Sometimes Kindness Involves Silver Shoes

Dark Moonday.  Waning crescent moon, also known as the balsamic moon, several days before the new moon.     A good time for releasing habits, patterns, and old junk of all kinds.  Pruning.

 

Recently I’ve been having one of those times that makes you think, “Was I actually happy a little while ago, and… did I really have energy to get things done?  Will I ever have energy again?”

I spent last week visiting the critical care unit of a very good hospital five hours away from where I live, sitting vigil with my family around the bed of my aunt who is fighting for her survival. 

I could feel the strands of my life slipping away until there was nothing left but the sterile hospital with pumps of antibacterial lotion at every door like mezuzahs, the efficient, rushing nurses, the buzzing, beeping machines, my aunt’s shallow breath. 

I silently chanted ‘Ya Sha Fi’, a Sufi chant meaning ‘to heal’ or ‘healing’ for hours.  It was peaceful.  My presence seemed helpful, and it felt so good to be helpful.

Coming back has been harder.  My aunt isn’t out of the woods, but her prognosis has improved.  The older generation sent me home.  They told me I'd be needed again soon, and in the meantime I had to take care of my own life.   That’s the tricky part.  Picking up those strands again after casting them aside so suddenly.

We have a very small family, and I adore my aunt.  Part of me wants to stay in bed, pull the covers up over my head, and hibernate for the foreseeable future.

But that's not what I’m doing.  I’m also not forcing myself, kicking and screaming, back to ‘normal’.  I’m being patient with the part of myself that wants to hide under the covers forever more. 

I learned this trick when I was quitting smoking.  If you really want to shift a behavior, you have to be incredibly kind to the part of yourself that is resistant to the change.  

Today I bought a pair of silver shoes I’ve been wanting for about a year.  Just looking at them makes me want to dance, and certainly to get out of bed so I can put them on.  I wore a silk dress because beautiful clothes help me to face the world.  I gave myself small manageable tasks to accomplish with the understanding that I didn't actually have to get everything done.

I held space for how I’m feeling in my meditation practice.  And I did my meditation practice. 

I’m sure that I’ll have days where I fail, days where I stay in bed in ratty sweats reading a novel for hours, getting up only to eat brownies, and I have to be kind to myself on those days too.  Tell myself its o.k.  I’ll just try again tomorrow.

Because life is too precious to be spent beating ourselves up.

For this Moonday, I’d love it as always if you have some art or a poem to share of any kind.  I’d also love to know what cheers you up?  What do you do to encourage yourself when you’re feeling overwhelmed by life?

Sending Loving Kindness to Myself... Circa 1992

Moonday.  Just after the new moon, the start of the year of the Tiger, Valentine's and V day.

I feel the pull to turn inward, retreat.  After some powerful healing work this week with my Dancemeditation community, I'm standing very close to a young me.  Fifteen.  She is full of self-hatred worn like thick dragon-scaled armor.  She loves Rilke and the Bronte's.  She likes to sit on the jagged brown outcroppings and stare at the roiling river, especially because she's not supposed to be there.  Her chest is sunken.  Suicide seems romantic.  There are bars in her eyes.  Her voice sounds shrill and brittle in her head.

Books are rafts.  Dogs are guardian angels.  Nature is Mother. Those things haven't changed.  This is a poem she loves. Today I send her my love, laughter, and I'm listening.

The night is darkening round me
The wild winds coldly blow
But a tyrant spell has bound me
And I cannot cannot go


The giant trees are bending
Their bare boughs weighed with snow
And the storm is fast descending
And yet I cannot go

Clouds beyond clouds above me
Wastes beyond wastes below
But nothing drear can move me
I will not cannot go


O mother I am not regretting
To leave this wretched world below
If there be nothing but forgetting
In that dark land to which I go


Yet though tis wretched now to languish
Deceived and tired and hopeless here
No heart can quite repress the anguish
Of leaving things that once were dear

--Emily Bronte

(It goes on and on like that.)

If you have a poem, song lyrics, an image, or a thought that a younger self who could use a little TLC might enjoy, I'd love it if you'd share it in the comments, or any other Moonday artistry.

How very bad poems can heal the spirit

I've been writing, lately, what my critical judging mind calls (very) bad prose poems. These are free verse, plain, and just for me.  They've been helping me with my journal practice.  I write in a journal every day in the morning as a way to ease into the day, get the writing muscle moving, write down my dreams, and get unstuck creatively.  Only sometimes I feel stuck even in my journal writing.

The poems help me out of journal ruts-- when all I seem to write are lists of things I want/need/ can't seem to do, and lots of blah blah about my feelings.  They help me to articulate large experiences in few words when writing in prose seems daunting.

Because I'm letting them be bad, and just for me, they aren't stuck, and don't take long.  Usually they illuminate ideas or feelings.  There is always more of a quality of witness about them.  When I write prose, I'm in it-- mired inside the feelings, actions, ideas.  With poetry, I feel freer.  I feel more spacious.  I don't feel compelled to explain or understand every thought, emotion, or turn of event.  I simply write impressions.

I thought I'd share one of them, written soon after a Dancemeditation workshop at Kripalu with my teacher Dunya.  We had been listening deeply to our bodies.  Some of them are more story-like than this one.  I'm sharing it even though I don't think its a 'good' poem-- (it isn't one that I label very bad, though.  I'm not yet brave enough to share one of those) because it helped me, even though it is a 'list poem', which my poet friends mostly sneer at as a form.  Hoping it will inspire someone else to write their own medicine.

Witnessing the Self

Grinding doubts inside my jaw,
heavy sacks of rain soaked sand.

Inflamed fear inside my face,
swollen passages
with doors on fire.

fingers and toes,
dried leaves possessed
in a windstorm.

Grief-- my heart, no more words for it.

Strong limbs,
ancient oaks unfurling green.

faith-- my breath,
open windows with white curtains
blowing into mystery.

My upper back,
wide oval lilies floating
on a glassy lake the hue of sky.

Passion-- my heart,
blood roses blooming
out of wet earth,

even with the grinding doubts inside my jaw,
heavy sacks of rain soaked sand.