Tag: gentleness

poetry

In a Community of Gentleness

annacitrino
“It’s the hard things that break; soft things don’t break…You can waste so many years of your life trying to become something hard in order not to break; but it’s the soft things that can’t break! The hard things are the ones that shatter into a million pieces!”  –C. JoyBell C.
Igor Mitoraj’s Icarus at Temple of Concordi, Agrigento, Sicily

After the recent shootings in Florida, the U.S. president stated “We have to harden our schools, not soften them.”  When difficulties happen, people are often encouraged to toughen up and get hard, to take charge, gain control. Strength is associated with toughness, power and the ability to fight back and win battles. I’m more interested in a different way of being in the world, though, the way of gentleness and humility. The world is full of so many hurts–people have lost homes, their health, their loved ones, and more. From bullying to physical abuse, humans suffer in innumerable ways. From what I observe, the world doesn’t need more hardness. There is already so much suffering everywhere we look. When we are hurt by others or are less than we hoped we’d be, what we want is to be comforted. When we suffer, we want someone’s soft words or arms. We want gentleness.

It’s rare, though, to hear of those who aim to become more gentle, making me wonder what needs to be in place before we are able to respond to each other from a state of what might be called willful kindness.

To be gentle means to be tenderhearted, kind, to be soft. Soft things are supple, can bend and are less likely to be brittle and break. As I reflect on the foundation necessary for gentleness to thrive between people, it seems a first thing needed is a foundation of trust, and trust involves a recognition of what it means to be in relationship. In Western culture, we have the idea that the world is full of inanimate objects available for manipulation and use. Overall, our awareness that we’re a part of a great life web, part of each other is somewhat shallow. Too often, it seems, people feel free to act without concern for the impact their behavior has on the larger community, including the community of the natural environment.

One recent example of this failure to see oneself as part of a larger community is in the me-first behavior of the drug firm executive Martin Shekreli. In his lack of respect for the larger community, Shekreli defrauded investors and increased the price of a life saving drug by 5,000% per pill. Dominic Rushe, writing for The Guardian quotes John Coffee of Columbia law school regarding Shekreli’s general attitude while in the courtroom, ‘“His behavior during the trial was arrogant, and he treated the judge as an irrelevancy. Every defense counsel I know, and I know a lot of them, instructs his client to be respectful and modest because ultimately the judge is going to sentence you. Your arrogance can cost you a very high price.”‘ Shekreli’s arrogance in response to difficulty is very different from a group of doctors in Quebec. Robin Levinson-King in her BBC article, “Why Quebec doctors have rejected a pay rise,” reports that the Québécois doctors asked for their salary increases to “be cancelled and that the resources of the system be better distributed for the good of the healthcare workers and to provide health services worthy to the people of Quebec.” These doctors are are aware that what they do and the attitude they demonstrate affects the lives around them. How utterly refreshing to be part of a society where people recognize their actions affect the greater good and willingly respond accordingly.

When we confront difficult experiences in our lives, rather than getting tough, perhaps it’s better to act with gentleness, and to draw closer to the suffering in order to listen to what it is telling us so we can find the clues for how the suffering can be addressed or possibly healed. To do this, we need to be able to understand how we’re interconnected with others. Charles Eisenstein in his book,  The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible, writes about interbeing and its defining principles. The first two of these principles are: “That my being partakes of your being and that of all beings. This goes beyond interdependency—our very existence is relational. That, therefore, what we do to another, we do to ourselves.” In family dynamics, as well as in personal love relationships where we are in close proximity with each other on an ongoing interactive basis, our awareness of these principals of interbeing are heightened. If one person becomes upset, everyone feels it and responds. If people are relaxed or focused on a particular activity–this, too, affects everyone’s behavior. When everyone in a group is in tune with each other, the air is suffused with gentleness, and you function on a foundation of trust that people are doing their part. It’s like participating in an orchestra–each person plays their own notes but the notes relate to each other rhythmically and melodically to create music.

E. E. Cummings writes beautifully about interbeing in his love poem “[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]”

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i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
                                                      i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

 

For ill or for good, how we respond to events affects others. Humans are social beings, and because of what we now understand about how mirror neurons function in our brains, we can say that people do, in a real sense carry each other’s hearts in their own hearts. When we observe someone else feeling sad, we see the emotion in their facial or body gestures, and our own brain cells connecting to what that person is feeling light up.

When we allow ourselves to be a channel for wellbeing, doing what we can to relieve other’s suffering, we tend to feel more centered, more in love with life. Our fears diminish, and we come to sense our connection to what Cummings names as “whatever a moon has always meant/ and whatever a sun will always sing.” Cummings names so well the awareness of interbeing brings: wonder. We can regain a sense of awe and an awareness of our place within the greater cosmos–a place of humility, but also that allows us to feel more alive, whole, more content–and as a result, more gentle.

In a world clambering for position and recognition, to be gentle takes courage. To stand inside the sharpened razors or heat created by living alongside people struggling for prestige, territory and power and yet remain gentle is difficult and very challenging. To survive in these contexts requires actively and routinely grounding ourselves in something wider and larger than our own intelligence, achievement or privileged place. We can ground ourselves with a wider foundation through developing a purposeful connection to community. Participating in a community that nourishes our spirits and building connections there can enable people to find ways to sustain themselves through difficulty and to become more than they could be by themselves. Research shows us, according to Robert Waldinger in his TEDTalk, “What makes a good life? Lessons from the longest study on happiness,” that those who are happiest in life fare the best are those who “lean into relationships with family, friends, and community.” Deep relationship requires taking time for trust to grow enough that people feel free to open themselves. Some possible ways to begin this journey with others are to share dinners, go on walks, listen to music, read books, essays or poems, attend plays, do art, share jokes, tell stories or to simply sit silent beneath a tree gazing up at the branches and the sky together–anything that creates spaces of being where lives can unfold naturally, and differences can be valued. In this context of relationship with a desire to keep the bond between each other, a natural kind of respect develops.

In community we can become free to begin to live beyond the fear of each other or the threat of being bulldozed by someone clambering for attention, position or power, we can let go of competition and focus on being present with each other. Gentleness can emerge. We can create time and space to hear, see, and know each other. Though he doesn’t name it as interbeing, E. E. Cummings intimates it in his poem; interbeing is the secret–the bud, root, tree and sky–the essence of everything. Our lives are intertwined. “I carry your heart in my heart.” To know this, to live in this gentle awareness, is what brings us into the presence and wonder of existence itself–the mystery of what it is that holds up the stars and keeps them in balance.

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poetry, Uncategorized

Flower Pilgrimage to Crete

annacitrino

Sensation

On blue summer evenings I’ll go down the pathways
Pricked by the grain, crushing the tender grass—
Dreaming, I’ll feel its coolness on my feet.
I’ll let the wind bathe my bare head.

I won’t talk at all. I won’t think about anything.
But infinite love will rise in my soul,
And I’ll go far, very far, like a gypsy,
Into Nature–happy, as if with a woman.

—Arthur Rimbaud

Over a decade ago, I browsed through a book with photos of Crete at a friend’s house. The abundance of wildflowers depicted in the photos amazed me, and I hoped  someday to be able to visit Crete in the spring. That day arrived this past April. I came to Crete on a pilgrimage–a journey seeking renewal through connecting with a fleeting seasonal aspect of nature that offers so much joy to so many: wild flowers.

Driving to the ancient site of Aptera, just west of Chania, I wandered the hillside above the sea. Meadows of marguerites stood chest high. Red poppies boldly waved their colors beside the buttercups sprinkled across the grass. The entire world shimmered in spring petals. Bees, legs laden with pollen, drifted from flower center to flower center, their hum filling the fields. Lying on a rock surrounded by blossoms the sky wide above me, I felt I was buoyed up by beauty, floating on time’s wide sea. Alive. Replete. I knew I’d arrived at my journey’s destination.

Flowers have a way of opening our hearts. They unfold their petals, and our hearts unfold with them. Previously, on this blog I’ve written about forest bathing, an activity that is now gaining momentum in the US, as studies, according to this recent article by Meeri Kim, “‘Forest bathing’ is latest fitness trend to hit U.S. — ‘Where yoga was 30 years ago,’”  have demonstrated how it helps to lower blood pressure, heart rate and reduces stress, among other benefits, including helping elderly patients with COPD, according to another study done in China, reported in the Natural Medicine Journal.  The insights this research gives got me wondering about the effects flowers might have on the mind and body. It turns out that flowers, too, bring us numerous benefits. One study shows how office workers grew more relaxed when viewing roses. Flowers, studies have found, reduce stress and speed healing. They also change our behavior. The University of Florida website, in their post, “Flower power: ‘Brain Awareness’ lecturer to discuss flowers’ positive effect on emotions,” explains how research done by Jeannette Haviland-Jones, Ph.D., a professor of psychology and director of the Emotions Laboratory at Rutgers University, unexpectedly found that “people who got flowers performed much better in memory tests than those who did not get flowers,” suggesting that flowers may effect memory functions. Louie Schwartzberg, renowned for his phenomenal time-lapsed photography, tells audiences on his TED Talk, The Hidden Beauty of Pollination, that flowers’ beauty is connected to survival. “We protect what we fall in love with,” says Schwartzberg. These examples illustrate some of the new understandings about the effects the natural world, including flowers, have on our physical well-being.

Asphodel

Beyond the beauty flowers bring, however, I’ve been thinking how flowers are important reminders of the value of gentleness. A flower’s life is brief, all its beauty spent in a single season but flowers are an important antidote to life’s hardness. We live in a world where power over others is often respected, where we’re encouraged to be a leader, and to take charge of our lives or of the situations we’re connected with. Get tough and be strong. Climb mountains, push your limits, and go farther. These are saying and ideas commonly found in our culture. Flowers are an antidote to this kind of thinking.

Though they can also hold their faces to the sun all day, absorbing its heat, flowers aren’t known for their toughness. Their petals are soft and tear easily. We appreciate them for their bold blossoms, their illusive, sweet scents and sassy colors but we love them for their softness. Flowers, in their gentleness, remind us that we, too, are human. Their petals are flexible, fragile, vulnerable, even, as they bend and turn with the wind, and in their softness, they allow us to speak from the tender parts of our own lives for which we often can’t find words–the part where we allow others to enter when we want to be in relationship–when we want others to know us. Tennessee Williams helps us understand the importance of flowers’ softness in his line from his play Camino Real, “The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.” We see the flower growing in the stony crack, and find its softness a relief. Life is not all hardness. There is a strength in softness that moves in a different mode. Flowers touch our souls the way music does, reaching past the stony walls of reason we protect ourselves with to lift our spirits, and let us know we are more than struggle. We are alive, joined to all that is–including joy.

Rimbaud’s poem, “Sensation” illustrates this idea of how allowing ourselves to be touched by the soft things of life can transform us. Rimbaud begins with the poem’s speaker walking into a blue summer evening. It is a vivid image, perfectly depicting the tranquil essence of summer’s calm depth. Though in the next line the poem’s speaker is “pricked by grain” and “crushing the tender grass,” we understand we’ve entered a soft world because the grass is tender. The grain that pricks us serves to make us aware that our senses are enveloped in a world that is delicate and alive, and therefore breakable. As we continue reading the poem, the words bathe the reader in a scene of natural beauty–coolness caresses the feet; wind immerses the head in its essence. The poem’s speaker doesn’t resist the blue evening he enters. Instead, he surrenders himself to the wind’s caress. The head is bare, unprotected, open to experience. There is no need to talk, to reason or ponder, yet there is an exchange. Like a flower opening, as the poem’s speaker gives himself to her, Nature reveals herself to him. The sequence is worth noting here. Infinite love arises in the soul as a result of opening to the relationship. In the poem’s last lines, Rimbaud brings the reader into the heart of the most intimate of connections– one that joins human to human and human to nature. The poem’s speaker describes himself wandering deeply into nature, connected to it as if with a woman. “And I’ll go far, very far, like a gypsy,/ Into Nature–happy, as if with a woman.” Going on a flower pilgrimage can bring a person to just such a place–to arrive at a destination of softness that lets us know we are alive and in union with the perfume and color of all that is.

This coming week I’m participating in San Francisco’s Lotus Live at the Asian Art Museum–creating with others a human flower as an expression of the value of diversity and peacefulness that can be seen from the sky. If you want to spread the healing power of flowers, you might want to check out this video describing how Larsen Jay began the organization called Random Acts of Flowers or maybe you simply want to pick flowers to bring someone, anyone, even a stranger, and see how it changes them.

Uncategorized

Climbing the Mountain of Uncertainty

annacitrino

I’ve done a number of challenging things over the years, at least they were challenging for me. One summer I biked up the west coast of Ireland with my husband, nephew, and two other friends. The most difficult day was biking from Galway to the ferry take off point for the Aran Islands. When we started out, it was raining hard. We crouched behind a bus stop wall as we left the city, watching the rain blow horizontally, hoping it would let up. When we could tell that it wasn’t going to, we pushed out into the wind, riding against it the whole way, making it to the ferry five minutes before it took off. After another fourteen miles of riding once we landed on the islands, we arrived at our bed and breakfast. There, I opened up the bicycle guidebook to read that the ride we had just done should the easiest day of riding up the coast, as it was flat. Obviously, this statement didn’t account for riding into a fierce oncoming wind and driving rain the entire way. What seems like it should be easy can actually be quite difficult.

Several years back my husband and I climbed Mount Kinabalu, the highest mountain in Southeast Asia at 4,095.2m or 13,435.7ft. The climb up takes hours–most of the day, as I recall, and you pass through several ecosystems as you rise in altitude. Then you stay the night in bunks at the guest house, and rest up a bit before getting up at 3:00am to climb the rest of the way to the top so that you can be there soon after the sun rises, and before the mists engulf the peak. Because you are climbing in altitude, it can be slow and difficult walking once you are at about 10,00 ft. We made it to the top, and the views were truly stunning as the mists rolled into the sun and over the pointed granite peaks and saddles. We began the descent as the mists thickened into cloud, and the clouds began to rain. The walk up to the peak the second morning, and then back down the mountain again took nine hours, and was the most physically difficult thing I ever did. The trail up and down the mountain is made of steps of varying height, and we were walking down them in what eventually became torrential rain. For hours I didn’t know if I would be able to carry on putting one foot in front of the other. There were no rest stop areas, however. What could we do but continue on? So we did. It amazed me how when it had to, the body could move beyond what I thought was its absolute limit.

But challenging as these things were, these physical experiences were, they weren’t the most difficult thing to bear. The most difficult thing I’ve done was sitting by my father’s side day after day the month that he lay dying—knowing he was dying, and just sitting with him, being with him as he climbed the highest mountain, and continued on through the rain and wind, to cross over to the other side.

In California, it has finally begun to rain after months of winter filled with drought. In Montana it is truly winter. Today as I bicycle through our New Delhi neighborhood, the sky has a hint of blue after months of pollution and fog. I glide past smoke from burning heaps of garbage, and women crouched over blankets spread out on the sidewalk, sorting grain, and children playing cricket in the streets. I think of the estimated 100,000 who live on the streets in Delhi.

When someone we know is dying, or suffering, and we don’t know what the end of it will be, we feel open, raw, and especially aware of how frail our strengths really are—how fragile the line between life and death. All we have and are could change so easily, and it has made me realize how every day our very breathing is a kind of sacrament. Our life is and becomes day by day what we are paying attention to. It is what we open our hearts to, how we are listening to the people around us, to their spirit, and what is being said underneath the words.

Or not. Many people from developed countries are removed enough from the suffering in the world to remain comfortable while others in many other places suffer. Ilya Kaminsky in his poem “We Lived Happily During the War” talks about how those who are well off in the world hear the suffering around us, or see it, and feel badly about it—enough to protest, yet still we are able to sit outside on the porch in the sun.

In the sixth month
of a disastrous reign in the house of money

in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money
our great country of money, we (forgive us)

lived happily during the war.

In this life there is suffering. We might be from the great country of money, but everyone suffers. We might be comfortable now, but in actually, we don’t know what the future will bring. We spend so much effort trying to make ourselves comfortable, aiming to fend off suffering. Suffering comes to all. How will respond when it does?

Recently, a friend of ours who seemed perfectly healthy began to have prolonged unexplained fevers. In the hospital, he learned a rare bacterial infection nearly claimed his life. We don’t know what is in our future. I want the people I ride by on my bicycle, and the people I meet to be well. I want those I love and know to be well, to be whole. There is so much suffering in this city, so many needy, and as I think about and see those who are suffering, I feel each time I’m being asked how am I responding to the needs of the world? Even the planet suffers. What is the suffering telling us? Can we hear what it is telling us about our choices? How can we be whole inside of and in spite of our suffering?

This past week I read these words by Henri Nouwen, “Gentleness is a virtue hard to find in a society that admires toughness and roughness. We are encouraged to get things done and to get them done fast, even when people get hurt in the process. Success, accomplishment, and productivity count. But the cost is high. There is no place for gentleness in such a milieu…Gentle is the one who is attentive to the strengths and weaknesses of the other and enjoys being together more than accomplishing something.” As Nouwen suggests, ours is a society that admires toughness and roughness, values getting things done over being present with another, over listening. Do we counteract suffering by taking action, making change? Maybe the place to start is by being gentle, keeping an open heart, deep listening, presence—these are not easy qualities to cultivate, yet in our deepest selves, we long to know that we truly matter. So much suffering begins, continues on, and expands even into violence because people do not feel that they truly matter, do not feel that their life rests in the heart of someone else who holds them precious. Again, as Nouwen says, “When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.” Do we have the courage to be gentle? Can we hold it above productivity and success, above accomplishment? Can we learn to be humble?  We don’t necessarily have to have answers, we can simply sit with another in shared awareness of  helplessness. That can be powerful, even life changing.

How do we know what path to follow in the days we have remaining on earth to live, so that when we come to the end of our days, we will be able to climb the mountain, or find our selves able to keep peddling into the wind and the rain though we feel our legs are leaden, so that we can find the boat that will carry us onward? How easily we get thrown off track of what is important, pulled in to world of worrying about the uncertainties. Thomas Merton in his book, Thoughts on Solitude, suggests that we don’t have to have all the answers. In his prayer, he says, “My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.” We don’t have certainty. Even Jesus’s own disciples asked who Jesus was. And they walked and lived with him. All of us are incomplete. The path we walk isn’t about achievement or accomplishment. It is about walking the path—the journey. It is in our reaching out in the intention to love, to be, and to be made whole that matters in spite of our questions and uncertainty, our incompleteness.

I noticed the trees were filled with leaves today as I rode down the streets, biking not necessarily to anywhere, just weaving back and forth along the pavement, practicing what it is to move, to be alive in this moment just as it is. Breathing in, I said to myself, “peace,” as I lifted my leg on the pedal. Breathing out I thought, “blessings.” Blessings on those around me who suffer. Blessings on the world that suffers because we don’t know how to be gentle. Blessings to all of us traveling from uncertainty to uncertainty.