A couple of the girls and I signed up for a different surf school this spring. They started earlier than our Favorite Surf School and it was good to get a different perspective, maybe learn some different things, from a different teacher. Well. It has been interesting! Apart from a disadvantage of having terrible weather and poor conditions for most of the weeks, the new surf school has not met our apparently quite high standards. (I love that I have surf school standards after less than a year of doing this.) Initially, this new school did not have a great selection of beginner boards. Most were only 8 feet long, and Lord knows, I need at least a 9. So I asked for a bigger board for the next time. It was lovely that the teacher did indeed bring me a bigger board. And. It was a paddleboard.
Hmmm. When I arrived, I saw the paddleboard lined up with the other boards, and thought to myself, "OH. I bet that's for me." The teacher confirmed this and then said, "Maybe it will be good for you to start here and then when you get better you can graduate to a smaller board." On some level, I am certain he's right. And did I stand up on that board? Yes I did. But because it is literally called a STAND UP paddleboard, I just can't seem to count it. It's not a surf board, dude. It's just...not...no.
Again, I may be a victim of my own standards here.
The teacher was kind, informative, and charming, and I'm certain he's a great surfer. But surfing a paddleboard? C'mon, man! It was terribly awkward. I had trouble maneuvering it like a surfboard - it was too thick and wide to get my legs comfortably around to sit properly, and my arms were outstretched so wide, it was difficult to paddle. If I wasn't perfectly lined up perpendicular to an oncoming wave, then I got dumped over, swamped under this massive thing. It was heavy. Awkward and clumsy. I couldn't turn it around like normal or move efficiently. Plodding and struggling, even small waves were a challenge. It was a slog of a day.
Of course people surf with paddleboards all of the time -- every day. With absolute delight and no qualms. See @rippinrosiedog on Instagram to see a delightful Labrador Retriever surfing daily with her owner on a paddleboard and doing far better than me! But for me at this moment, it wasn't what I wanted. I wanted to get better at surfing on a surfboard, and maybe I don't want to admit that I might need something as big as a paddleboard to get better.
Surfing a paddleboard seems to describe the heavy and awkward period of time I'm in emotionally as well. After having my big realization the other week that perfectionism and the shame around mistakes has been an organizing principle of my life, I've been "prosecuting the past," as Buddhist Therapist Guy (BTG) said, often misspeaking "prosecuting" as "persecuting" and I wonder which one is more apt. Dealing with the fallout of this realization has left me drowning in regret, disappointment, grief, and not a little self-pity. Unbidden, thoughts arrive daily of some past decision that fundamentally altered the course of my life for which I wonder, "Did shame make me do that?" Ugh. It's exhausting. Heavy. Awkward. I'm not turning this around like normal.
BTG says I'm grieving. At least I finally know the source of my grief, but there's still the grieving to do. This is where I am when I'd rather be surfing to greener waves with more ease. Slogging through the waters of samsara with the clumsy heaviness of grief, I am tired. Bone deep exhausted. I continue to validate these feelings and try my best to apply liberal amounts of self-compassion, but the waves just keep coming.
This grief is even infecting my sleep. Last weekend, I went to see my friend, Barb, in Washington, DC, so I obviously flew. I haven't been on a plane in a while and I was worried about a tight connection through O'Hare airport. In the nights leading up to the trip, I dreamed about racing through the airport and missing the connection. What's weird was I had my doggo with me. Lucy and I were racing through the airport, and we missed the connection because we couldn't find Ethel. Ethel was Lucy's sister and she died a couple of years ago. We missed the flight because we were looking for Ethel. BTG interpreted the dream this way: "You are worried that your grief will prevent you from moving on."
Let's hear it for the Buddhist Clinical Psychologist absolutely nailing the Jungian dream analysis.
So what can I do? Acknowledge. Validate. Bring awareness and presence to these feelings and thoughts. When I was in school in Iowa, I went to see Amma, the Hugging Saint. I went with a friend, pretty skeptical of the whole thing, but as I approached her in line, I began to feel a presence. And when I was enveloped in this woman's pillowy bosom, I wept. Someone held me kindly and with a compassion I don't think I had ever felt before. They then gave me a Hershey's chocolate kiss and sent me on my way. So, I can try that now -- do that for my own self. Hold this heaviness and grief with compassion until I can get back on my real surfboard and find some balance. (And eat chocolate. Every Harry Potter fan knows that chocolate is the best thing when dealing with dementors.)
I also keep looking for the next step as a light at the end of the tunnel sort of reassurance, and visions of the next step keep arriving on song lyrics and books. In that way, this blog is aspirational: I'm telling my self the next steps whether or not I'm ready to walk them or embody them. I don't think it's denial, though my eyes are open to that possibility. I'm giving myself a vision of the next stage while getting swamped in the current one. Right now, I'm angry, blaming, and full of regrets. (BTG says this is good -- at least I'm not blaming myself for everything, which is at least different if not actually adaptive.) I am plagued by what-ifs, in grief over a life unlived, potential unrealized -- one long "What could I have been?" soliloquy on repeat in my mind. All of this is quite heavy and clumsy to carry around. Hard to maneuver. I'm getting repeatedly tossed by even the smallest waves. So creating a vision of what could be next is comforting.
BTG shared notes for a talk with me in which he says, "By choosing to do spiritual care, you're choosing to be uncomfortable." I think this was intended for caregivers when working with others, but it also applies to our inner life. Can I have the patience to wade through the various stages of grief? Will I have the perseverance? The talk discusses endurance and acceptance being qualities necessary to get through to forgiveness and ultimately freedom, and a quote I like a lot is, "A deep enough acceptance won't need endurance." A deep enough acceptance won't need endurance. I'm getting an idea of what this means.
In Falling Upward, Richard Rohr writes, "Necessary suffering goes on every day, seemingly without question. When I wrote this in the deserts of Arizona, I read that only one saguaro cactus seed out of a quarter of a million seeds ever makes it to early maturity, much less reaches its full potential. Most of nature seems to totally accept major loss, gross inefficiency, mass extinctions, and short life spans as the price of life at all." While this seems absolutely depressing, thankfully he goes on. "Feeling that sadness, and even its full absurdity, ironically pulls us into the general dance, the unified field, and an ironic and deep gratitude for what is given -- with no necessity and therefore gratuitously. All beauty is gratuitous." Both. And. There is always both beauty and absurdity, sacred and profane, sublime and ridiculous. Go to anyone's 10- or 20-year high school reunion and you'll see what remains of even the brightest star's potential. We are all grey and balding by then, yet still hanging in there enough to show up.
I also read an astonishingly beautiful book called Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss by Margaret Renkl last week. Just the medicine I needed to paint a picture of acceptance. (Thank you, Suzanne and David!) In a chapter called "Nests," she writes, "This life thrives on death," after describing how the little babies of various animals are food for predators. "Oblivion would be easier -- not to know when the rat snake noses aside the tangle of grasses the cottontail has carefully patted into place, not to see it lift the impossibly soft fur she has plucked from her own belly, not to fathom that it is slowly, almost mechanically, swallowing the blind babies she has borne for just this moment." It is a harsh place, this earth on which we live. So why stay? Honestly -- it's a question I ask myself all too often.
But then in this same chapter, Renkl has an answer: "But hold very, very still in the springtime sun, and a tufted titmouse will come to harvest your hair and spin it into a soft, warm place for her young. Keep an eye on the ivy climbing the side of the house, and one day you will see a pair of finches coaxing their babies from a tiny nest balanced among the leaves. Hear the bluebirds calling from the trees, and you might turn in time to see a fledgling peer from the hole in the dark nest box, gape at the bright wide world for the very first time, and then trust itself to the sky." All beauty is gratuitous.
Oh to be that fledging bluebird once again.
I'm reminded of the Buddhist story of the Lotus and the Mud. The beautiful lotus flower grows out of slimy, gross, nutrient-rich mud. Life is both. The beauty and the disgusting. The yin and yang. The Lover has to exist before The Tortured Poet can write her music.
In the chapter "After the Fall," Renkl writes, "This talk of making peace with it. Of feeling it and then finding a way through. Of closure. It's all nonsense. Here is what no one told me about grief: you inhabit it like a skin. Everywhere you go, you wear grief under your clothes. Everything you see, you see through it, like a film."
I've been working on being aware and staying with these feelings and thoughts, allowing them, and then letting them go in hopes of them going away. In hopes of the grief passing. Looks like that's not how it works. Maybe I don't want to admit that this is never going away. A deep enough acceptance won't need endurance.
BTG wrote that there is strength in enduring, in being patient, in riding the paddleboard until you no longer need to, "To give it it's time, so that it can be transformed." One of my Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Training peer group members shared a Thich Nhat Hanh quote, "Awareness is like the sun. When it shines on things they are transformed." Just staying present, right here, with awareness at this moment is enough. I will find a balance and move into a new way of being little by little, without even knowing it, if I can just be. If I can allow and acknowledge, observe and validate, things will change all on their own.
This is such a different way of doing things for the control freak within me.
Renkl continues, "You are waking into a new shape. You are waking into an old self. What I mean, time offers your old self a new shape. What I mean is, you are the old, ungrieving you, and you are also the new, ruined you. You are both, and you will always be both."
I am ruined. Indeed, I am ruined.
Maybe there's peace to be found in that. Freedom? If I'm already ruined, then there's nothing to perfect. I can relax.
At difficult times like this, I'm deeply grateful for friends who have their own depths and can hear my story as well a good therapist. I'm also deeply grateful for the writing of Pema Chodron, who I return to often in times of need. In one of my favorite books of hers, which I reread with new understanding every time I open it, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times, she writes:
My broken heart is raw. There is a continual ache. This isn't going away, is it? It's now part of me. We walk hand in hand now.
When accepted fully. I'm not there yet. But I'm getting there. Saltwater is cleansing. Sunlight transforms.
Both. And. It is a both and world. This is perhaps a step on the way to nondual thinking: fully accepting both sides of the duality as necessary or integral to our existence here on this blue planet. I can escape, but maybe I don't want to after all. One of my favorite artists started out as Brian Andreas with Story People. He is now transformed into Kai Skye at Flying Edna. One of my favorite pieces of his says, "She held her whole life up to the light & it struck her how it glowed, even with the threads of dark woven through it & if she cried easily after that it wasn't because she was sad, but because the world is so beautiful & life is so short." (It's amazing to me how my future self has left these breadcrumbs around my house for me discover when I most need them; I've owned that piece for years.)
I'm weaving the threads of dark right now as I surf a paddleboard into a new shape. It feels heavy. Clumsy. Awkward. Like a fledgling taking its first flight, I don't really have the hang of this yet. Renkl also writes, "Aren't transitions always marked by tumult and confusion? How comforting it would be to say, as a matter of unremarkable fact, 'I'm wandering in the mist just now. It will blow off in a bit.'"
It is a harsh place, this earth on which we live. Tumult. Confusion. Grief. None of us escapes the natural harm of the rat snake or the Mako. Having fully accepted this, we can turn our boards around. The Lover has to exist before the Tortured Poet; the baby bunny has to give way for the rat snake's dinner.
But as Renkl writes, encouragingly, "There is nothing to fear. There is nothing at all to fear. Walk out into the springtime, and look: the birds welcome you with a chorus. The flowers turn their faces to your face. The last of last year's leaves, still damp in the shadows, smell ripe and faintly of fall." Just be here. Be here and notice. Sunlight transforms. Saltwater is cleansing. That is enough. I'll get back on the Admiral this weekend and keep paddling.
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