Spiritual Cloud Coverage

One week ago I took a train right up into the clouds.

It began like fog, but as the train continued to climb up the mountain past the 4,000, 5,000, 6,000 foot mark, I was officially in cloud territory; where I could not see more than 50 feet in front of me.

Some fellow travelers on the train were quite upset.

After all, we had just paid good money to view a mountain range that would have been spectacular had it not been for the fog and cloud coverage.

On any other day I probably would have been disappointed right with them; grumbling about my idealized mountain summit experience being ruined. 

But this time, I wasn’t.

No, for me, the external landscape of fog and clouds was in absolute synchronicity with my internal landscape.  And on this day, the generous mirroring of my inside and outside geography was deeply cathartic.

Every so often one my children will be crying and deeply upset, but when I ask them: “what happened? Why are you upset?”  They can only just barely sputter out between breaths “I-don’t-know,” and it seems the “I-don’t-know” part is just as distressing and confusing as the upset part.

I am in one of those times right now.

Not the upset and crying side of things per se, but rather the reality that I know I am in a deep space of emotion, yet I can’t seem to put together the “why” or even find the “right” words to accurately and articulately describe what I am feeling.

This is making me crazy.

I’ve heard novelist and memoirist Dani Schapiro say that sometimes she does not know what she is thinking or feeling until she writes it.  But what if you can’t even do that?

I found this poem recently by German Rainer Maria Rilke that seemed to brush against this current experience inside me. (Leave it to Rilke to find the right words…)

It’s possible I am pushing through solid rock
in flintlike layers, as the ore lies, alone;
I am such a long way in I see no way through,
and no space: everything is close to my face,
and everything close to my face is stone.
I don’t have much knowledge yet in grief
so this massive darkness makes me small.
You be the master: make yourself fierce, break in:
then your great transforming will happen to me,
and my great grief cry will happen to you.

(my underline)

Rilke’s offering of the “solid rock” image has profoundly resonated with me. The sensation inside me is like a cement boulder locked inside my chest, impenetrable. Yet I do not feel heavy, weighed-down or tired as one might expect.  And this sensation has left me preoccupied with so many unanswered questions. Like:

ü  What the hell is it?

ü  Is it something that wants to be born? Or something I am holding on to?

ü  Is it something to do with my soul? Or something to do with my ego?

ü  Should I put in more time and effort to explore it? Or just let it be?

ü  Does this experience warrant a move toward mystery or insight?

ü  Is this experience reflective of faith or ignorance?

I’d like to tell you that after several weeks (yes, weeks!) of this I have come up with some brilliant answers, but I gotta confess, I got nothin’.

And even though the famous Swiss Psychoanalyst Carl Jung said: “Man, as we realize if we reflect for a moment, never perceives anything fully or comprehends anything completely.” I still find it so aggravating!

Personally, I like my boxes nice and neat, preferably with a bow on top. I like movement toward extravagant finish lines that have trophies and t-shirts for the winners.

So for me, not having answers can feel like spiritual mess and confusion which is just so, messy…

Not to mention, it feels like being painfully stuck; like watching the most esoteric, philosophical, black and white documentary- in slow motion. 

Like I said, painful.

What then, at times like these, helps one get through?

Well, for me, this time around, I have found 2 things very helpful both independently of each other and inter-dependently together: 1.) Imagery and metaphor and 2.) Women’s spiritual stories.

In the 20^th century Carl Jung re-awakened the role and value of imagery and metaphor in Western Consciousness in the form of symbolism.  In Man and His Symbols he said:

It is the role of religious symbols to give a meaning to the life of man. The Pueblo Indians believe that they are the sons of Father Sun, and this belief endows their life with a perspective (and a goal) that goes far beyond their limited existence. It gives them ample space for the unfolding of personality and permits them a full life as complete persons.

I love this idea that a symbol could create “ample space” inside of us- especially when we are feeling particularly cramped and constricted, and paradoxically for me, the fog and clouds was the very symbol to do this.  Unlike words or spiritual practices that seem to require intellectual vigor or else time and effort on the part of an individual, what is elegant about an image or metaphor is the very grace of it because all that is required is allowance.

In one of her interviews after writing The Invention of Wings, novelist and memoirist Sue Monk Kidd said:

We have to acknowledge sometimes that this moment is enough. This place is enough. I am enough. It's okay. And if I never seek another thing, it's enough. And it grounds us in our own being. It grounds us in home. Home.

Being in the fog and clouds, embracing their gray, misty cover as metaphor, was extraordinarily grounding for me (and spacious)- leaving me with the sense that the world and I were just where we should be without any effort on my part at all.

Which brings me to my second helpful tool during times of spiritual confusion and stuckness: Women’s spiritual stories.

There are times when Mr. Carl Jung (and Joseph Campbell and Thomas Moore and even Rainer Maria Rilke too) and I must part ways.  Times when I need to see pronouns like “she” and “her.” Times when I need to read the words “feminine” and “heroine.”  Times when I need the real life, how-do-you-do-it spiritual stories of mostly modern women who are imperfectly walking a spiritual path, and are brave enough to share their awakenings and pitfalls with others.

During these times I choose to re-read spiritual memoirs and spiritual texts by women that I’ve read already once or twice before, listen to, watch interviews and/or visit (when possible )women who I call “Marys.”

“Marys” are elder women who are wise, funny and smart role models, and spending with them--in word or en vivo--is most therapeutic for me.

And last of all, a way I connect with women's spiritual stories is through conscious, mindful,  contact with the mother of us all, the natural world.

So in these past weeks, to help me tolerate this “solid rock” in my chest, I have re-read Anne Lamott’s Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith and Sue Monk Kidd’s The Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman’s Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine which were just pure joy to read again.

There are so many passages from these 2 books that I love so much but just to remind you of a few:

–Anne Lamott

v  “I’m a sucker for a great resurrection story.”

v  “The bad news is that whatever you use to keep the pain at bay robs you of the flecks and nuggets of gold that feeling grief will give you.”

v  “The depth of the feeling continued to surprise and threaten me, but each time it hit again and I bore it, like a nicotine craving, I would discover that it hadn’t washed me away.  After a while it was like an inside shower, washing off some of the rust and calcification in my pipes. It was like giving a dry garden a good watering. Don’t get me wrong: grief sucks; it really does. Unfortunately, though, avoiding it robs us of life, of the now, of a sense of living spirit.”

v  “When you’re on the high wire, you have to use every ounce of grace and skill and awareness and loyalty you can muster just to get to the other side. But that’s the gift, to have to use that kind of attention and focus, and it shows up around your eyes.”

v  “I was desperate to fix him, fix the situation, make everything happy again, and then I remembered this basic religious principle that God isn’t there to take away our suffering or our pain but to fill it with his or her presence…”

-Sue Monk Kidd

v  “In a way my whole life has been about waking up and then waking up some more.”

v  “There had been so many things I hadn’t allowed myself to see, because if I fully woke to the truth, then what would I do? How would I be able to reconcile myself to it? The truth may set you free, but first it will shatter the safe, sweet way you live.”

v  “Perhaps it’s possible to forgive in one grand swoop, but I didn’t experience it that way. I did it in bits and pieces, one stage at a time…You forgive what you can, when you can. That’s all you can do. To forgive does not mean overlooking the offense and pretending it never happened. Forgiveness means releasing our rage and our need to retaliate, no longer dwelling on the offense, the offender, and the suffering, and rising to a higher love. It is an act of letting go so that we ourselves can go on.”

v  “My body had recognized it as the truth even before my mind could allow it.”

I could have re-read any number of other spiritual memoirs by women (books often devalued in the media and popular culture as “chic lit” or “self-help,” but that is a soap box for another time) or spiritual texts written by women, but these 2 sufficed this time because each woman was able to tell and retell the story of a spiritual heroine; a story that is deeply nourishing to me even though I cannot completely articulate all the reasons why.

Seeking out “Marys” to lean into the spiritual lives of women has also been very helpful in the past few weeks. 

Two quick examples.  One, is I chose to visit a great-Aunt of mine who is 86 years-old. 

She’s a fantastic woman who stands a mere five feet tall like me, actually she may even be shorter now due to a little osteoporosis, but remains sharp as a tack and quite a spit-fire.  I could listen to her tell stories all day long- definitely a “Mary.”

The other “Mary” example is re-listening to a radio interview with author and environmentalist Joanna Macy.  Ms. Macy is also 86 years-old just like my great-aunt, also sharp as a tack, definitely a spit fire, and full of so much wisdom. 

Here are a couple of nuggets from her interview just to get a taste:

v  “You're always asked to sort of stretch a little bit more, but actually we're made for that. There's a song that wants to sing itself through us. We just got to be available.”

v  “You become what you love.”

v  “We are called to not run from the discomfort and not run from the grief or the feelings of outrage or even fear and that, if we can be fearless, to be with our pain, it turns. It doesn't stay static. It only doesn't change if we refuse to look at it, but when we look at it, when we take it in our hands, when we can just be with it and keep breathing, then it turns. It turns to reveal its other face, and the other face of our pain for the world is our love for the world, our absolutely inseparable connectedness with all life.”

The last way I’ve tried to help myself bear this recent weather pattern of spiritual fog and clouds is by bathing myself in the feminine during my encounters with the natural world- which has included many hours of weeding my vegetable and herb garden (in fact my garden has never looked so good). 

Always a go-to for me.  Never lets me down.  One could argue, the natural world is my Mother Superior of all the Marys. 

Therefore, each time I watch a gray heron flap her wings across the blue sky, each time I sit quietly listening to the leaves move in unison on the tops of the trees, and the one recent time I met a box turtle on my bike ride along the New England Rails to Trails, I “relax my heart” (to borrow a phrase from author, psychologist and Buddhist teacher Tara Brach), and come home to the present moment with a profound sensation of interconnectedness.

Whether through symbol, imagery, metaphor, women’s spiritual stories or whatever you find most helpful, I pray that you may also find a way to skillfully maneuver through whatever “solid rock” lies lodged in your own heart space.

May it be so.