Embracing Humanity's Pain - a meandering...

I wrote this piece about 13 years ago in the aftermath of Hurricane
Sandy that devastated parts of the Northeast in the U.S.  It seemed
relevant to resurrect it with what is going on in the world today,
with floods, fire, famine and ongoing, endless wars -
the state of humanity...

~

The images on TV back then of people on the East coast left broken
 and brokenhearted - calling out for assistance, as if they had been
abandoned - 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 do - close
myself off to what is happening in the world, under the guise of
"spirituality"?  I can't.  There is 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.

I saw a woman on TV back then 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 and loss.  I'm sure some have
 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" (however we know that
to be) - losing that felt sense of connection adrift in their lives. 
 I understand this deep wound.  I know such people. 
 I've been there.  I empathize.
  It is a helpless feeling not knowing how to help them. 
 It's as if some people's pain is so deep , 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" - a loss of one's internal bearing 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?
  Like the displaced people of Palestine, and
 Ukraine, in their current reality... 
Breaks my Heart again...

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, collective 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 the pain, and so we distract
ourselves from the pain, theirs and our own, by shutting it out,
and shutting down; by pretending that it is all a grand illusion,
a dream that we can detach from.  I have done it too, not wanting
to experience the pain.  But the pain ripples out anyway - through
humanity.  How can we *not* be affected - how can we not allow
ourselves to *feel* it...

Humanity's pain *is* my/our pain.  It's all a reflection.  And lofty
beliefs and "spiritual" words are dismissive, not helpful, because
they cannot be heard, or received by those caught in their deep pain...
Humanity's pain needs the embrace of an empathetic heart of
compassion...

~

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

And yes, at times I don't want
to feel others' pain,
because it is 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 the Silence of all Life,
and rest there - waiting;
petitioning the Cosmic Energies,
neither male nor female,
to intervene,
on behalf of
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...

Mystic Meandering
2012

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

So much held in the heart - Brian Doyle

So much held in the heart
in a lifetime.  So much held in a
heart in a day, an hour, a moment.  We
are utterly open with no one in the end -
not mother and father, not wife or husband,
not love, not child, not friend.  We open windows
to each but we live alone in the house of the heart.
Perhaps we must.  Perhaps we could not bear to be
so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed
heart.

When young we think there will come one person who will
savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know
this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are
bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by
time and will, patched and force of character, yet
fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter
how ferocious the defense and how many
bricks you bring to the wall.  You can
brick up your heart as stout and
tight and hard and cold and
impregnable as you possibly
can and down it comes
in an instant, felled by
[someone's] second
glance, a child's
apple breath,
the shatter
of glass
in the
road,
the
words
 I
have something
to tell you, a cat with
a broken spine dragging
itself into the forest to die,
the brush of your mother's
hand in the thicket of your hair,
the memory of your father's voice...

Brian Doyle
Joyas Voladoras
Excerpt from - One Long River of Song:
Notes on Wonder

(Brian's words, my format)

~

A couple of memories from childhood that warm my heart:
Smelling the aroma of coffee and breakfast wafting from the
kitchen that Mom was making mid morning on vacation days
when we rented a cabin in one of the coves on the lake...

And one of our closer moments with Dad, at the same cabin,
when he took us kids out on the little pier next to the
boathouse at night to point into the night sky, as we clustered
next to him like ducklings, and pointed to the
Big Dipper.

~

Art - Mystic Meandering

 

Brian Doyle's stories/essays were, for him, a mystical project
born of both joy and desperation - embracing humanity.

"We're only here for a minute. 
We're here for a little window.
And to use that time to catch and share
shards of light and laughter and grace
seems to me the great story."

Brian Doyle