“I can’t take it anymore. I don’t know who’s who or what’s what or why.”
~Saturday morning cartoon I happened to overhear
Like so many humans these days, I have been dealing with strong challenges in my life. I’m aware of this with humanity as a whole, but also specifically with friends, clients, loved ones, there seems to be an amping up of life’s vicissitudes for a good number of people.
photo by Elizabeth Good
It’s easy to be caught up in the worries, fears, attempts-at-problem-solving, future scenarios, rehashing the past, and other caught-in-the-world-of-the-head activities.. Yes, even for a spiritually-based psychic, my friends. (In fact, I have noticed with many other psychic pals as well, we feel things even more keenly and with more difficulty at times than a lot of folks we know!)
So how to take these moments of uncomfortableness–at times extreme—and breathe Life into oneself again? How do we let the next moment, the next breath, bring a possibly unexpected Grace?
Sometimes it’s a gift. Hurrying somewhere, you see a child’s face, innocently smiling, which has that “Buddha Baby” countenance to it…suddenly you know you are okay, even if just for right here, right now. Or you find yourself in a place where you literally can “stop and smell the roses” (no wonder distilled rose oil is a great and costly healing potion through the ages~it has real magic). Yet it’s not always so simple, so easy.
A gift that came my way this week (as I was as caught up in my woes as possible) was a book of poetry. I wasn’t seeking it out, but…there it was, on the shelf of my local library’s bookstore. How could I not pick up a tome with the title, “Ten Poems to Last A Lifetime”? That sounded important!
And indeed, it was. Author Roger Housden collected some of the most wise, helpful, and healing poems ever written, and added his beautiful commentary. As a whole, the poems remind me that the human journey is one of learning to integrate life’s pains with the incredible beauty of human existence. (And Mr. Housden now tempts me with a list of his other seductive book titles, such as Ten Poems To Change Your Life, Ten Poems To Open Your Heart, and Ten Poems To Set You Free).
In this book, for example, I love the line, however sobering, from Dorianne Laux’s For The Sake of Strangers: “No matter what the grief, its weight, we are obliged to carry it,” as much as the famous more seemingly exhilarating line from Mary Oliver’s poem When Death Comes, “I want to say: all my life/I was a bride married to amazement.” This book of wisdom poems reminds me: life is a play of dualities; life and death, good and bad, dark and light.
In that reminder itself, I am healed. Able to move into life and breathing freely again, knowing the world is not against myself nor my loved ones that suffer. Perhaps life just offers itself to us all to make meaning and and love and creativity and healing out of all that we undergo.
I think it’s important to watch for things that are healing, like the book of poems. I felt that way about Obama’s presentation at the White House Correspondents Dinner. I thought, if our president can smile and laugh in times like these, maybe there’s hope. Some might say that it’s just cynical to smile and laugh when things are so bad, but Thoreau said, “Surely joy is the condition of life…”
Thank you Cecile for your thoughts. I love that Thoreau line! So important to recall in these oft-stressful times.