wont to - and close myself off to what is happening in the world, under the guise of “spirituality”?  I can’t.  There’s no either/or.  It’s all one Life living ItSelf out here – just as it is…  Pain and Peace… And maybe it’s really that I want to protect myself from feeling my own pain. That’s what global pain does.  It gets us in touch with our own pain, our own vulnerability, our own helplessness to know what to do for a hurting world, let alone our own pain.  And ironically, the more time I spend contemplatively in Silence, listening within, the more of the world’s pain I seem to feel, as well as peace.

I saw a woman on TV helping in the clean-up effort in her own coastal town – crying – saying – “I want to go home, but there is no home.  It’s gone.”  I turned away and cried silently in my heart.  I can’t imagine the devastation to the psyche that no amount of religious platitudes of non-attachment, or non-dual refrains of, there is no “me” who wants to go home, can assuage.  It is a deep wound of the heart to lose one’s sense of “home” – to *feel* that sense of separation.  I’m sure we have all felt that in one form or another at some time in our lives, whether it was a loss of a physical place, a person, or an emotional/spiritual sense of “home” – that led to a sense of deep “homesickness” of the heart.

And a lot of us know people in our daily lives who need our empathy and our compassion, who have lost their sense of “Home”, feeling abandoned by “God” – adrift in their lives.  It is a deep wound.  I know such people in my family.  And it is a helpless feeling not knowing how to help them.  It’s as if some people’s pain is so deep that it cannot be mended.  It is not a tangible “fix” on a practical level, or seemingly a “spiritual” one either.   It is a deep pain of the psyche.  It is a loss of “Home” - that sense of eternal Beingness – a loss of internal bearings of the Spirit; an insatiable pain that no one and nothing can fill.  I’m sure you’ve met them too.  The ones whose hearts cry the cry of desperation in a dark wilderness of the mind, like sleep deprivation, leaving a deep hollow hunger within.  How do we help these wounded wanderers?

It all trickles down, pain upon pain – or maybe I sound too morbid - too dramatic…  But it’s true.  We are all impacted by the pain of others, by the global pain of a wounded world.  One person’s pain affects us all.  And yet, many times, as I have discovered, we are helpless to end their pain, and so we distract ourselves from their pain, and our own, by shutting out and shutting off; by pretending this is all an illusion.  I have done it too, not wanting to experience their pain.  But their pain ripples out anyway - through humanity.  How can we *not* be affected – how can we not allow ourselves to *feel.*

I once read a story online.  I believe it was a story of an African man who when asked how he was said he was “unwell”, even though he was very well.  The story went that his grandmother was not well, and that when one member of the family was unwell, they were all unwell.  And I knew what he meant.  I experience this myself in my own family.  One family member’s unwellness of being affects the whole family, and we are all “unwell” - we are all in pain, until that person becomes whole again. To some that sounds “co-dependent”, but it is energetic; an energetic vibration felt throughout the whole.   

Their pain *is* my/our pain.  I don’t want it to be.  I want to ignore it, or blame them for their choices that created their own pain…  But there it is.  It’s all a reflection.  And lofty beliefs and words are not helpful, because it cannot be heard, or received by those caught in the deep pain of the unconscious…

There is nothing I can offer
that buffers the pain,
that softens the heartache,
or heals the wounds -

for my sister, my mother, or the world…

And yes, at times I want to hide from their pain,
to not feel their pain,
because it is often too overwhelming…

And because I have my own pain.

And what to do with that as well…

I sit with it and let it speak,
let it cry,
let it take me to the “mothering”
womb of Silence of all Life,
and rest there – waiting;
petitioning the Cosmic energies,
 neither male nor female,
 to intervene;
on behalf of my sister,
my mother,
myself,
and a suffering world.

Sometimes
that’s all I can do…

When the “practical”
fails to touch the soul…

We pray…

And that is our offering
of love…

Photo: A piece from another canvas in progress…