Since I was 8 years old, my older brother has been an addict. Though he has had some short stretches of semi-sobriety, mostly he has not. Anyone who knows addiction knows that its tentacles extend to and ensnare most everyone within reach. The ways this sorrow has shaped my life for the past 54 years are myriad. But the most pervasive way is the hard, hard learning that compassion is sometimes an inadequate response; that sometimes love can't do anything at all. That it is imperative to choose comforting, loving, and creating safety for myself. That ultimately, despite all the wishing and hoping and working and trying, that is the place I must land.
I am moved by your sorrow, Lyn. And also challenged by your notion that "compassion is sometimes an inadequate response." I put great store by compassion and you make me remember that long ago, when i first learned of compassion, I thought that it could fix things. And I spent countless days and more years than i care to remember trying to apply compassion to the sorrow and loss that I found all around me. But if there's a way for compassion to fix things, I never learned it. I eventually learned that if i did not allow myself to be compassionate I became unwell (to put it mildly). So i wondered if compassion wasn't something, perhaps ironically, self-serving. But, no, I could never abide that. But i think I have learned that to live with an open heart means that compassion is simply what follows. But, though I often yearn for others to be touched by what little I can offer, I have learned that some will be open to that and many (even most) will not. And there is sorrow in that, for sure. And yet we endure.
I love these notions, Chris. Thanks for them. I actually think that compassion is deeply self-serving, in that it allows me to show up as the best version of myself. I guess I wish there was such a thing as "magic wand compassion"...the kind I could just wave and find things transformed.
Thanks for sharing this Lyn. Thus is one of the hardest continuous lessons to live with. It is invaluable when those of us in this position share about what it is like. It makes this very uncomfortable place to live more bearable, less lonely. It doesn't halve the burden, it transforms it.
Lyn and all who shared this deep mystery. Your thoughts remind me of the ‘blessing’ of Khalil Gibran: ‘May you know the pain of too much tenderness’. Compassion is the one value the Dalai Llama said he’d save if all religion disappeared. Compassion and the pain of it not fixing others’ wounds is a price I pay for loving. The alternative is numbing out and missing out on LIFE.
Thank you for this. My sister is an addict and the haunt of her choices has always been troubling for me, considering I am her older sister and felt responsible that I couldn't have helped her. I am learning to choose the safety for myself, while accepting her for what and who she is, with all of her calamities. Knowing she is a child of God, knowing that she has never been my responsibility. Some days this lands with me, others I can only reach for it.
Absolutely true. Self care is not selfish if it runs parallel with having said and done all possible things to help others who cannot hear or see to help themselves. Thank you Lyn. It takes a lifetime to learn and accept this.
Lyn, I am coming here to comment on a similar sorrow in my life, of my children's long journey through addiction. I hear you. Sometimes love can't do anything at all, in spite of all the trying. Totally feel that.
I’m so pained and moved by what you shared here, Lyn. Thank you. 🙏🏾
I wrote my own response to this Sunday night, and then I awoke the next morning and realized - ohhhh, no, that’s not it at all. my greatest sorrow is what I feel in the face of loved one’s mental illness, and how helpless I feel. How I can’t “fix it.” How hard that is to bear. Then, I awoke this morning sobbing from a nightmare - something that hasn’t happened to me, maybe, ever, involving this loved one and at the end of the dream was my desperate cry to an aunt who recently passed, “how do you make a person get help? how do you make a person get help???” I awoke to this, sobbing. Then I logged into substack to write my amended response to Pádraig’s prompt . And before I got there, your reflection here about your sorrow and your brother met me on my way, as if to remind me - you are not alone, Mona, though the particulars are different.
Some days I try to learn what this particular sorrow is teaching me - equanimity - you cannot control this, Mona, you cannot make someone else else make choices you think would alleviate their suffering. And most days I rail against that and still believe I can make it change. I think of the “4 immeasurables” or “divine abodes” (brahmaviharas) in Buddhism and how compassion is one, equanimity is another. A teacher once said that equanimity says “I love you and I know I can’t control what you do. I love you and I know that beings are owners of their own karma.” I try to remind myself that perhaps the most compassionate thing I can do is really understand this, and accept this person - just as they are - in my heart. Sometimes that feels possible, often it feels out of reach with a part of me continuing to say “but if only…”. wishing, praying, for things to be different.
My greatest sorrow is that my mom died when I was 18. Sorrow’s gift is empathy with those who experience loss. And also meeting and bonding with others who live with a like loss.
I share with you the loneliness, Padraig. And I wonder at my core if the loneliness is only part of an illusion, brought on by the inability to see, maybe to remember, a connection, the connection, that is at the heart of everything. A connection that is ours to rediscover in the telling of our stories. I often feel I am trying to remember something, and that the deepest something is the memory of my connection to all that is, hidden from view for now. It is a connection that I seem to have once known, and hope to know again.
I wonder if 'trying to remember something' is what pushes us out into our lives, into that deep longing to find the pearl, the essence that might lead to connection. Belonging. Thank you Sean, and Padraig. Love Sundays...
The greatest sorrow, for me, is life itself. To live holding an awareness of such Beauty and such horror. To witness, within myself, and all around me the savagery of the human beast, and the extraordinary delicacy and care of the beast’s delightful relative, an open, gentle heart. This sorrow is reborn each day. As is this Beauty.
I have tasted love three times in my life. The first began under force and endured when I became a devoted parent and believed in staying together "for the children". When the children reached maturity, after 23 years married, I claimed myself. The second time I coupled with an independent man, pursued him as a test of myself and tried for fifteen years to elicit some sense of belonging with him. I left the effort, unsuccessful. Then, at 71, I woke to a surprise intense love for a stranger, entered into an arrangement as "friends with benefits, certain I could move his "friendship" into a love that matched my newly found true passion matched with intense kindness and love. After a year, he left the benefits for a true love, but I determined to keep the friendship. Now, eight years later and entering my 8th decade, I long to be able both to give and receive a complete LOVE, unbound and free, as I now understand myself to be capable of. I am lonely for the chance, finally to give and receive in equal measure, but especially to be able to give in a whole heart, soul and body way to another soul. My sorrow, as I come closer and closer to life's end, is that I may not have a chance in this life to match in loving. I am open, but odds are not in my favor. My life is full of every other form of love, so I am not bereft, but have that yearning at the edge of all other loving.
Moving and so honest. I recognize a profound, human lament in “but have that yearning at the edge of all other loving”. Who are we if we cannot be honest and say deep things like these?
Your share brought light to an already sunny day. I, too, am 71, with a longing for that "taste" of love with a partner who sees and hears me. Each day brings joy and pleasure in connection - to the natural world, animals, literature, old friends and family, even strangers. I am focused on the present.
A fresh sorrow for me. The end of what I thought was a promising relationship. But perhaps one I pursued a little too vigorously in trying to keep that ancient loneliness at bay. So I will howl a little until the season of my heart moves on. As it always does.
Ancient loneliness caught in my throat as I read the phrase. Thank you for sharing with us, and for the reminder that our howling does come to an end. I can relate so much.
My chronic depression is a teacher whose lessons I’m still learning. I didn’t understand it when I was younger, having been brought up in a society/community where mental illness was something to be borne and endured rather than addressed and helped. As I grew older, the power of the depression became more and more profound, until I finally faced the long darkness which threatened to consume me. Between reading William Styron’s ‘Darkness Visible’ and seeing the wondering looks on my children’s faces wondering when I would come back, I decided to seek help.
The lessons that I am still learning are about the nature of darkness both in myself and in others, and what passing through the darkness can teach us. I liken it to Gilgamesh passing through the Mountains of Mashu, dying and being reborn on Paradise Shores. That light is something that I seek to understand. The darkness has its lessons, none more compelling than the nature of the light.
I have also been studying and practicing with darkness. I am moved by your post, thank you. I love this poem, wendell berry. Also reading Opening to Darkness, Zenju Earthlyn Manuel.
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
Thank you, Sean, for your reference to William Styron's book. I was not aware of it, and I'll give it a read. My experience is similar to what you describe, with depression being a lifelong companion whose influence has been alternately passive and controlling. After nearly 70 years I've learned that it is not seperate from me, but an element of my being that must be accepted, like it or not.
I knew that there were people like me in the world but Styron’s book really put it into perspective. Like you, I now know that I can live with this companion, however difficult they may be, and that they have so many lessons to teach me.
Acceptance for me has been a long road,seeking help from multiple sources along the way. Many have not been effective, a few have provided a fair amount of 'up time'. Although the term 'mental illness' has the ring of there being something 'wrong' with me, it's still been helpful to accept that this is not something I'm making up or manufacturing simply by not 'thinking right'. Like Sean, mental illness was both denied and untreated in my youth. Part of acceptance has been surrendering to the fact that I have a lifelong condition that I'll have to be mindful of and manage as best I can as I consistently seek the light. I hope your time in the light is much greater than in the darkness. And I agree with Sean that there are lessons to be learned from both.
Perhaps the greatest sorrow from which i have learned or, rather, from which i've made a life is that I never learned my parent's stories. They kept powerful secrets about which I can only guess - albeit I have applied all the skills of investigation that I have been able to learn. I was, perhaps, one of their first secrets, as I was born in secret. And it seems like they chose silence as the way to keep their secret. And, though they may have wanted only to be silent about whatever it was that they were hiding, that silence grew into something all-encompassing of my young life. I was starved for stories from them and from the family from which i'd been hidden. It almost killed me. But I learned to read very young and was able to feed the void with which I lived. And even as an adult and after years of trying to learn my parents' stories, I failed. And they are gone now, having kept their secrets, and their sorrows, to themselves. I do not feel sorry for myself for what I went through as a child nor even what I bear now. That sorrow, though great, pales beside the greater sorrow of having been denied the stories from which I was fashioned. And so, I have become a storyteller, a scholar of stories, a poet, a teacher and, perhaps most surprisingly of all, a parent.
My standard answer to my kids (and my kids' classmates to whom i told stories weekly for years) when they asked if the stories I told were "true" was: "All my stories are true, but you shouldn't believe anything I say." I love their confoundment at this response but today's kids in their wrestling with meaning in our complex world, didn't really want an answer to their question. What they loved was the play of meaning, the uncertainty, the wonder. And I could see them, as they got older, struggle so fiercely to hang on to that wonder. To older children and adults I like to share this quote (for which i have only an attribution of "traditional saying"): The dreamer awakes, the shadow goes by, / When I tell you a tale, the tale is a lie. / But listen to me, fair maiden, proud youth, / The tale is a lie, what it tells is the truth.
I had to pause and turn away before a response came to me, because just this past Friday my mother quietly left us as I sat with her in hospice after she fell earlier this week. As is the case these days this meant for me hurriedly packing a suitcase while my wife arranging travel details(she was already committed to leading an entirely separate memorial service she had organized). But my greatest sorrow and a long unrecognized source of my anger issues was losing my father when I was 8. Life then meant dealing with two different stepfathers each of whom made contributions of their own good and bad. But now I realize that I am moving into Terra incognita as the mantle of family elder falls to me. The formal duties are light, mainly collecting family lore with the aid of ancestry.com, and otherwise I have no desire to probe too deeply into the lives of relations from whom I am seriously divided in today’s America. I long ago learned to let most brick walls go by without bashing my head into them. So, as noted, I am now more than ever a stranger in a strange land. Fortunately I do have some experience at that.
I feel that strangeness as a stranger in a strange land, and there is something of strange community. Mostly this is the human experience. I certainly have tried my upmost to avoid this reality, and in acceptance (often repeated attempts) of my aloneness…some less-aloneness emerges. Thank you for sharing from your strange land.
Dear Robert, losing your Mom, as you sat with her, is such a huge change. I am glad that your reflections are yielding insight, even if some are painful. May your mantle as Elder be a gift to your family, giving them a chance to see a fulfilled life with deep values.
What’s a sorrow that’s been a teacher to you in your life?
I went back to the Poetry Unbound episode to listen again. “Remembering is a moral act, a courageous act,…the heart can’t make it up.” It struck me that in probably all circumstances, the aggressors remembering, the pain in remembering and acknowledging is more validated than those who have suffered. Here in the new regime, there is the attempt to whitewash (literally) history. One response to this attempt I read was something like when you say you want to protect children from feeling bad about the past and themselves, you are really only talking about caring about some children.
Growing up in a violent household, the sorrow, maybe it also is a loneliness, that felt like a core part of me. A feeling of being different, but not in a good way. I used to think maybe there was something unlovable in me that I needed to keep from other people, not let them see me, really see me.
I don’t feel that way anymore. I know that the problem was not me. I totally get it when Pádraig wrote “I do not see it as a failure now, and even the sorrow’s truth has become a companion. And-strangely-a point of connection.”
Elaine, it doesn’t sound like you were very often, if ever, told you were amazing, brilliant, precious. That wasn’t fair, and you realize that as an adult. I come from an Italian family guilty of child-worship. It’s amusing to hear my siblings repeating the phrases Aunts and Uncles heaped on US to my grand nieces and nephews. I think this lack of feeling cherished makes it hard to accept praise as an adult, because it’s unfamiliar and uncomfortable. My heart aches for gifted public figures who cannot absorb the genuine and fully deserved admiration people shower on them. May your insights lead to connection and deep peace.
Thank you for your beautiful expression around the subject of Sorrow and opening it up for contemplation.
I read every one of the responses so far and felt that I could reply to each one of them with my own experience. I have not done so, but I will say the following.
Many of my soon to be 80 years contained a search for the replacement of a lack of self-respect.
I'm aware of my family of origin and the source of a deeply depressed mother and a codependent father upon my own life. The stories are vast for me in my search for inner peace. I ran against walls and was greatly damaged many times.
I learned by picking myself up and asking for help eventually with a professional. I read voraciously, learned by giving myself and others, healthy rather than codependent support.
With time my own actions built self respect. I grew to see that what I was looking for outside was actually something that I needed to give myself inside.
Joseph Campbell in his research and writings had a phrase that at first was completely untenable to hear. Learning to love your fate.
I am so blessed in that I have embraced and do have that exact feeling about all my life experiences. I am grateful in a way that is very hard to even put into words. I have found tremendous Joy in the small things and some great things of being alive. I can say that I am at peace.
The word peace is probably the biggest word in the dictionary.
Though I don't have a life partner and have never had one that was capable of overcoming their own inner deamons , I no longer am even interested in the subject of having that kind of relationship. That's probably the biggest indication to me of how much I have healed.
My appreciation and love of life has been the greatest gift of all. I share it with people I care about and sometimes even strangers.
I have the gift of writing since I'm a small child and I am working on many writing projects at this point, both as Legacy and as sharing I believe some important lessons that hopefully will help others in their own challenges.
I wish for the entire world, what I've received. Not just for the people that I know and love but for strangers, anyone who is suffering. And for those who are so miserable that they harm themselves and perhaps others in their misery.
Life is a huge, sometimes frightening, sometimes magnificent mystery. I feel strongly that sharing our stories is a vital means of "paying it forward".
When I was 15, a 16 year old classmate died in a tragic car accident. Our school closed for his funeral. I remember sitting in silence in the packed church waiting for it to start. Everyone around me was whispering lines that started with "if only..." If only I'd said, if only I'd told him, if only I had apologized, etc. I promised myself then, that to the best of my ability I wanted to live so I never felt that kind of regret if someone was suddenly gone from me. It has led to some awkward moments of saying vulnerable things maybe too soon, and to asking forgiveness when pain was still fresh. I have missed the mark often. Yet, for the most part my efforts have been met with deep appreciation and have created deep connections. It has also created in my deep contentment with peace. I am grateful for my classmates time here with us.
I clearly remember waking on a spring morning at about the age of four and deeply longing for the place I had just left. Despite the beauty of the day, the breeze blowing my animal curtains, the sound of my mother singing in the other room, I felt inconsolable. This memory and longing inspire me even today toward aspirations of a life that intersects with the pain and beauty of a world that is still incarnating, where deep longing becomes belonging. I no longer need to travel the world seeking the perfect home, the most loving community, the best friends, and partner. In a deep state of relaxation, I can access my heart and from there the electromagnetic field of energy that scientists are now calling Love because of the universal principle of mutual attraction. Is this any different than my Catholic ancestors’ understanding of a grace that surpasses all understanding and transforms even the most painful losses?
wow...great insight....as well as the words..."restless is the heart until it rests in You?" perhaps...we are all restless in human form for that from which we came?
The sorrow of abandonment and abuse became my guide for mothering. Somehow those inner wounded-healer parts were guides (along with my recovery) to help me be for my children what I’d always longed for (and as you speak of loneliness, I suppose I still long for that attachment).
Since I was 8 years old, my older brother has been an addict. Though he has had some short stretches of semi-sobriety, mostly he has not. Anyone who knows addiction knows that its tentacles extend to and ensnare most everyone within reach. The ways this sorrow has shaped my life for the past 54 years are myriad. But the most pervasive way is the hard, hard learning that compassion is sometimes an inadequate response; that sometimes love can't do anything at all. That it is imperative to choose comforting, loving, and creating safety for myself. That ultimately, despite all the wishing and hoping and working and trying, that is the place I must land.
I am moved by your sorrow, Lyn. And also challenged by your notion that "compassion is sometimes an inadequate response." I put great store by compassion and you make me remember that long ago, when i first learned of compassion, I thought that it could fix things. And I spent countless days and more years than i care to remember trying to apply compassion to the sorrow and loss that I found all around me. But if there's a way for compassion to fix things, I never learned it. I eventually learned that if i did not allow myself to be compassionate I became unwell (to put it mildly). So i wondered if compassion wasn't something, perhaps ironically, self-serving. But, no, I could never abide that. But i think I have learned that to live with an open heart means that compassion is simply what follows. But, though I often yearn for others to be touched by what little I can offer, I have learned that some will be open to that and many (even most) will not. And there is sorrow in that, for sure. And yet we endure.
I love these notions, Chris. Thanks for them. I actually think that compassion is deeply self-serving, in that it allows me to show up as the best version of myself. I guess I wish there was such a thing as "magic wand compassion"...the kind I could just wave and find things transformed.
Thanks for sharing this Lyn. Thus is one of the hardest continuous lessons to live with. It is invaluable when those of us in this position share about what it is like. It makes this very uncomfortable place to live more bearable, less lonely. It doesn't halve the burden, it transforms it.
“It doesn’t halve the burden, it transforms it.” Thank you for this, Beth.
Lyn and all who shared this deep mystery. Your thoughts remind me of the ‘blessing’ of Khalil Gibran: ‘May you know the pain of too much tenderness’. Compassion is the one value the Dalai Llama said he’d save if all religion disappeared. Compassion and the pain of it not fixing others’ wounds is a price I pay for loving. The alternative is numbing out and missing out on LIFE.
Thank you for this. My sister is an addict and the haunt of her choices has always been troubling for me, considering I am her older sister and felt responsible that I couldn't have helped her. I am learning to choose the safety for myself, while accepting her for what and who she is, with all of her calamities. Knowing she is a child of God, knowing that she has never been my responsibility. Some days this lands with me, others I can only reach for it.
Absolutely true. Self care is not selfish if it runs parallel with having said and done all possible things to help others who cannot hear or see to help themselves. Thank you Lyn. It takes a lifetime to learn and accept this.
Lyn, I am coming here to comment on a similar sorrow in my life, of my children's long journey through addiction. I hear you. Sometimes love can't do anything at all, in spite of all the trying. Totally feel that.
I’m so pained and moved by what you shared here, Lyn. Thank you. 🙏🏾
I wrote my own response to this Sunday night, and then I awoke the next morning and realized - ohhhh, no, that’s not it at all. my greatest sorrow is what I feel in the face of loved one’s mental illness, and how helpless I feel. How I can’t “fix it.” How hard that is to bear. Then, I awoke this morning sobbing from a nightmare - something that hasn’t happened to me, maybe, ever, involving this loved one and at the end of the dream was my desperate cry to an aunt who recently passed, “how do you make a person get help? how do you make a person get help???” I awoke to this, sobbing. Then I logged into substack to write my amended response to Pádraig’s prompt . And before I got there, your reflection here about your sorrow and your brother met me on my way, as if to remind me - you are not alone, Mona, though the particulars are different.
Some days I try to learn what this particular sorrow is teaching me - equanimity - you cannot control this, Mona, you cannot make someone else else make choices you think would alleviate their suffering. And most days I rail against that and still believe I can make it change. I think of the “4 immeasurables” or “divine abodes” (brahmaviharas) in Buddhism and how compassion is one, equanimity is another. A teacher once said that equanimity says “I love you and I know I can’t control what you do. I love you and I know that beings are owners of their own karma.” I try to remind myself that perhaps the most compassionate thing I can do is really understand this, and accept this person - just as they are - in my heart. Sometimes that feels possible, often it feels out of reach with a part of me continuing to say “but if only…”. wishing, praying, for things to be different.
Thank you for your sharing, Lyn. 🙏🏾💔❤️🩹
Thank you for this, Mona. I am sorry for your own aching heart. Indeed, you (we) are not alone, though the particulars are different. ❤️
💞❤️🩹
i took a poem to my poetry class just yesterday about addiction. it's so far reaching.
My greatest sorrow is that my mom died when I was 18. Sorrow’s gift is empathy with those who experience loss. And also meeting and bonding with others who live with a like loss.
I share with you the loneliness, Padraig. And I wonder at my core if the loneliness is only part of an illusion, brought on by the inability to see, maybe to remember, a connection, the connection, that is at the heart of everything. A connection that is ours to rediscover in the telling of our stories. I often feel I am trying to remember something, and that the deepest something is the memory of my connection to all that is, hidden from view for now. It is a connection that I seem to have once known, and hope to know again.
Happy Sunday.
I wonder if 'trying to remember something' is what pushes us out into our lives, into that deep longing to find the pearl, the essence that might lead to connection. Belonging. Thank you Sean, and Padraig. Love Sundays...
The greatest sorrow, for me, is life itself. To live holding an awareness of such Beauty and such horror. To witness, within myself, and all around me the savagery of the human beast, and the extraordinary delicacy and care of the beast’s delightful relative, an open, gentle heart. This sorrow is reborn each day. As is this Beauty.
so well said. thank you.
I would say I agree…and how much I pretend otherwise.
I have tasted love three times in my life. The first began under force and endured when I became a devoted parent and believed in staying together "for the children". When the children reached maturity, after 23 years married, I claimed myself. The second time I coupled with an independent man, pursued him as a test of myself and tried for fifteen years to elicit some sense of belonging with him. I left the effort, unsuccessful. Then, at 71, I woke to a surprise intense love for a stranger, entered into an arrangement as "friends with benefits, certain I could move his "friendship" into a love that matched my newly found true passion matched with intense kindness and love. After a year, he left the benefits for a true love, but I determined to keep the friendship. Now, eight years later and entering my 8th decade, I long to be able both to give and receive a complete LOVE, unbound and free, as I now understand myself to be capable of. I am lonely for the chance, finally to give and receive in equal measure, but especially to be able to give in a whole heart, soul and body way to another soul. My sorrow, as I come closer and closer to life's end, is that I may not have a chance in this life to match in loving. I am open, but odds are not in my favor. My life is full of every other form of love, so I am not bereft, but have that yearning at the edge of all other loving.
Moving and so honest. I recognize a profound, human lament in “but have that yearning at the edge of all other loving”. Who are we if we cannot be honest and say deep things like these?
Your share brought light to an already sunny day. I, too, am 71, with a longing for that "taste" of love with a partner who sees and hears me. Each day brings joy and pleasure in connection - to the natural world, animals, literature, old friends and family, even strangers. I am focused on the present.
Yes indeed, welcome to country Padraig!
A fresh sorrow for me. The end of what I thought was a promising relationship. But perhaps one I pursued a little too vigorously in trying to keep that ancient loneliness at bay. So I will howl a little until the season of my heart moves on. As it always does.
I love your work Padraig.
Ancient loneliness caught in my throat as I read the phrase. Thank you for sharing with us, and for the reminder that our howling does come to an end. I can relate so much.
Your “aancient loneliness” captures a great amount of sorrow. Thank you.
I know a similar ancient loneliness and appreciate your open wondering about it. May I howl with you?
My chronic depression is a teacher whose lessons I’m still learning. I didn’t understand it when I was younger, having been brought up in a society/community where mental illness was something to be borne and endured rather than addressed and helped. As I grew older, the power of the depression became more and more profound, until I finally faced the long darkness which threatened to consume me. Between reading William Styron’s ‘Darkness Visible’ and seeing the wondering looks on my children’s faces wondering when I would come back, I decided to seek help.
The lessons that I am still learning are about the nature of darkness both in myself and in others, and what passing through the darkness can teach us. I liken it to Gilgamesh passing through the Mountains of Mashu, dying and being reborn on Paradise Shores. That light is something that I seek to understand. The darkness has its lessons, none more compelling than the nature of the light.
I have also been studying and practicing with darkness. I am moved by your post, thank you. I love this poem, wendell berry. Also reading Opening to Darkness, Zenju Earthlyn Manuel.
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
I love this poem, and Wendell Berry in general. I’m going to check out Opening to Darkness soon. Thank you!
Thank you, Sean, for your reference to William Styron's book. I was not aware of it, and I'll give it a read. My experience is similar to what you describe, with depression being a lifelong companion whose influence has been alternately passive and controlling. After nearly 70 years I've learned that it is not seperate from me, but an element of my being that must be accepted, like it or not.
I knew that there were people like me in the world but Styron’s book really put it into perspective. Like you, I now know that I can live with this companion, however difficult they may be, and that they have so many lessons to teach me.
Thank you, Carl. I wonder that about myself, and maybe it is time to accept it.
Karen,
Acceptance for me has been a long road,seeking help from multiple sources along the way. Many have not been effective, a few have provided a fair amount of 'up time'. Although the term 'mental illness' has the ring of there being something 'wrong' with me, it's still been helpful to accept that this is not something I'm making up or manufacturing simply by not 'thinking right'. Like Sean, mental illness was both denied and untreated in my youth. Part of acceptance has been surrendering to the fact that I have a lifelong condition that I'll have to be mindful of and manage as best I can as I consistently seek the light. I hope your time in the light is much greater than in the darkness. And I agree with Sean that there are lessons to be learned from both.
Perhaps the greatest sorrow from which i have learned or, rather, from which i've made a life is that I never learned my parent's stories. They kept powerful secrets about which I can only guess - albeit I have applied all the skills of investigation that I have been able to learn. I was, perhaps, one of their first secrets, as I was born in secret. And it seems like they chose silence as the way to keep their secret. And, though they may have wanted only to be silent about whatever it was that they were hiding, that silence grew into something all-encompassing of my young life. I was starved for stories from them and from the family from which i'd been hidden. It almost killed me. But I learned to read very young and was able to feed the void with which I lived. And even as an adult and after years of trying to learn my parents' stories, I failed. And they are gone now, having kept their secrets, and their sorrows, to themselves. I do not feel sorry for myself for what I went through as a child nor even what I bear now. That sorrow, though great, pales beside the greater sorrow of having been denied the stories from which I was fashioned. And so, I have become a storyteller, a scholar of stories, a poet, a teacher and, perhaps most surprisingly of all, a parent.
A parent who reads to children and tells stories….all of them true, mostly?!
My standard answer to my kids (and my kids' classmates to whom i told stories weekly for years) when they asked if the stories I told were "true" was: "All my stories are true, but you shouldn't believe anything I say." I love their confoundment at this response but today's kids in their wrestling with meaning in our complex world, didn't really want an answer to their question. What they loved was the play of meaning, the uncertainty, the wonder. And I could see them, as they got older, struggle so fiercely to hang on to that wonder. To older children and adults I like to share this quote (for which i have only an attribution of "traditional saying"): The dreamer awakes, the shadow goes by, / When I tell you a tale, the tale is a lie. / But listen to me, fair maiden, proud youth, / The tale is a lie, what it tells is the truth.
I carry deep sorrow for all the hurt I've caused in others.
I can relate to this & wish I could make it right to each one. Too many.
I had to pause and turn away before a response came to me, because just this past Friday my mother quietly left us as I sat with her in hospice after she fell earlier this week. As is the case these days this meant for me hurriedly packing a suitcase while my wife arranging travel details(she was already committed to leading an entirely separate memorial service she had organized). But my greatest sorrow and a long unrecognized source of my anger issues was losing my father when I was 8. Life then meant dealing with two different stepfathers each of whom made contributions of their own good and bad. But now I realize that I am moving into Terra incognita as the mantle of family elder falls to me. The formal duties are light, mainly collecting family lore with the aid of ancestry.com, and otherwise I have no desire to probe too deeply into the lives of relations from whom I am seriously divided in today’s America. I long ago learned to let most brick walls go by without bashing my head into them. So, as noted, I am now more than ever a stranger in a strange land. Fortunately I do have some experience at that.
I feel that strangeness as a stranger in a strange land, and there is something of strange community. Mostly this is the human experience. I certainly have tried my upmost to avoid this reality, and in acceptance (often repeated attempts) of my aloneness…some less-aloneness emerges. Thank you for sharing from your strange land.
Dear Robert, losing your Mom, as you sat with her, is such a huge change. I am glad that your reflections are yielding insight, even if some are painful. May your mantle as Elder be a gift to your family, giving them a chance to see a fulfilled life with deep values.
Condolences Robert. Holding you and your family in the Light.
I’m beginning to see my waking in the mornings with sadness and fear a profound teacher.
Thank you for your vulnerability. May this bravery expand your life to include waking early, with joyful anticipation of the day ahead.
Seems you might be living somewhere besides the USA? I share the sadness and fear Hillary mentioned. A sense of dread….
I always gave my address ending with, "Planet Earth, the Milky Way..." I live in VA, outside Washington DC. Born in NYC, childhood in New England.
My bad. If joyful anticipation is really your morning wake-up feeling? I’ll have whatever you’re having!
Not bad... I'm actually pleased and curious. Where did you think I came from?
Someplace outside the USA….
Me too. Good people, Unite!
Loneliness, absolutely. And yes, we are connected and alone. A poem, entitled “Alone.”
i surely am
it’s my shoulder blade that aches today
not yours
for it is causing ME irritation
it’s my memories
of a fading story
i lived once upon a time
it’s my social security number
my bank account
my email address
it’s my body
from agony
to ecstasy
encased
in the soul
a companion, of sorts
it is i
who went to sleep last night
and dreamt my dreams
i awoke
just me
got up
on my own
it will be me
who experiences my death
whenever that may be
even when
i kiss my lovely wife
with deliberateness and delicacy
I am alone
with her
it’s true
this is
my poem.
What’s a sorrow that’s been a teacher to you in your life?
I went back to the Poetry Unbound episode to listen again. “Remembering is a moral act, a courageous act,…the heart can’t make it up.” It struck me that in probably all circumstances, the aggressors remembering, the pain in remembering and acknowledging is more validated than those who have suffered. Here in the new regime, there is the attempt to whitewash (literally) history. One response to this attempt I read was something like when you say you want to protect children from feeling bad about the past and themselves, you are really only talking about caring about some children.
Growing up in a violent household, the sorrow, maybe it also is a loneliness, that felt like a core part of me. A feeling of being different, but not in a good way. I used to think maybe there was something unlovable in me that I needed to keep from other people, not let them see me, really see me.
I don’t feel that way anymore. I know that the problem was not me. I totally get it when Pádraig wrote “I do not see it as a failure now, and even the sorrow’s truth has become a companion. And-strangely-a point of connection.”
Elaine, it doesn’t sound like you were very often, if ever, told you were amazing, brilliant, precious. That wasn’t fair, and you realize that as an adult. I come from an Italian family guilty of child-worship. It’s amusing to hear my siblings repeating the phrases Aunts and Uncles heaped on US to my grand nieces and nephews. I think this lack of feeling cherished makes it hard to accept praise as an adult, because it’s unfamiliar and uncomfortable. My heart aches for gifted public figures who cannot absorb the genuine and fully deserved admiration people shower on them. May your insights lead to connection and deep peace.
Thank you for your beautiful expression around the subject of Sorrow and opening it up for contemplation.
I read every one of the responses so far and felt that I could reply to each one of them with my own experience. I have not done so, but I will say the following.
Many of my soon to be 80 years contained a search for the replacement of a lack of self-respect.
I'm aware of my family of origin and the source of a deeply depressed mother and a codependent father upon my own life. The stories are vast for me in my search for inner peace. I ran against walls and was greatly damaged many times.
I learned by picking myself up and asking for help eventually with a professional. I read voraciously, learned by giving myself and others, healthy rather than codependent support.
With time my own actions built self respect. I grew to see that what I was looking for outside was actually something that I needed to give myself inside.
Joseph Campbell in his research and writings had a phrase that at first was completely untenable to hear. Learning to love your fate.
I am so blessed in that I have embraced and do have that exact feeling about all my life experiences. I am grateful in a way that is very hard to even put into words. I have found tremendous Joy in the small things and some great things of being alive. I can say that I am at peace.
The word peace is probably the biggest word in the dictionary.
Though I don't have a life partner and have never had one that was capable of overcoming their own inner deamons , I no longer am even interested in the subject of having that kind of relationship. That's probably the biggest indication to me of how much I have healed.
My appreciation and love of life has been the greatest gift of all. I share it with people I care about and sometimes even strangers.
I have the gift of writing since I'm a small child and I am working on many writing projects at this point, both as Legacy and as sharing I believe some important lessons that hopefully will help others in their own challenges.
I wish for the entire world, what I've received. Not just for the people that I know and love but for strangers, anyone who is suffering. And for those who are so miserable that they harm themselves and perhaps others in their misery.
Life is a huge, sometimes frightening, sometimes magnificent mystery. I feel strongly that sharing our stories is a vital means of "paying it forward".
When I was 15, a 16 year old classmate died in a tragic car accident. Our school closed for his funeral. I remember sitting in silence in the packed church waiting for it to start. Everyone around me was whispering lines that started with "if only..." If only I'd said, if only I'd told him, if only I had apologized, etc. I promised myself then, that to the best of my ability I wanted to live so I never felt that kind of regret if someone was suddenly gone from me. It has led to some awkward moments of saying vulnerable things maybe too soon, and to asking forgiveness when pain was still fresh. I have missed the mark often. Yet, for the most part my efforts have been met with deep appreciation and have created deep connections. It has also created in my deep contentment with peace. I am grateful for my classmates time here with us.
Such wisdom. And a way your classmate lives in so many decision points of your own life. Thank you for this honest reflection.
I clearly remember waking on a spring morning at about the age of four and deeply longing for the place I had just left. Despite the beauty of the day, the breeze blowing my animal curtains, the sound of my mother singing in the other room, I felt inconsolable. This memory and longing inspire me even today toward aspirations of a life that intersects with the pain and beauty of a world that is still incarnating, where deep longing becomes belonging. I no longer need to travel the world seeking the perfect home, the most loving community, the best friends, and partner. In a deep state of relaxation, I can access my heart and from there the electromagnetic field of energy that scientists are now calling Love because of the universal principle of mutual attraction. Is this any different than my Catholic ancestors’ understanding of a grace that surpasses all understanding and transforms even the most painful losses?
wow...great insight....as well as the words..."restless is the heart until it rests in You?" perhaps...we are all restless in human form for that from which we came?
deep longing becomes belonging. wow. thank you.
The sorrow of abandonment and abuse became my guide for mothering. Somehow those inner wounded-healer parts were guides (along with my recovery) to help me be for my children what I’d always longed for (and as you speak of loneliness, I suppose I still long for that attachment).
How precious to be the generation that broke the chain of sorrow to give your children a full dose of LOVE. Bless you!