Tag: grief

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The Season is Now

annacitrino

Sandhill Cranes, Staten Island, California

Now is the season to know
everything you do
is sacred.

–Hafiz

Recently, I traveled to Staten Island in California’s Central Valley near Lodi, California. An important wintering spot for migratory waterbirds, the Central Valley supports 60% of wintering waterfowl in the Pacific Flyway and 20% of the winter waterfowl in the whole of the US. According to the Audubon website, “The four Central Valley regions hosted approximately 65 million migratory land birds in the spring and 48 million in the fall.” My purpose in the visit was to see the sandhill cranes. Since the cranes like marshes, bogs, agricultural lands, river valleys, and open prairie, California’s Central Valley is a perfect wintering location for the birds.

The largest gathering in the world of sandhill cranes is in Nebraska, where over a quarter million sandhill cranes gather in spring on the Platte River. Witnessing the multitude of bird life gathered in that location, the air filled with their wing-flutter, their voices calling to each other across fields, and the enormous energy of their life-force could carry one into a state of awe. The Nature Conservancy’s excellent short video of the sandhill cranes’ spring presence in the Platte River Valley enables people to visit the spectacle vicariously. Viewing the film brought me into sharper awareness of the myriad worlds that occur simultaneously alongside our human one. 

Sandhill Cranes, Staten Island, California

At least 3,000 years ago bird migration patterns were noticed in various cultures of the Pacific islands as well as in ancient Greece, and are also referred to in the Bible in the books of Job and Jeremiah (Wikipedia). While humans are out traversing the highways, working in fields, gathering in buildings, or sitting in around the dinner table discussing who to vote for in upcoming elections, sandhill cranes and other migratory birds have their own motivations and are flying by the thousands upon thousands to locations they’ve gathered at for millennia. 

While we move through our day unaware of nature’s larger rhythms, a great cycle of being is unfolding all around us and we are part of it. Like an Indian raga, the movements of animals flow in cyclic rhythms of time across the globe in circuitous routes, increasing in volume, size, and energy at different locations, then quieting down and moving on as seasons change, only to be repeated again the following season. Flyways and the myriad patterns of many other animals moving across the globe–leatherback turtles, whales, monarch butterflies, bats, salmon, pronghorn deer, each following ancient rhythms, can be seen on interactive maps like this one, as well as this video of global animal movements.

Geese flying above Staten Island, California

The whole of creation is in a state of continuous change. Though trees are rooted, Chelsea Steinaur-Scudder and Jeremy Seifert, in their article in Emergence Magazine, “They Carry Us With Them: The Great Tree Migration,” describe tree migrations that have occurred over millennia, and that are presently taking place as a result of a variety of factors not as yet totally clear, but including “changes in climate, past and present land use and management, the proliferation of native pests and plants, the introduction of non-native species, and the built landscape.”

A big part of my reason for wanting to see the sandhill cranes is because many of my great aunts and uncles were born in Nebraska. I’ve been writing about them, and want to experience more of the landscape they inhabited to better imagine their voices and to sense how the land there might have shaped their lives. Though they lived at Nebraska’s western edge and not in the Platte River Valley, they may well have experienced the cranes’ migration, and I like the idea of my life intersecting with a vision of these birds that may have also been a vision they had. My ancestors migrated from the eastern US states to Nebraska. I never met most of them because by the time I was born, my parents had migrated to California. My great grandparents, as well as several of my great aunts and uncles, died before I was able to meet them.

Geese, Staten Island, California

In Western culture we like to think of time as linear and often depict history on timelines. A different way of looking at existence is to imagine it as circular or a great spiral–the spiraled twist of DNA helix, the chambered nautilus’s fibonacci whorl, the swirled currents of wind and water, and the cosmic curled tail of our galaxy. We are all part of the great movement of becoming. In our migrations, we say goodbye to what was and reach toward what will renew and nurture us in body or spirit. To live is to be part of the great cycle of birth and death. There are many deaths and births before we let go of our bodies.

Humans generally like firmness and solidity. We live in a certain location or in a particular period of time. Nevertheless, it’s also true that humans have been migrating since the dawn of their existence, as this National Geographic map shows. Many times, people move from their birthplace to other locations. According to the UN, “more people than ever live in a country other than the one in which they were born.” When we choose to move elsewhere, we generally hope the move will carry us to an environment we perceive is better than the one we left behind. These maps depict human migration in recent times, making it clear not everyone migrates out of choice. Whether people migrate from their own choice or not, letting go of one’s former life carries with it a kind of grief.

Gail Rudd Entrekin‘s poem “Finally,” (used with her permission) found in her excellent book of poems, Walking Each Other Home, takes a close look at what it’s like to come face to face with losses we don’t necessarily expect during the migration of our lives as we move from birth toward maturity.

Finally

Every morning now it’s the big girl pants
and they are not black silk with lace, but cotton
voluminous and white. You’ve seen them
hanging on clothes lines back in the day,
functional pants for women who mean
business. They mean to get things done
no allowance for pain, don’t mean to spend
a single minute caressing their losses. These
women look straight ahead and forget to smile
at children, forget to touch their husbands’ hands,
their old husbands wandering like children,
these men who were supposed to be gods
and fell unable in their duty to protect, left
these women to drop their peacock feather earrings,
chop off their long thick hair, toss their wild
photos into an old shoe box, and take charge,
grow up, finally, grow all the way up.

The poem brings us into the world of navigating inside those difficult migrations life inevitably brings our way. The underwear described in the poem aren’t black silk with lace. They are “functional,” the kind perhaps our grandmother or great grandmother might have worn, women so busy trying to survive they didn’t take time to soothe themselves regarding what they lost. We need dear ones close by to help steady us but for various reasons, we don’t always have the support we need.

Often times when entering into difficult life passages, we recognize the journey’s challenges and find ourselves needing to turn serious and grow practical. Entrekin’s poem describes these women, they who no longer do such things as wear their lovely peacock feather earrings. They cut their thick hair, and toss the photos of their wilder days in an old shoe box. In confronting hardship, they’ve let go their adornments and spontaneity. Out of necessity they “take charge, / grow up, finally, grow all the way up.” There is such sobering responsibility and finality embedded in those words. Courage and bravery too. I read the lines and think of people I know right now who are having to do just that as they confront various difficulties.

There’s also a sadness there, a sorrow in this letting go of a former self in order to “take charge.” Things that have delighted and brought us joy are important touchstones to memories that helped shape and give texture to our lives. Even if out of necessity, we don’t want to stuff them away in a shoebox never to be seen again. We need the things that give us beauty and joy in order to keep going. Nevertheless, eventually, as we approach our life’s last days, everything we’ve held so precious will need to be set aside. We will need to let go of everything we’ve ever held dear.

Egret, Staten Island, California

Entrekin titles her poem “Finally.” When we retire from work we felt dedicated to for years, or when someone dear to us becomes seriously ill or dies, we leave one world behind for another. These situations and circumstances require us to leave behind a familiar reality for a different one and are a kind of interior migration as well as a death of a former way of living.

The arrival of bodily death is the ultimate finality. Contemplating our death can help us recognize what it is that truly matters. To help us do this, Buddhists recommend people practice reading or reciting what they call the Five Remembrances:

  • I am of the nature to grow old. I cannot escape old age.
  • I am of the nature to grow ill. I cannot escape sickness.
  • I am of the nature to die. I cannot escape death.
  • I will be separated from everything and everyone I hold dear.
  • My only true possession is my actions.

Frank Ostaseski, head of the Zen Hospice center in San Francisco, California, in his book, The Five Invitations, encourages us to sit down with “sister death,” to have tea and conversation with her because in doing so we learn how to live more fully. Ostaseski suggests that as we turn toward the griefs we carry, we become more whole. “Every time we experience a loss, we have another chance to experience life at a greater depth,” he writes. “It opens us to the most essential truths of our lives: the inevitability of impermanence, the causes of suffering, and the illusion of separateness. We begin to appreciate that we are more than our grief. We are what the grief is moving through.”

Geese at Staten Island, California

“In the end,” Ostaseski goes on to explain, “we may still fear death but we don’t fear living nearly as much. In surrendering to our grief, we have learned to give ourselves to life.” Ostaseski’s talk about poetry and the end of life, is moving, and I recommend it.

The other side of grief is love. For me, both Entrekin’s poem and Ostaseski’s insights emphasize the preciousness of every moment. The simplest things are treasures: sitting in the presence of those we love, the taste of a good meal, a walk under billowed clouds spread across a wide sky. Life is ephemeral. This is why in the end, acts seemingly as simple as walking across a room are not simple or trivial. They are rich and lavish gifts of being. As the 14th century Iranian poet Hafiz wrote in The Gift, translated by Daniel Ladinsky:

Now is the Time 

Now is the time to know
That all that you do is sacred.

Now, why not consider
A lasting truce with yourself and God.

Now is the time to understand
That all your ideas of right and wrong
Were just a child’s training wheels
To be laid aside
When you finally live
With veracity
And love.

Hafiz is a divine envoy
Whom the Beloved
Has written a holy message upon.

My dear, please tell me,
Why do you still
Throw sticks at your heart
And God?

What is it in that sweet voice inside
That incites you to fear?

Now is the time for the world to know
That every thought and action is sacred.

This is the time
For you to compute the impossibility
That there is anything
But Grace.

Now is the season to know
That everything you do
Is sacred.

poetry, spirtuality, Uncategorized

Living with Loss

annacitrino

When recent storms on the coast caused waves of 25 to 50 feet, I drove north to Maverick’s to see them. The size of small mountains, water rose from the shoreline waving its wild, terrifying and gloriously beautiful arms into the sky. A few people sat on surfboards waiting for a wave with good form they could ride. The majority of us, though, were spectators who walked the cliffs above the shore or who traversed the shoreline, gazing in awe at nature’s wonder. The world’s wild beauty is a can fills us with awe, though sometimes it also carries us to the edge of danger and the possibility of loss.When looking carefully, you can notice loss lives beside us just beneath the surface of experience. Sometimes its absence is a mountainous weight hovering nearby like a cresting wave, waiting to tumble down at the sound of wind, a child’s cry, or the distressed look from a stranger on the street. So many seemingly insignificant things could serve as the trumpet’s blow resounding from walls that previously keep a person feeling safe. The loss of family members or someone we love, loss of work we used to do, people we used to know, a change in health—these can become waves of enormous change in our lives, and the way the world once worked, along with the things that held it together can come tumbling down. This is hard ground to walk on, difficult territory to reside in. How do we keep going? How do we begin again?The experience of loss has been with us since the beginning of the human story as we fled the safety of the Garden of innocence and inexperience, with the awareness that we needed to begin the difficult journey toward understanding who we are and how to restore our relationships. This is a difficult task as our understanding is always incomplete. When things fall apart or we experience significant change, we like to know how we’re going to get to new ground and when we will arrive at a new place in our lives. But the timing of how this will all come about usually isn’t readily apparent. The process is less like a line and more like a spiral, and the pilgrimage to that desired place of being extends over varied and challenging terrain.A couple of months back, I read Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s book, The Silence in an Empty House, a beautiful book of poems describing experiences in her relationship with her life partner who had a terminal illness. While experiencing the territory of loss, the writing takes the reader into the heart of relationship and the many small moments and memories that build and connect one life to another in intricate interweaving. In her poem, “Watching the Bridge Collapse,” Gillan describes how life can change in ways never expected. 

We loved each other. Our children were
smart and healthy and beautiful. How could we lose?
then one day you, who could swim a hundred laps
in the town pool, who ran even in a mid-winter
snowstorm, began to move slower and slower,
your hands no longer functioning the way
they always had, your legs unwilling to obey
your brain’s command. And now, your head bent
sideways, so it nearly touches your shoulder,
your legs so weak they cannot hold you up,
your voice thin as a thread. 

The situation Gillan describes is excruciatingly difficult. We acknowledge age brings diminishment, but to witness the vitality of one you love slowly decline in so painful a manner is a loss no one hopes for. Nevertheless, the poems show Gillan confronting the loss and suffering day after day although there is no possibility for expectation that her husband’s condition will improve. This is a struggle any of us could find ourselves in. As Gillan later points out in her poem, “What is Lost,” we do not know what our future will hold. “We all believe that if we just do what we’re supposed to/ the world will remain firm beneath our feet,” she writes. But this isn’t how it is for many people, and one of the things I especially appreciate about Gillan’s poems in this volume is how she describes her losses so directly. In the poem, “My Daughter Comes Home to Take Care of Her Sick Father,” Gillan’s speaks openly about the difficulty of her situation. “I do not understand,” she writes, “how love could become so complicated./ I am ashamed that some part of me wants this to end, to just/ stop.” Her honesty about her struggle in coming to terms with what she has been given is powerful and moving because the story she tells is bigger than simply her own personal story. It’s the story of all who struggle against things that seem unbearable. She speaks the words that are nearly impossible to find when the burden of loss is so enormous it lies beyond the ability to name.When someone we love difficult finds themselves struggling under difficult circumstances, it’s natural to want to offer help and solutions. Yet sometimes there are no solutions. When her husband tells her of his fear of being blind in the poem, “Because You Keep Turning to Me,” Gillan writes, “I offer what comfort I can, and when I hang up, I cry/in my hotel bed because you keep turning to me/ and all I have to offer is my hands, useless and empty, and too far away to even stroke your head.” I read her words, and recognize my own emptiness in trying to meet the loss I sense in others around me who are suffering. Gillan extends her expression of the depth of our incompleteness in such circumstances in her poem, “There is No Way To Begin.” 

“There is no way to begin this poem, to say how I who have
always believed that whatever happens, things always
work out for the best, have finally been brought
to my knees, not to pray as I did in Blessed Sacrament
Church on Sixth Avenue when I was a girl, but in defeat,
unable to find the thread of joy that has always
waited for me just beyond tears.”

When we realize things aren’t going to get better for others or for ourselves where do we go? Thich Nhat Hahn in the 14 precepts of engaged Buddhism, recommends that we “Find ways to be with those who are suffering, including personal contact, visits, images, and sounds. By such means, awaken yourself and others to the reality of suffering in the world.” Suffering being with those who suffer is necessary to the growth of our capacity for compassion and for understanding of how our lives are connected to those around us, as Maria’s poem so effectively gives voice to. What we come to realize when in the presence of suffering, is that solutions for how to cope with suffering aren’t going to be external. Like a tree that grows around a fence pole standing in its way of growth, we somehow must enlarge ourselves to be able to include or surround the loss.When we look at others’ suffering we suffer too. The brain’s mirror neurons tell us this. One of Gillan’s poems, “Watching the Pelicans Die,” speaks directly to our interconnectedness, demonstrating so effectively how human suffering is reflected in the natural world as well. The drowning pelicans’ bodies caught in the BP oil spill are a echo of her husband’s painful effort to rise above the weight of the disease that wants to drown him. Oil covering its body, the bird in Gillan’s poem screams without sound, “a picture of torment and despair,” the silent despair Gillan recognizes her husband and family daily bear as they try to survive the calamity the disease has created–the suffering from which there seems no end. …On the Gulf, the earth and sea are being destroyed, just as you were by the disease that finally defeated you after you struggled against it for all those years.Some things are bigger than all of us. We cannot defeat them. If there is enough carelessness and greed in the world even the ocean can be destroyed…Our life is intertwined with the life and suffering of the planet. Suffering continues, and so does the brave effort to meet it. “You never gave up;” Gillan writes in her poem of the same title, “you kept doing whatever you could do,/ fell each day because you’d try to walk even though/ you no longer could.” Spelling out an alphabet of loss as time passes, moments of sudden memories of beauty, but also the months and years of loneliness and long process of letting go, letting things be what they are. “The world is too full of grief,” she writes in her poem “Planting Flowers in Iraq,” a poem about a groundskeeper planting flowers when the very same week two hundred people were killed by car bombs, and Gillan recalls a mother’s face overcome with grief as she lifted her dead child in her arms. “The world is too full of grief,” Gillan writes.

It’s true. The pulse of loss throbs inside the silence. Everywhere one looks, tears and sorrow wait beneath the surface of things. I think of the 9/11 memorial designed by architect Michael Arad and landscape architect Peter Walker where once the Twin Towers stood in New York City. An immense sense of loss envelops you as you approach the memorial, then stand to look as water pours its delicate and silvery life over the square’s edges into the firm earth, then falls again endlessly and forever into a bottomless space that cannot be fathomed, seen or known. The grief feels utterly palpable and weighted with presence, moving beyond words into a space where grief lives and doesn’t end. This is grief embodied.

How do we get to the other side of grief? How do we live beyond, into or with loss that feels too immense to bear? How do we find a way to name the grief, to hold it and still keep living? In her poem, “What if?” Gillan writes,

And what if, this moment, wrapped in the gauze shawl
of stillness, is the secret after all, to learn to look
more closely at the varied world, the veins of a leaf,
a stone, the stippled pattern of bark, and to find,
even in the shape of our hands, the curve of our nails
the ability to lift a cup and drink, the secret of loving
the transfigured world?

An answer is to learn to look, and where Gillan turns her gaze is to nature. Nature, too, has experienced enormous and unspeakable losses, especially in the past few centuries, but life is still present, available to us as a renewing source when we look deeply. Tree and stone, our own hands lifting a cup to drink. From the transfigured world we can drink and draw new life. As Gillan points out, it is when we allow ourselves to be wrapped in the “gauze shawl of stillness” that we enable ourselves to connect to the commonplace of the world in its transfigured form. This in turn allows us to see our experience as part of a greater whole. We heal from the inside out. Physical wounds begin healing from the inside. It could be the same with wounds of spirit and losses of the heart. We let ourselves be present with the wounds and losses, holding them in the arms of our thoughts, speaking to them tenderly, dearly, gently. More than our direct pursuit to find an external solution for what will meet our deep need, perhaps what we seek finds us as we allow ourselves to be available to what is working within us. Or perhaps it is a bit of both. During these winter months we inhabit the season Christian tradition names as Advent: light’s entry into the dark—into the places of our lives where we cannot see. It is a metaphor reminding us that there are times in life when we don’t know where the next step leads. Things move in complex worlds beneath the surface of what we can see or comprehend. All people experience this state of being. We don’t know when the light we feel we need will appear or how we are going to find it. It’s not a direct path. As this song written by Stephen Foster describes, our souls long for “Hard Times to Come Again No More.” Notice how in this version by Tommy Fleming, the entire audience knows the words and sings together with him. We are not alone. The whole world knows struggle. We walk together. Our inner work is to keep mind and heart open, to walk as we can, trusting that as we move, we journey toward wholeness. Like blossoms, we wait in our own time for light to open us.