Sunday, March 1, 2015

Sunday Thoughts



We must become intimate with anger to clear the way to our connectiveness, to our vulnerability and an aliveness to everything. In the end, our anger is transmuted to wisdom, which in turn gives rise to compassion.
from Holding Anger, by Jules Shuzen Harris, Sensei in Tricycle Magazine


Last night I spoke on the phone for hours with my oldest friend, Audrey, who lost her husband on New Year's Day of a terrible neuro-degenerative disease, supra-nuclear palsy. We laughed together -- a lot -- even as we talked about overwhelmingly sad things, and I was struck by our long connection to one another, how comfortable it was to lie on my bed and listen to her familiar voice tell me stories, the story of her husband, his illness, his final days, her children's remarkable compassion, her own strength and ability to recognize her failings, the extraordinary love she carries and projects.  It's these things that tie me to the world.

I read Timothy Kudo's  beautiful Op-Ed piece How We Learned to Kill  and felt the sour taste of anger rise like bile in my throat, the absurdity of all of it.

I read the above quoted article about anger this morning and wondered where I was on the journey referenced -- intimacy -- connectiveness -- vulnerability -- aliveness -- wisdom -- compassion. Perhaps, like grief, these things come and they go, get mixed up with laughter, a sense of absurdity, even desperation, and then grounding.



10 comments:

  1. I read that article by Timothy Kudo. Powerful and awful and true sadly. What he didn't mention is the burden he must carry with him the rest of his life, the burden of those lives he took or ordered taken. My father died fifty-five years after the second world war ended and still he carried those lives that he took with him. They haunted him until the end of his life. It's a heavy price to ask others to pay.

    I have no easy answers. If someone was to endanger my children, I would kill I'm sure. We are all humans, good and bad, kind and cruel, enlightened and not. There are no easy answers.

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    1. lily cedar -- Interesting thoughts. They remind me of an incredible article I read in The New Yorker some time ago about a soldier seeking atonement for some deaths he'd been responsible for in Iraq. I think the title was "Atonement" -- he found the family who he had affected living now in Glendale, CA, and when he sought their forgiveness, he was forgiven. It was amazing and worth looking up.

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  2. I, too, believe I go through all of those emotions, sometimes within moments of each other.
    When do I get to grounding?
    Maybe I have that too and just don't pay attention.
    I am so glad you got to talk to your friend. Such talks restore our souls.

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    1. I believe your soulful connection to the daily life tasks you engage in -- the cooking, the chickens, the caregiving, the children and grandchildren, your ministering to all those people, your relationship to the natural world around you and then, of course, your incredible ability to articulate all of that in your writing -- well that's supreme "grounding," no?

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  3. I like the idea of anger as a journey with a purpose. I haven't yet read that op-ed -- thanks for pointing it out!

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    1. I liked that idea, too, Steve. I feel like I've achieved a bit of it with some issues that have plagued me over the years, and I know that I have much more travel to do in others!

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  4. I think all aspects of aliveness come and go and get mixed up. Perhaps in grief they are more visible. Doesn't it keep coming back to stories, all our stories, that we lived/live them, retell them, examine them, treasure and embrace them, not for being exclusively happy but for being ours. There is such balm in the voices and words of our oldest friends. That we also get to be that for them is, I imagine, what ties any of us to this world. xo

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    1. Marylinn -- That is so exactly true. Thank you.

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  5. Vulnerability is hard...is that because because who knows where a crack in the armor might lead?

    Janie B

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    1. Janie B - It's weird to realize as you get older how difficult it is to be truly vulnerable and how much we've built up that "armor" over the years through so much experience.

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