TO WELCOME WHAT IS STRANGE, & ESPECIALLY IN THE WOMEN WE LOVE
Apprenticeship to Love, Chapter 235, August 5, 2024
- Today’s questions: What feels too strange today? Too different to be allowed to rest in your heart? What happens when —if only for a moment— you see this strangess as a gift, this stranger as a guest, to be fêted, received? Seen, heard, known?
- Today's suggested practice: to sit with your own resistance to learning what you already know & receive as love... (see my "Short Practice,” below)
- My practice today: 3am, asanas, 3-part breath meditation
TODAY'S MEDITATION
We find comfort in what is "normal." We unconsciously create a way of being, with ourselves and with each other, our culture, that is bent towards normal. With every breath we take, we make less and less room for that which is not experienced as normal. But the gifts of life, and especially of love, these live in the places beyond normal. These are strange, and they are brought to us by strangers.
...
We are, all of us, strangers here, in a place whose strangeness has us instinctively curling back into what we knew. Our version of normal. It cannot last.
From our first breath, and perhaps even before that first wailing breath, we are invited and cajoled and pressed into normal. For some, the invitation is welcome, the pressing a comfort. For others, the beginning of the straightjacket, a life sentence of unhappiness. Of misfit. Unless, somehow, with someone or in some place, an accomodation with the strangeness of who they are.
...
I want to be seen for who I am. This was her wish. And, she continued, To be loved for that.
Is this so much to ask?
What stands in the way of me offering want I believe I want to give? What stands in the way of seeing her and knowing her and loving her, as she is? A misfit. Strange. The bearer of unimaginable (strange) gifts.
...
Mothers and daughters. The pain of not being seen or known by she who birthed you, who —because she too knows this pain of being unseen, unknown by her own mother and this mother culture— birthed you. I cannot imagine. (But I have imagined being seen as a stranger bearing gifts, and that seeing was my dear and wise and departed friend, and I grieve that I will not feel that active in my life now.)
I cannot imagine but I hear this story of daughters not seen by mothers unseeing often. And hearing it, and especially when it is close to my heart, I feel an impotence: there is nothing I for me to do. Except, as a friend reminded me, listen. Bear witness.
...
I listened for two days as she struggled to articulate her pain. All the while feeling this impotence. Feeling that I ought to be able to do or say something. Something. And, aware that I was not falling into my old habit of saying and doing things, anything, to alleviate my discomfort. Instead, letting her discomfort be. Honouring it. And letting my own be. Honouring that too, I suppose. All of it new and confusing. A little bit beyond my depth. Or not.
When she left I felt sad. A failure. Sad in a way I haven't felt in a long time. Then, missing my dear and wise and departed friend more acutely: This was the time when I would call on him. To walk. To talk. To listen. To laugh. To know myself capable.
But now? Now, to do this for myself and to grieve his absence and to remember his persistent and fortifying presence.
Is it all grieving? This impotence as a loved one's pain? The impotence facing loss, death?
There is no normal here. No place for comfort. Just the broken-feeling. The inadequate-feeling. And the awareness that this strangeness calls me to be more than I imagine myself capable of being.
...
This was not the only conversation this weekend with a daughter unknown by her mother, herself unknown. I listened to her pain. I wondered at the pain the mother carries, not being seen or known by her own mother.
How, in a culture that will not allow the strangeness of who we are, and especially the strangeness of the feminine. Her only place is in isolation. Especially from her family who would exorcize this strangeness rather than admit its weird gifts. No place but the hut on the edge of the forest. Or in a sorority of similarly wyrd sisters. A circle of witches. But in the impoverished and normative culture of our nuclear families? No place to hide. To be.
...
Raise your daughters well. Do not encourge them to be less than themselves, the wayward and wyrd sisters their lives will require them to be.
And do not neglect your sons, though they may find the comforts of this culture easier to absorb. They need our attention and our love because they will be the ones to protect their sisters' strangeness. They will be the ones who need to be sensitive to the wyrd ways of the ones they come to love. And they will only learn how to dance this strange dance of "following the follow" from their fathers, who —perhaps, if they're lucky!— have stumbled into some awareness of what gifts of strangeness our womenfolk bring to us.
...
She called me later. The evening after her short visit. Tears. Again, the pain of not being heard or known.
I listened. And, from some place that needed to broken open by the feelings of impotence and inadequacy, I was able to speak. A dark incubation.
I spoke and she laughed. Dried her tears. Told me she felt better. Thanked me.
What happened?
Things do not come in the time I give them. Or in the place or way I want them. They come unbidden. From dark and silent hours and days and weeks. An incubation that is indeed dark and mysterious and strange. When their time is ripe. And only when I am susceptible to their strange beauty. I am, it seems (and I am reminded of this constantly, but it is no comfort, always feels strange) only susceptible when I broken open.
...
Patience. Breath. A ritual of slowing down to become ready.
Against a culture of grasping and conquering I am trying to learn to be patient and ready and aware. Susceptible. Tender. Confident.
TODAY'S INSPIRATIONS
🌀You deserve nothing. (Kendra Cunov)
🌀Human life is an experience of magnificence when done with the courage to make mistakes.
… conceptualize beyond events and to discover a path unfettered by commonly held limits…. (Guru Singh &Guruperkarma Kaur)
🌀I didn’t really know what I was capable of… and it was time I started learning. (Stephen Jenkinson, my notes on his “undeclared apprenticeship”)
🌀There are so many others. But you see me, you hear me, you know me. (My beloved)
TODAY'S SUGGESTED SHORT PRACTICE
Today's practice, to breathe and feel the confusion of life —the tension, pressure, friction, and stress that makes everything possible— and then allowing this confusion to become more beautiful than you can possibly imagine:
Please read through first, then ...
- Set two alarms, for times of the day when you have a five-10 minutes to become conscious of who and how you are in this day.
- When the alarm sounds, wherever and however you are, take a few moments and:
- Ask yourself: What feels too strange today? Too different to be allowed to rest in my heart? What happens when —if only for a moment— I see this strangess as a gift, this stranger as a guest, to be fêted, received? Seen, heard, known?
- Then, follow the short practice here:
- Stand, or sit, or lay yourself down, and bring your attention to your body.
- Feel the ground beneath you. Allow the earth to hold you with gravity. Feel how dense and heavy you are. Feel also how lightly you sit or stand or lay on the earth. Feel yourself between the pull of earth's gravity and the subtle but persistent pull of the sun, the stars.
- Slow your breathing so that it is long and deep into your belly. Slow the inhale to a count of four or six. Slow your exhale to a count of six or eight or ten. Repeat three to five cycles of breathing, going a little slower with each cycle. Continuing to notice yourself held by the earth, raised by the sun and stars and sky above. Feel the subtle tension and pressure and friction and stress that allows you to be and rest and move in this body.
- When you’re done, take another minute or two, breathing gently, slowly filling and emptying your belly. Here, as you breathe into your fullness, ask yourself, Do I feel right? Am I in alignment with the man or woman I am? Do I even have an inkling what that might feel like? Do I even have an inkling of what it feels like to be out of alignment with myself?
- Notice if your body-mind feels somehow changed. And whether you notice a change or not, be content with yourself, exactly as you are in this moment.
- Continue with your day until the next alarm sounds, and repeat.