Extinction

On my wedding day, my father said, "I wish for you an extinction, so you may know what it means to lose something forever."

I lost my father on Oct 21, 2004. And my marriage, too, ended three years ago. Both my beloved dogs, Great Danes named Peanut and Lucy, died within a year of one another, on the heels of our separation. Still, I don't think these losses are what he meant. Not exactly. My father always struck me as a brooding man. I always knew that beneath his full throttle laughter and impish ways he was a pensive, contemplative man to whom words were more than mere information currency. I suspect he meant something more unruly when he wished extinction my way.

Our wedding guests were no doubt taken aback, since extinction-as-blessing is not exactly champagne and cake conversation. What ever happened to "May the road rise to meet you, may the wind be at your back" and other light Celtic blessings? Ah, but we are the black Irish, the dark and moody ones who bless marriages not with rote and flowery passages...but with extinctions (the glass was still raised, of course).

Losing oneself in the midst of growth is in fact extinction. It is a permanent, irretrievable loss of something we once took for granted. "I AM this, I AM NOT this," is nothing more than the fluctuating mind stuff (or chitta vritti for you yogis in the house). The tighter we cling to something, the more insecure we become, the less anchored we are. Ungrounded, floating, fearful, needy, dependent, we clutch and grip and try to wring from some experience an explanation--no, a definition of what we are. Of who we are.

And then one day it just dies. It simply passes into time and space like a dusty fossil, lying down with the weight of all the neediness, all those expectations, all those hopes and dreams (the glass raises again). So, it folds into the layers and layers of time until its simple imprint--a memory, a taste, a touch--is all that is left.

Then we know, in one moment, extinction of the self. Total obliteration of the identity we have labored so hard to protect, to defend, to define, to project, to perform.

Gone.

Blip.

May the road rise to greet you, may the wind be at your back…

Letting go of who you (think) you are and have been is a lot like any other death, really. Not at all dissimilar to the death of a parent, in my experience. There was a being that gave shape and direction to my every thought and action, and that being is no more. And whether my father died or I died, I know not. Whether my marriage failed or I failed, I know not. Whether my dog (my child, my friend) was devoured by cancer or I was, I know not. Because in each instance of loss, I have let go of some part of myself. I have offered up and released some heretofore "essential" part of who I "am."

Sometimes I feel as though nothing remains, as though the extinction has been final. As though the species has been wiped out, off the map, without hope of return.

Maybe that sounds macabre, but in fact I feel a giddy release in acknowledging that small extinction. I feel joy and liberation even as I feel grief and insecurity (we broody types happily embrace the simultaneity in all things, comfortable with seemingly disparate emotions flooding in at once--this explains whiskey).

The truth is (in this moment, and only now), I quite agree with my father that to lose something forever is the only way to know the limitlessness of ones own heart. To lose irretrievably someone or something you love, is to learn what love was in the first place. And it isn't the soft puffy cloud kind of love you meet here. It is the raw, in your face, peel back your skin, and dilate kind of love you find splitting the seams of your heart. Heart meaning core, meaning center, meaning self. 
Love is being broken open into infinite scattered illogical pieces that equip you to keep rebuilding an even larger, more vulnerable space to keep holding love.

If you keep insisting on rebuilding the same small shape, carefully cupping yourself around the same tired edges, you just end up with ever greater pressure building and building. You must break open, die, and expand.

And that's just a black Irish fact.

I keep a watchful eye on the silverback gorillas, the blue whales, and the polar bear. I watch ice caps melt and wonder how many fish will be left in the sea by the time I turn 40. But tonight is my own steady, certain extinction that captivates and scares me. It is the irreversible moments, the actions or words I can't take back that haunt me. It is the face in the mirror that looks less and less familiar, and more and more independent of me.

Somewhere along the way, I let go of something, and she is running wild in my life like she is the last of her kind. she keeps breaking my heart and patching it back in ever larger contorted shapes, and she keeps leading me to water I can't drink.

If Einstein was right, this moment too will fold back on itself, and I should as likely remember the future as the past. And in that case, a true extinction would in fact become a birth--a temporary thing that cannot sustain itself through time and space. I strain my memory searching for the future, but so far all I see is the same old image--reproducing herself into each and every moment. But I suspect the future requires someone different than the woman sitting and writing tonight, or the bride whose father wished upon her an extinction.

I imagine the time and space, the ecstatic and harrowing experiences ahead, don't make sense anymore for this particular limited me. I guess that means it's time to die.

Again.

Yet there is also a kind of presence that has more to do with the dissolution of the boundaries. I could call it a merging with the fabric all around in the vibrations of sound, the elixir of scent, the feel of the air around one’s skin and the earth beneath one’s hands and feet the feel of my heart beating into the earth as I lie on my belly in cobra (and where does the air leave off and my body begin, where does the earth leave off and my body begin…there is no exact point of separation…one is always already the other).

It is in dissolving the boundaries of self and other, of skin and breath and time that we allow for a presence denied to the living. In this letting go of the form that is tied to a time and place, there is freedom, liberation. Perhaps this is, in part, the lesson of the corpse. The lesson of death and dying. Beyond all the hackneyed hallmark gibberish about death teaching us the value of life is the underlying message that in death, in the many, mini deaths of each moment and each transition, life is freed from the prison of a moment, a job, a relationship, an illness, a time, a body.

The grief of loss is not really for an individual, or even the singular loss. The real power of grief is that the individual loss serves as a doorway that ushers us into the transformational brutal, raw, liberating, sacred experience of GRIEF, wherein we remember our connectedness. Though it feels like separation from the one we love, the actual feeling, in my humble experience, is the raw memory of our connection, our union. Perhaps this helps to explain why loss can be so transformative and renewing even as it seems to break us into a million irreparable pieces.

No, it isn’t the individual loss, which we certainly mourn. The death of one dear individual also triggers past losses. We hear this all the time. Grief is like a spiral, we revisit the losses again and again on anniversaries, in meaningful locations, in the smells and sounds that recall our loved ones back to us.

But grief is also remembered each time we go there. Grief is a place, like the underworld where Persephone must go for a time each year. The body itself retains the memory of those other cut threads, and when we are faced with the death of another relation, the experience itself, which is stored deeply in the cells, renews and dredges up that past. We FEEL the similar feelings and our minds recollect those past losses.

Still, I think I mean something other than that even. There is something on the tip of my tongue, and I suspect that is precisely the point for which I am grasping--it is beyond language, description, and even intellect. Because grief undoes them all, leaves us without words, or without adequate words. Leaves us broken and shattered, formless.

Yet grief also transcends time and space, freeing us from the limitations of who and what we happen to be at the most recent moment. Lifted up out of the mundane perspective, for even a moment, we realize and remember that simultaneity of all experience, feeling everything at once...or at times, devoid of feeling or sensation as though one has been pulled deeply into pratyahara, senses withdrawn and still like the cold quiet of a new moon.

Individual losses take us there, into that experience where anything and everything is possible, real, and alive. But to actually feel that oneness, that union, that sense of absolute infinite possibility, there is also an unraveling of who and what it is we think we are.

I used to think the transformation that seems to follow loss was merely the result/effect of one’s life being turned inside out and upside down, being thrown into the air when the ground beneath crumbled or the rug was pulled up--when what felt stable and secure is suddenly (or in some cases, slowly) removed. In that uncertainty and instability, we not only feel the fear, anxiety, and despair of having “lost” someone we love and what that relationship meant to us...but we are also afforded an opportunity to lose old perspectives, seeing our lives (our countless habits, hang-ups, expectations, and projections) in a fresh way, from a new (albeit wounded) angle. So for years I have understood the “gift” (an admittedly hackneyed spiritual term) made available by loss and grief; it seemed to me that the rug being pulled out from underneath me not only made me adept at recognizing there are no rugs, but I also began to see how these experiences gave me a completely new perspective on what was happening and whether or not that life was aligned with a deeper sense of Self.

So my own grief and loss has propelled me into new identities with staggering speed and depth. I have gone from college English comp instructor with a house and a husband to a wandering gypsy of sorts, teaching yoga and writing these words, to...what exactly? The point is, it doesn’t matter what I am constantly becoming and unbecoming, it isn’t so much about the roles or shapes or forms I take, but what those forms, shapes, and roles allow me to access and remember.

I guess what I am getting at is that I realize that grief is not just an emotional state or a process, but a continuous experience of consciousness that is characterized not so much by sadness as by transformation.

Yes, the sadness is tremendous in the wake of loss, but I don’t feel that grief is about sadness alone, or reconciling oneself to sadness. I don’t think grief or the grief process is solely about letting go or honoring or making peace or moving on. Grief can sometimes serve as the fire that burns away everything false and limiting. And much as we grieve and miss the individual, there is also a recognition that something persists long after their form, and ours, has been changed and dissolved.

There is a recognition, in other words, that the relationship was never contained by the interactions and exchanges between two forms, as though our love for another is merely an exchange of currency. Because in order to harness that connection, we would be dependent on the forms, which means we would be dependent on separation...and in death that separation is not actually furthered.

In death, that separation ends. Dissolves.

Blip.

And then, we remember.

And we access that ancient memory.

And there is the possibility of a freedom that feels like pain, ecstasy, destruction, and birth.

Each individual loss undoes us as individuals. We lose footing, we struggle to maintain the mundane routines and roles that quite frankly “make us who we are,” whatever that means.

But the individual who dies does not in fact leave us or become more distinctly separate from us. The individual loss ignites a deep awareness (so deep in fact we may not even register much less name the felt sensation) that there was never ever any separation. Grief for that one being, that one loss, compels us to merge and go beyond separation.

The individual loss undoes a sense of individuality and draws us into the felt experience of union.

My father is in the sand and currents and brush of a Rocky Mountain river. He is extinct, lost forever into something larger and intangible. In the trout scales and river eddies and dusty trails, the sage smell that fills me with an ache, the fading wildflowers whose spines begin to break, and the rustling feathers of crows in the trees...that is where my father has gone.

Never, ever to return to me again as anything more, or less, than that. And lately I see shards of myself in such places. I catch glimpses of my own life, scattered like so much afterthought. I find myself dangling like a question mark.

To cease, to stop, to let go, to surrender. To grow silent, to grow still, but still to grow. And grow and grow and grow, beyond what I am or who I was or what I think I ought to be. To grow beyond bride or wife or lover or daughter or sister or teacher or friend.

Expand beyond until that shell is dead, dust, an imprint in memory I hold like the desert holds the memory of the sea. Knowing the sea, too, will always remember the body of the desert.

And extinction is losing something forever...but what is forever to the desert and the sea?

The road doesn't always rise to meet me, and the wind has as often blown in my face as been to my back. Perhaps my father was simply being practical, wishing for me something certain at a time when irrational or naive wishes are tossed like so much wasted rice. To wish a death for someone is in fact a very pragmatic thing. It's to wish for someone the most authentic and predictable experience we can have.

But to wish an extinction, ah, well that's different.

That's wishing complete surrender.

That's wishing you the ability to let go of something forever when its time is done.

Glass raised, that's wishing the desert could bid farewell to the sea.

And that just makes me want to fold into myself and grieve because you know it could never be any other way. But the beauty is knowing the sea and the desert were once one body, one word, one place. Like he was here once, and once I was him. And now it's just me, and I’ll keep splintering into pieces, deserts upon deserts of fossilized memories. Just waiting for the tide to roll in and wash it all away. Waiting the way the desert waits for the sea.

Patiently.

Because extinction makes one patient.

opening to presence

One of the most crystalline of memories I have from childhood is my 4-year old self in bed as my babysitter was about to close the door and turn out the light. My Jungle Book soundtrack was on the record player, and she had let us stay up late watching a show on orcas (which, I was convinced, were big magpies). As she went to close the door to a crack, I called her back in and asked, "What will happen when my mother dies?"

Now, I don't know about you, but these are not easy thoughts to sift through with a 4-year old on a Friday night to the tune of "Trust in Me." I have tried my best to remember the identity of the unfortunate witness to my early existential crisis, but so far she hasn't been tracked. Nor do I remember what her response was aside from an initial "Oh, honey, that won't happen for a long time" that was quickly trumped by my "But what WILL happen?" Suffice to say, I am sorry to have unloaded that on you...if it helps, I still grapple with it all the time. Especially in the wake of having lost one parent already and too suddenly.

Last week I was hiking along listening to the NPR podcast of the always satisfying show, On Being. The guest was Kate Braestrup, a Maine chaplain to game wardens who go on search and rescue missions that end in tragedy as often as in recovery. She refers to her work as a "ministry of presence," at the "hinges of human experience when lives alter unexpectedly — where loss, disaster, decency, and beauty intertwine." This woman kind of rocked my world.

Her "ministry of presence" embodies, so sublimely, what "the divine" means to me. What yoga means to me. What sitting with discomfort means, what showing up means. THE miracle, as Braestrup sees it, isn't in the inexplicable events or the tragedies. THE miracle is that we continue to show up, to be present, even as we know the way the story--all our stories--will end.

"The question," said Braestrup, "isn't whether we are going to have to do hard awful things, because we are. And we all are. The question is whether we have to do them alone." In her years as a chaplain, and having lost her own young husband in an accident, Braestrup recognizes that "god" is the force that shows up, is present. "What we are less apt to be aware of and reconciled to," she explained, "is that we will lose everyone we love as well...the loss is going to be real, and there is no anesthesia."

And the power of this is, we know it. We already know it. We have always known it.

And yet, we continue to show up.

What I DO remember about the night of my crisis, however, is a feeling that kept me up that night. In spite of early signs of a brooding personality, I was still relatively untouched by any suffering...so I cannot project onto the little me what the older me would call it now. It wasn't anxiety or fear, though there was an element of urgency to my question. It was like I HAD to know, and I wasn't worried about what would become of her, per se (like, is there life after death or do we just dissolve into dirt or is there a god and is he/she/it nice?)...no, I wanted to know what would happen to me.

That seems reasonable, as I read it. Kids think about themselves, people tend to worry about their own lot. But that wasn't the obsession that night. It was this: somehow I felt that when she dies, so would I.

And I was too young to be feeling that as a metaphor or thinking symbolically about the ways we are grafted and shaped by our lives. I was a literalist. Snakes could sing, orcas were magpie mothers, and life was intimately bound to my mother.

To my father as well. Which I learned on a Thursday night in late October, 2004 when I said over and over to my brother on the phone, "No no no no no." As though I could revise the moment. Backspace, edit. In that moment, I felt something we might as well call a root, go cold and hollow. And in the days and weeks that followed, I felt the hunger of a dead root. Felt it seeking a sap that would never again whet its thirst. Uprooted. The world rocked.

There was who I was before. And then there was who I was from that point forward. Death is a tough teacher, especially a death that you know in your own bones and feel in the cells is a death of you, too. The raw material, the quickening, the sprout, the emergence, and then the felling. Who you were and who you are. Ne'er the two shall meet.

When someone you love dies, no matter how much warning you have or how prepared you may be, something fundamental shifts. Grief happens at a molecular level. Grief happens at the invisible vibratory level. Which is why grief, as an experience, is a lamentation. It's a song.

Braestrup noted that amidst a world of natural disasters, wars, unspeakable and even evil acts of violence, these catastrophes are almost always followed by courage, care, love, and generosity. We tend to treat the BIG EVENT as the thing--the place to look for god (or awaty from god) and we learn to treat our stunning capacity to care for one another as "unusual." But really, love and care--in the face of the loss and the suffering--this is the ongoing narrative of who we always have been and will be. Though there are those horrific stories of suffering where no one shows up and no one speaks up and no one helps, the usual way is to be present for those who need us to live on.

I have come to see that the reason people turn away, turn a blind eye, go into denial, or "don't want to know" is NOT because they are shallow, uncaring, or ignorant. I believe what they fear the most is their capacity to feel--to feel love break you open and make fragments of all you once thought you were. To feel loss empty you out and leave you with nothing more than the ache that is itself an undying love that must remain beating while the corpse continues on its journey.

We are afraid to feel, because the power of our feeling doesn't fit into the neat and tidy categories of our language, our logic, or our limitations.

Bearing witness is a part of many spiritual traditions and practices--learning to sit with and be present for what IS happening instead of checking out and running toward what we prefer, remember, or want. Braestrup' s ministry of presence reminded me of this witness consciousness--sakshi. As she explains, suffering alone is the worst. The stories that leave us feeling most helpless and powerless are the most tragic. When we know there is pain and despair, it is our innate response to want to hold one another.

And so it makes perfect sense, really, that sometimes people cannot "go there." They may be fine with CSI or the local news or a remote and uplifting tale of struggle that ends happily. It's a lot tougher to face the suffering that calls upon our own capacity to feel--even when feeling doesn't mean we can change a damn thing. Especially when what we feel doesn't mean we can change a damn thing.

Our capacity to feel, and to feel so deeply and profoundly that it can literally restructure our very being, is terrifying. In the great epic, The Bhagavad Gita, the warrior Arjuna begs to see Krishna (the lord) as he really is. After Krishna essentially gives Arjuna god-glasses, and reveals himself in his full manifestation (AS manifestation itself), Arjuna is overcome and cannot bear it. Glasses off. It is too much, too beautiful, too terrifying, too everything. It is everything at once. It is his own divinity, his own limitless beauty and power, too. All of it, unbearable to witness. To behold.

Before I lost both of my beloved great danes to their respective deaths (both hideous and painful), I used to remark on how teary-eyed I felt when they would look at me so longingly and adoringly. It's like I was somehow preemptively feeling the loss that would inevitably come. One winter day on a long hike through knee-high snow, Peanut (a cow-spotted Harlequin dane with unfettered enthusiasm) bounded up to me and just plopped down, pink tongue lolling out the side of what could only be described as a smile. I looked straight into his eyes, and he just stared at me, panting joyfully.

I burst into tears.

Right there on the trail, in my red snow hat and ill-matched mittens. And it was cold enough to freeze those tears to my cheeks so that they tickled and itched and distracted me enough to pull myself back into self-mockery and some silent comment about PMS.

But here is what I have learned. In those mahogany eyes, I saw my own divinity--my own capacity to love and be loved, unconditionally. And it was too much. It was ecstasy and pain--a momentary sense of really being SEEN. Seen and loved. And not loved in spite of what was seen, but because of it.

Unbearable.

And yet we DO bear it. And yet we do survive, continue on, live, however haunted, in, among and within the ghosts.

Among the many beautifully simple things Kate Braestrup said in the interview was this: "God is love. If nothing else...god is that force that drives us to really see each other and to really behold each other and care for each other and respond to each other."

I stood on the snowy battlefield somewhere between who I had been and who I was becoming, moment by moment, and I was given the sight to see that force, god, the divine....and it was too much. Glasses off.

Lately I have been doing my morning practice outside, on the grass overlooking the woods. I like to be on the ground, close to the wet earth before the sun fully rises. It's a still time, punctuated here and there by the first hummingbirds of the day and the occasional dismissive caw of a nearby sentry crow. There is one in particular who seems to recognize me...perched each morning in the same tree branch. I start with bakasana for him. Hawks circle overhead, and deep in the threads of the grass I watch ants climbing and descending like little black beads. It's lovely.

Except the cows.

And here is what I mean by that: I am living on the land where I was raised, which means 80 acres of serene pine forests and wildflower-dotted fields. It means solitude and sanctuary, and for a woman who was trying to navigate too many sudden losses and a health crises that sent me spinning, solitude and sanctuary are good medicine.

But it also means living on land my stepfather uses to raise cattle...and for a woman who has advocated for non-human animals (and farm animals in particular), this presents some challenges.

For years, as a vegan and animal rights advocate, I operated from the position that my way was the right way. And even as I did my best not to outwardly judge or collapse into proselytizing, I still harbored the belief that I was right--which means my stepfather is, well, wrong.

Wrong for raising sentient beings, no matter how humanely or free-ranging and grass-feeding and lovingly tended to (all named, all roaming the fields and forests). Because at the end of the proverbial day, they go to slaughter. No matter how you dress it up, slaughter is a messy business. No being wants to die. And even the most skilled, small-scale operations (like the one my pop uses) are ending a life in a violent way. "Humane slaughter" is a euphemism that can only comfort those who profit from and feed upon the suffering of those whose voices are literally snuffed out in the act.

This is usually when people turn away. This is where they don't want "to go" and don't want "to know." I don't have the choice, as I spent over two years researching animal exploitation as it relates to identity construction. Simply put, I have subjected myself to daunting hours of the worst kinds of footage, reports, and frontline narratives detailing the most atrocious and institutionalized forms of brutality and cruelty inflicted upon those beings who have no voice, no choice, and absolutely no power. The gentlest among us are the ones we brutalize and literally dismember into objects, pieces parts, according to our own tastes and preferences.

Like cows.

Who are gentle, maternal, playful, easily scared.

Easily subdued.

Kate Braestrup works at that place where "loss, disaster, decency, and beauty intertwine." The heart of her ministry is being present to it all--even as it may feel unbearable, bearing witness and opening oneself up to the true miracle that emerges in that presence, that willingness to be there EVEN AS WE KNOW the end of the story. And it is ALL there--the tragic and the beautiful.

Whilst I have been healing parts of my ever-shifting self, something in me had hardened in order to remain on these 80 acres during this sojourn. Something in me had numbed out so that I could deal with the fact that one side of a fence romped 4 spoiled, overweight, infinitely happy dogs...and on the other side romped newborn calves and lowing mothers whose lives will all eventually culminate in the garage freezer. In spite of all my years of practice and knowing better and leaning into the void...blah blah blah...there was right and there was wrong. Deep down that was how I felt. To be fair, at this point I value peace far more than I value being right, but I cannot deny there is a shrill and condemning voice inside me that has a very difficult time with all this. So, instead, I watched the voice, felt the feelings, and applauded myself for embodying peace over conflict. But the battle was not over, because I was the conflict.

Each time a calf was born and named, I would just go quiet, erring on the side of silence when the judgment and anger and frustration wanted to scream. Proselytizing and lecturing and so forth were, thankfully, no longer my methods. Still, those feelings have value and my response to them was, "don't go there." I turned off, I turned away. Because the pain is too much when you know there will be suffering, and nothing you feel will change a damn thing.

I recently attended...wait, scratch that, suffered through? Endured? Survived? (you get the idea) a workshop with Ana Forrest--a world-renowned teacher known for her intensity, abdominal work, and fierce honesty. It wasn't my first time with Ana, but this was the first time I had done heart opening with her. What remains with me long after the muscle fatigue wore off is Ana calling upon us to breathe into the heart, to feel the heart, to open the heart. "Practice one thing a day that brings your awareness into the space of your heart," she said. "Let the heart remain open, and if you can't do that, remain open to an experience, and if you can't do that, just breathe into your heart, and if you can't do that, just remember that it is there."

The heart is the bridge for the yogi, yoking together the more earthly regions of consciousness with those more elevated and esoteric. It's where the roots find flower. The heart center is the center of unconditional love and the willingness to see ourselves in all others. To keep the heart open, spacious, breathing, and feeling is no small feat in a world that so consistently asks us to be small, armored, defensive, and limited. It's hard to feel when what you want to feel is merely safe.

It's unbearable to feel broken apart and undone and shredded.

To feel it all.

Yesterday morning I was reminded of Kate and Ana and their words. I was reminded of Arjuna and Krishna, of my father, my mother, and my babysitter. In that mystical early morning hour, halfway through my sun salutes, one of the steer had wandered to the fence to watch me. Within a few minutes, the rest of his companions had joined him. I know they are males, because the western pasture is where they all go until they go to slaughter. These are the long-lashed, velveteen beauties whose eyes and swishing tails and obsidian hooves I have been avoiding. Looking away. Because I know the way the story ends, and after a lifetime of developing affections and attachments to the boys out back, I have learned that the storyline does not deviate.

But something happened yesterday. I got really honest with myself about some of the stuff that had been stirred up and eventually shaken out of my gut in Ana's class: "To open the heart, you have to open the gut," she had said to us as we panted with fat rolled-up mats plunging into our bellys as we lifted up into our 4th or 5th bow pose. "And when you open the gut, you stir up all your shit, literally...and metaphorically."

The gut is 3rd chakra--Ego, power, sense of self. Who it is we think we are, and who it is we think others think we are. And to open the heart, truly and fully, we gotta let go of some of that shit.

As I stopped and let myself gaze back at that boys yesterday, I knew exactly why I had been avoiding it for so long.

It felt just like looking into Peanut's eyes that cold winter day. These were the same eyes. The gaze was not judging me, it was simply holding me, exactly as I am. Seeing me. And the painful realization was that I had denied him, this doomed and lovely being, the same care. The same attention. As though knowing the pain and loss was ahead, and that I was powerless to change his fate, somehow excused me from showing up.

Kate Braestrup said that, "once you kind of accept that death is a given, that (the love and care) becomes the thing to look for and to mark."

This isn't just the tale of bearing witness to those who are made so completely invisible and unseen. This is also the tale of my love for my parents, for my roots. For all that is simultaneously loss, disaster, tragedy, fear, beauty, courage, and hope. It is an unfurling tale of how to reconcile all of it happening all at once as what IS. Just as surely as I hope to open my eyes and look into the eyes of the slaughtered, I hope too to look deeply into the eyes of my stepfather and my mother. To look deeply while I still have that opportunity--and instead of insisting on seeing me in their gaze (being like me, thinking like me), I hope I have the heart and care and god (or whatever I wanna call it) to see them. To really SEE them, hold them, and love them because I know how the story will end.

We are, each of us, held, however tenuously and awkwardly, by one another in our suffering--moment by moment, and from lifetime to deathtime. That suggests, to me anyway, that it is our nature to hold others in their suffering. Even as we know we will lose them, feel pain, and possibly be in the sad state of powerlessness to do anything about it. We can show up. And we can love and care and respond to and attend to it all--however glorious or terrible it feels. Because keeping the heart open to feel is what we are here to do.

And I suspect that I am not the only one who has a way of building up diligently-patrolled fortresses to protect myself from feeling the big feelings. It's so much easier to turn away from what we don't want to feel, and our culture is tailored to indulge that tendency.

So here is my promise to myself: One thing a day that keeps your heart open--just one thing. Whatever that thing is, let it in. Even when it hurts--because it hurts. Even when you are afraid. Most especially because you are afraid. Let it unmake you, let it break you. And let it take you more deeply into who and what you have always been.