Tenderness. Especially now.

(repost from CBAW Newsletter)

Beloved community,

It is a difficult time. Most of us are in our safe homes, opening the news apps, social media, and email newsletters, sick at the images, wrecked by the stories. Some of us are reading each message to identify and decode the wrong things said, to identify evidence of cruelty somewhere close to home. Somewhere to put our rage. I am guilty of this myself. I believe it is an expression of my grief, of my own deep confusion and destabilization by horrors that feel inexplicable. When I don’t honestly know how to make sense of an enormous complicated f-ed up thing, I sometimes give myself the illusion of steadiness by finding the wrong thing and pointing to it. 

That impulse to disguise my powerlessness as righteousness is programmed deep in me, and maybe it’s in you as well. If you are not in fact handing out bottles of water or digging through rubble or helping people escape or bandaging wounds or lacing up your boots to go do so, may I suggest you take a breath and pull away from engaging in virtual chaos? Make your donation, as much as you can, to support people doing the above. Write your congressional representatives. Then sit down and breathe. Suffering is not actually alleviated by outrage.

Again and again, atrocity is met with more atrocity is met with more atrocity and so on. We all agree that it’s awful awful awful what’s happening to the children. That’s easy to say, it’s true, it’s right. But what’s been coming up for me, in meditation and between the lines of the terrible stories, is that adults are also deserving of tenderness. Even them. Even you. Even me. All of us.

The impulse I am trying to consciously program into myself, through poetry, through community, is a movement towards unapologetic sincerity, toward letting my softness and grief be liquid, allowing it to spill over in a world that demands something more rigid of me. 

Yesterday we gathered in the Friday workshop and allowed ourselves some softness, some tenderness, some unapologetic sincerity. If you weren’t able to join us, I offer it to you here, in case it’s helpful.

We began by taking a moment to close our eyes and take three deep breaths. Maybe counting to three on an inhale, then 4 on an exhale. Pause between. Now check in with the space between your eyes, what is the quality of energy in that place? Begin with the freewrite, “I feel…”

We were guided by the words of John O’Donahue, from his poem “For One Who is Exhausted, a Blessing.” Then I read the following:

We closed with this poem, “Threshold.”

Thank you for being extraordinarily you. Especially today.

With tenderness and sincerity,

Seema