Friends,
Many of you are new here—welcome, and thank you. This post is an invitation for ten minutes of silence tonight. A regular essay will follow Thursday.
__
Last week I got heavy. I woke up Tuesday and looked at Instagram and saw a frenemy holding her newborn girl, grinning. I fell into a deep muck of self-pity and despair. I’ll never have a daughter, I lamented. I grew hot with envy and indignation. Why her? Why not ME? I wanted to do the usual things: work to distraction, run ten miles, dust the spoons. But my whole system said, nope. Today, you’re going to sit in this tangled, ugly mess. I called my friend, Alice, who made me tea. She sat with me in my darkness and offered no advice, just a listening ear. And then, at 4pm, I saw headlines from Texas.
Earlier that day, I found myself chided by the internalized, censorious voice of Yankee capitalism. Exactly how much time, Isabel, do you plan to spend FEELING? What an absurdity. What a luxury. And don’t you know: feelings are dangerous? They’re irrational; they can’t be quantified. How many times have you heard someone say: “Don’t be emotional.” This admonishment guarantees that our feelings remain unexamined and unfelt. Longterm, we cease to trust ourselves.
I realized Tuesday, sitting in my mess, that my feelings were multidimensional. Righteousness came to cover grief; indignation masked longing. All of it was there to hide my fear that the old idiom is correct: “You have a daughter for life; a son until he meets a wife.” Deep down in my tangle lies the panic of future abandonment. Ah, I sighed. I can do something with that.
I share this to illustrate that a feeling, fully experienced and embodied, has a lot of truth to tell. And, counter to what ‘rationality’ dictates, only when we give our emotions time and space can we see the silent, invisible hand of un-satisfied wants or un-processed traumas (big and little) that run our lives. Denial of a feeling means it dictates us invisibly. This is true for us individually and all together.
Right now, we’re surrounded by a collective caul of un-felt, un-processed grief—a smothering, psychic membrane of pain. The more we avoid it, the more it chokes us; the more we deny it, the more we strengthen the invisible hand of un-processed emotion that guides the collective. Egos rage in a war of conquest; judges and legislators mistrust female sovereignty; Salvador Ramos got so numb he shot his grandmother on the way to Robb Elementary.
I didn’t mean for these essays to be political, but how can they not be? If you’re operating with even half a heart, it’s breaking every day. Nineteen children were massacred last week. That grief is immeasurable. And yet: what will happen if we don’t process it? The unfelt sorrow continues to collect in our psychic atmosphere. It’s getting hard to breathe.
My friend Caroline recently explained to me the Buddhist practice of Tonglen—a meditation for transmuting suffering. Those of us who are willing should sit with the collective tangle. With time and space, perhaps we can make some sense of the complex feelings in the zeitgeist. Then, we can draw the grief down and transform it into love. This is the work of a lifetime. But if we don’t change our collective consciousness, who will?
The Buddhists also say that the way out is through. My friend Ashley Wu and I would like to offer a chance for us all to gather—together or apart—for ten minutes of silence tonight at 9pm EST to be with the enormity of Tuesdays loss, and with all the other losses of the last few months; the last two years. Collective, personal; all of it. This is a small moment, a small offering, but it’s a way in—which, I have to believe, is also the beginning of a way out.
My love to you all.
I don't know if I believe in Mercury Retrograde but if I did, May has been one lousy month
I will observe silence