It’s a big week for all of us. I haven’t used this platform to talk about the election, but it’s too much on my mind this week to pretend I’m thinking about anything else!
I’m reading Francis Weller’s FABULOUS book The Wild Edge of Sorrow, and here are a few quotes that I’m reading in the context of our current national dynamics:
Much of the grief we experience is not personal; it doesn’t arise from our histories or experiences. Rather, it circulates around us, coming to us from a wider expanse, arriving on unseen currents that touch our souls.
When our grief cannot be spoken, it falls into the shadow and re-arises in us as symptoms. So many of us are depressed, anxious, and lonely. We struggle with addictions and find ourselves moving at a breathless pace, trying to keep up with the machinery of culture.
Our souls know we are designed for a bigger, more sensuous, and more imaginative life. We can go for days, weeks, months, a lifetime with only marginal encounters with beauty and the wild, only rarely sharing an intimate moment with a friend. We collude in numbing, slipping into the void through alcohol, drugs, shopping, television, and work, anything to help us ward off the feelings of emptiness that come crashing through our door.
One of the most essential skills we need to develop in our apprenticeship to sorrow is our ability to stay present in our adult selves while grief arises.
And he quotes Stephen Levine: If sequestered pain made a sound, the atmosphere would be humming all the time.
When I read about the rally in Madison Square Garden, I hear the humming of sequestered pain. It’s turned into an infected wound and threatens the well-being of all of us. And this pain isn’t just “theirs.” Of course I am voting with Kamala with all my heart, but this pain affects all of us. We have to live together! Valerie Kaur says,
What I want to remind us all is that as much as we must fight for our convictions and stand for what is just, remember that all those people who vote against you are not disappearing after Election Day or Inauguration Day. We have to find a way to live together still… I invite people to take their wounds [and] their opponents’ wounds into spaces of re-imagination—of imagining an outcome, a policy, a relationship that leaves no one outside of our circle of care, not even “them.” This kind of labor, this kind of revolutionary love, it’s not the sacrifice of an individual, it’s a practice of a community.
Wow. If a Sikh woman who’s traveled around the country mourning the hate crimes against her people and others can exhort us to revolutionary love and a circle of care that extends to everyone, so can we.
As long as we focus only on comfort, progress, acquisition, and improvement without leaving room for grief and sorrow, I believe we will stay in this wounded place. All of us need healing, and all of us need the communal rituals that foster it. And we need integrated adults who can usher us into these sacred places. Whatever happens on election day, we have our work cut out for us. Grace and peace to you, my friends.