May 17, 2016 – In the Eye of the Human Hurricane

[Note: I’m travelling today. I’ll resume recording when I’m back home from vacation – at the latest.]

On Friday I had a long talk with someone who is very special to me, who is living through a very difficult time in her life – one that is asking an enormous amount of her. She said it’s the hardest time she’s ever been through. Part of what we shared, was what comes of living through hard times. It’s a great paradox: we never want to endure hard times, nor wish it for others – anywhere, but it is what makes us us. Or it can be – depending upon how we meet it. Good times are wonderful – falling in love, having great success, visiting beautiful places, being surrounded by wonderful people, enjoying robust health – or just feeling at home in our lives, as things go along. Good times are necessary to bring encouragement, rest and to refuel us. But from what I’ve seen of life, it’s the hard times that forge us – evolve us. They make us stronger, more resilient, more creative – and more human.

It’s a strange setup, that what we want to avoid, is also the thing that sculpts us into who we are and brings out our humanity. My attention is always captured by examples and stories that illustrate this. I heard an interview of a man who lived through WWII in London, the siege, little food, loss of loved ones, loss of a normal life. And he said it was the best of times. People helped each other out, made do with less, celebrated more, took nothing for granted. Joe and I had a trip planned to Italy on September 14, 2001 – just three days after the attacks in New York and Washington. I spoke over the phone to someone who ran a small agritourismo, in a tiny town outside of Florence, asking to cancel our reservation. She was kind and concerned and said, “of course” and refunded all our money without question. This Italian woman and I had no idea who the other was a few days before, but because of the horrible circumstances, we were no longer strangers. My dad was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2000. Without speaking of it with each other, or planning it, all four of us, my brothers and I, showed up that evening to circle the wagons and be with Mom and Dad. Hardship shows us our love of each other – it connects us.

If you think about it, if we had no hardship, we’d not learn anything new, not appreciate all we have, not have a sense of our own contribution, the difference we make, and we’d not need each other. Though it’s our nature to avoid it, escape it, numb ourselves or just complain, we must meet hardship – we must really live it, for it to have its way with us. And I believe that without some source of love and support, this is just about impossible. My friend shared with me how valuable it is to her, to have people hear her. She needs for someone to simply take in what life is like for her – allow her to share deep, painful feelings and experiences – without trying to fix things or console her – or to show her the “bright side.” What helps the most she said, is to have someone say “oh, how awful this must be – I’m so sorry.” Being witnessed, is a way out of the loneliness of our suffering, and it makes our experience real. It helps us find a way to hold what we are dealing with differently; it has us realize that though we hurt, some part of us is fully whole. My friend said, “this is so hard… and I am fine.”

I know that in my life, the support and witness I’ve had during my seasons of struggle, have helped me see my way through to a new level of capacity and awareness. I have (and have had) lots of people in my life who provide this kind of witness – therapists, coaches, ministers. I’ve heard them say how their own lives, the hardship they have had to endure, has provided them with the experiences necessary to serve others. We can be taught about human behavior patterns and faith traditions, but we can’t get a degree in compassion and connection. If we’ve not ever experienced grief, we can’t be with someone who is currently experiencing it in the same powerful, real way.

Not to make us mechanistic, but it occurs to me that we – specifically our hearts – are sort of like processors of hardship. In goes human experience – human suffering, challenges. When met, when felt, truly, deeply, it transforms – out comes compassion, connection and capacity for perspective – as well as creative solutions to our problems. It thereby leaves us changed, stronger, with greater capacity to respond to difficulty down the road. I wrote a post several weeks ago, where I said those who have the capacity for their own suffering, have fully “digested” their pain. This is what I’m talking about here. It’s like the Buddhist practice called tonglen. I may not have this exactly right, but my understanding of it (from a book I read years ago by Pema Chodron) is that we breathe in suffering and breathe out love, thereby transforming dark into light within our own beings, within our hearts.

I’m up in a plane as I write this – on the way to Kauai – to meet my sweetie, who is already there. As I look down, I see layers of clouds and the blue ocean below them. Fortunately (especially because I’m a bit of scardy-cat flyer) the Pacific Ocean is living up to its name, and we are floating smoothly above the earth. Maybe because I’m suspended in our atmosphere, but the idea of a hurricane has come to me. Gale force winds swiping across the land, in the center is the eye, a place of relative calm. Though this is a rather violent metaphor, I think that when life is tossing us about, we can find ourselves in the center of the storm, where everything doesn’t hit us with such intensity. I wonder if this isn’t where my friend finds herself, when she realizes that, despite all that is swirling around her, tossing her life about, she is still ok.

I almost always have the intention in these posts, to bring what I’m seeing about life to art-making (or visa-versa). Art making certainly isn’t as hard as the greatest hardships in our lives, but the analogy applies, nevertheless. Learning to work with watercolor is hard. Learning to see – really see – what’s there and training your color eye, can be hard too, if you’re not amongst the few, who have been bestowed these abilities from birth. And there isn’t any way to learn, to gain the abilities, these skills without actually doing them. We must sit down, dip the brush in water, in paint and put it to the paper ourselves. In this way, it is a solo endeavor; anyone else’s hand on the brush, and we miss out on the benefit. And the bearing witness part applies too; it is always my aim to minimize the discomfort, by normalizing the struggle and offering pointers along the way.

I so don’t mean to trivialize great suffering, by comparing it to painting. But there is a spectrum, a range of degree of intensity in everything. And fortunately for most of us, our suffering is more frequently small-scale, than hurricane-force. But maybe if we practice finding the eye in the smaller storms, like when we are learning to paint, finding it when the big stuff comes, we’ll be better prepared. Then when the storm passes, and we can rest, we reform our lives from a new place, with a new perspective. This is my great hope anyway.

With my love,

Cara