Tag: Surrender

The Beauty and the Broken

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I am sitting this morning in the stillness and the beauty that surrounds me here in my small home. Wrapped in the ever-powerful presence of the Doug Firs that stand guard outside. These trees that have become such dear friends to me, the tall ones that stand in protection, sentinels looking out over the land with their roots reaching deep into the fertile dark soil.

I am sitting with the presence of a weight, a heaviness resting on my heart and my shoulders. There is so much to grieve in this time, I feel myself wanting to run away. Wanting to not be with this weight, the intensity of change I feel in my own life and maybe even more acutely in the over culture, the political climate, and the actual climate. Which we must remember is not an abstraction, is our ability to live on this beautiful green jewel we call home.

I see so much suffering, increasing poverty, spiritual disconnection, desperation in the eyes of people in the streets. The faces that meet mine as I walk through the grocery store. The increasing number of people living on the streets in the city near my home. It is all too much to bear. And yet, I have no choice. This is the time in which I was born, and in which i am responsible for being a faithful witness to the truth of these times, both the beauty, and the broken.

What is the appropriate response to this weight and darkness? Maybe a better question is what is my appropriate response? Being that I know truly in my bones that the one thing I am actually responsible for is the way that I move through this world and my life. What do we do in dark times? What comes forward to me in this moment, as  clear as day is this – we make beauty from the broken.

The shattered vessel mended with lines of gold. The shattered heart mended with a healing balm of love and devotion. In times of darkness, we must remember who we are. Not get lost in the clamoring of voices that would tell us that it’s over, that we’ve gone too far into the darkness to be able to heal the horrors that we are witnessing all around us. It is easy to reach for despair. It is also easy to reach for hope. I do not think that either of these are the path to healing. The path to healing lies in our individual and collective actions that bring beauty and wholeness into our own lives and communities.

This is outside the realm of despair or the realm of hope. This is a sober and truthful look at the situation in which we find ourselves. Being a faithful witness to what is unfolding all around us and not looking away, not burying our heads in the sand. Not burying our pain under rage, or a frantic busyness that never ends. We must make beauty from the broken.

I step outside under an uncharacteristically blue frozen sky. The heavy clouds and rain that normally meet me on a January morning are gone. And though my heart is filled with wreckage the sky is so blue and the trees are so green. The birds continue to sing, heralding a new day with life force flowing from their bodies, and strong wings that meet the cool crisp air. When I look to this wild and holy world I know that crumbling under the weight of it all is not an option. Doom scrolling through social media, watching the news, being pulled into all of the insanity, for me – is not an option.

So I choose the path that my heart speaks, the path that is true for me… I place my cornmeal on the ground with prayers. I lift my voice in song with the birds. I commit myself to another day of walking in beauty. I keep my heart open. I keep my eyes open.

The poet in me knows that even the darkest places in my life are fertile ground. As I walk this path I gather treasures and put them in my basket. The suffering of the world can become medicince when I hold my aperture open to see the fullness of the whole picture. It is in our descent to darkness that we really learn who we are in this world. I would never wish suffering on another human, and yet I know that my own suffering has been, again and again, the doorway into the truth of who I am.

I choose to believe that this collective underworld  it feels like we are walking in right now, can be that doorway into the truth that we all so desperately need to see, that we are humans who are born to praise life and make beauty. That it is through this turning to the sacred  through this passageway of hardship that we can begin to once again weave a fabric of humanity and consciousness that can bring us into the new world our hearts you know as possible.

That may sound like overly optimistic, spiritual mumbo jumbo… but all I have to trust in this moment is my own heart. My own heart, and the way that the trees are still standing tall so tall, and the way that the birds are singing to me, and the grass under my feet covered in heavy frost. All I have to make sense of this time is what was given to me. And in this moment my grief ladened heart is also singing like a bird.

May it be that our wounds, personal and collective, be alchemized into medicine to heal the whole. This is the prayer I place on the earth this morning. The prayer I share with you now, so tender and small. But seeds too are small, and they live in the darkness, and they, in good time grow to be grand trees that bear fruit and feed life. Remember the seed that was planted in your own heart. Trust in its ability to withstand the cold winter darkness, set the taproot, then the branch roots, then the blooming.

And then I was 40…

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Well, it happened. I woke up yesterday morning and I was 40 years old. And I felt, exactly the same. Exactly the same as I have always felt completely and entirely, Marianna.There was no profound shift, no sense of increase in my adulthood status, my maturity, or my wisdom. Simply another day, alive and in my body.

I made my coffee, as I always do. And searched through the cupboards at the beach house I was renting to see if I could find something larger then an 8 ounce mug, as 8 ounces is terribly unsatisfying for me when it comes to coffee. I settled on a glass beer stein, and filled it full of dark strong liquid, and generous pour of organic cream. Settling down with my Journal and my pen, as I do almost every morning.

And as I sat there reflecting on my life, the soft sound of the waves on the beach in the distance, my own breath moving in and out of my body, gentle creaks of an old house shifting, and the felt sense of my daughter sleeping in the room downstairs, I was completely content.

As I began to write, reflecting on this shift in my age, and the things I wish to have happen this year, I had a realization. Every birthday since I have been a young teen, my birthday has been partially a celebration and also, the day of the year that I hatch my personal “fix Marianna” campaign. So, my birthday has become my own New Year’s Eve shitshow, where I make resolutions that I don’t keep, and look at all the things that are wrong with me and worry about how desperately I want to change but never seem to be able to.

I am always planning to be more dedicated, more focused, to do more writing, to exercise more, it’s exhausting even to think about it, it’s exhausting to write about it, and it certainly is exhausting to live it. I realized yesterday, and it sounds like a simple a-ha moment, but it felt like a lightning strike, that what I really want is to be less. Less of a perfectionist, less self-punishing, less of a people pleaser, less worry, less shame… The only thing I truly want more of is courage.

I have always loved the word courage, heart, to speak the truth of the heart. It seems in our current time of social media, and outward presentations taking the forefront, it takes special dedication and bravery to speak the truth of our hearts. To step out from behind the veil of “I’m OK and everything is great”, and to admit that we have pain, that we are suffering, that I am suffering. But this is what courage requires, it requires the truth.

Sometimes I doubt myself, no, scratch that I doubt myself all the time, well frequently anyway. I doubt that I am good enough, that I have anything original to say at all, that anyone wants to hear anything from me in this world full of scholars and eloquent beings, and artists, and people with college degrees. I doubt that there is a place for me in the world, in the world of humans anyway. I am quite certain of my place in the natural and more than human world. But the doubt is heavy, it hangs like a cloak and it colors all my days.

 I think this is deeply tied to perfectionism. To trying to be something other than what I simply am, and sometimes, what I am is a god damned mess. How does the dance between being and doing become so complex? How can I allow my complexity to be exactly what it is and as it is, and still move towards simplicity? Simplicity and purpose are where joy lives, I believe.

I have this recurring realization that it is only possible for things to be different when I am aware. Awareness, and allowing the light of awareness to shine into the dark crevices of my life, into the frightening and broken places, into the places I have purposefully cloaked in shadow. This is the way healing can happen, not by making birthday resolutions to become a better person. That whole “become a better person thing” reeks of bullshit to me.

This year, instead of making that birthday resolution list all of the things about myself that I want to change. I made a different kind of list entirely. I made a list of all the ways I want to be brave. And wouldn’t you know? Not really a surprise, to find out that most of the things that scare me involve deeply revealing myself and being brave and vulnerable in my body. I want to swim naked in the daylight, and learn to rollerblade again, and kiss a man who is not the man I was partnered with for the last 19 years…. Sounds fun, right? Fun and completely terrifying!

I have had a lot of magic in my life. I have had years a great growth, beauty, harmony, and community. I have had years of heartbreak, of loss, of my world falling apart around me. I have held in my hands the pieces of all I held dear, kissed them tenderly and set them down forever to step on to a new path of truth. I am not averse to challenge, I am not easily broken, but I am afraid. Yes, there is a lot of fear running in this system. But one thing I know is that I can learn new things. I can learn new ways of seeing and perceiving. And I can become more courageous.

So, here I go. Off into my 40th spin around the sun, with a small list of things I fear, written on a sheet of folded paper… Some actions seem small and some larger, but all of them I believe will lead me in the direction of true authenticity in myself. And who knows, I might just have a lot of fun along the way…