“What you are first able to write on the page, whether the writing comes easily or with difficulty, is not likely to be close to a finished poem.”
(Mary Oliver, A Poetry Handbook, 109).
For me, making the first mark on the page is not the hard part, I’m learning this so clearly right now. The difficulty is staying with the poem (the relationship, the feeling of being in pandemic forever, you know…). The difficulty is coming back to the page of exuberantly scribbled descriptions of a particular plum’s tree’s ice-encased branches and how they mirror exactly my feelings of immobility and precariousness, coming back to see those words with slightly different eyes, and to annotate my own motivations for writing a line. When I come back (because, you know I come back), feelings of complete incompetence paralyze my deeper thoughts and force me to contend with wave patterns on the surface– “What difference does this work make for anyone else?” comes up, and so does “Why am I presuming that anyone else is having a similar experience?” However, the consummate practitioner in me is not so easily derailed by ebbing and receding thought tides, I have been staying with it.
Somewhere in January, or February, or.. what is a month anyway but a way of marking the steady cycling of a moon who doesn’t need to know whether it is April or August, I began to feel a stagnating sadness, a heaviness of heart that lowered the ceiling somehow– much like winter clouds in Portland. (Unlike Seattle, whose proximity to sea and mountains means things move fast.) “Why now?” I wondered. We had been living in pandemic conditions for three-quarters of a year, survived a rough wildfire season, prepared for the potential coup and observed the insurrection from the relative safety of our home, why now? And I realized that at regular intervals though the entire pandemic, major adaptations had been required. We have mostly settled in to the rhythm of pandemic life, and in this settling, I begin to unsettle. Do I use beginning to avoid staying?
This feels related to the play of the gunas: the elemental constituents that are at play in all manifest reality. Tamas, the fertile darkness where it appears as though nothing is happening; Rajas, the creative burst required to make something happen; Sattva, the luminosity of relaxing into the rhythm of fruition. They are at play. They are equal. They continue so long as their purpose exists [this is a longer conversation].
“From that follows freedom from action colored by kleshas (obstacles to pure perception).
Then all the coverings and impurities of knowledge are totally removed. Because of the vastness of this jñana (wisdom), little remains to be known.
Then the sequence of transformations (parinama) of the gunas ends, because they have fulfilled their purpose.”
Ravi Ravindra, The Wisdom of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, Sutras IV.30-32.
I’m back in school working on another graduate degree, reading and writing a lot. In every class I’ve taken since returning to school, I have had the great good fortune of meeting old versions of myself, or stories of myself that don’t feel as true anymore. In my first writing class, there was the guy who denied that an overtly racist advertisement was anything but an innocent mistake. And I felt simultaneous impulses to dismiss him and the person I was at age twenty and to bless him and myself for our mutual blindness; being with my old selves cracked my egg-heart. (This is not at all to suggest that I did not explain the racism in the ad and the privilege of being able to deny such blatant discrimination.)
Realizing, I do know how to stay.
In a similar vein, I recently had to have a hard conversation about COVID boundaries. At this point in the pandemic, I felt a level of indignation about having this conversation, and I know that an earlier version of myself would have written off the person with whom I was talking as untrustworthy. I would have ended the relationship. This time, though, I didn’t. I had the hard conversation, and am on the other side of it now. I can hold boundaries. I can hold people (myself included, of course) accountable without shutting them out. This is a revelation for me.
It occurred to me while driving back from a double-masked Target run to stock up on toilet paper and pantry items (pandemic, ice storm signifiers) that I obviously know how to stay. I laughed so hard I started crying while driving past the Union 76 station where I refuel so infrequently now when I remembered that I have been in a monogamous relationship with my husband for over seventeen years. Obviously, not every moment (or year, to be honest) has been easy, and I know how to stay. Oh, and among many other relationships I have had for multiple decades, my practice has been a part of my life for twenty-four years next month. When I’m teaching folks about beginning new habits, I suggest looking at the habits you already have for guidance, so I asked myself “What can I learn from my marriage that can help me now?” Mary Oliver’s words echo in my ears: the relationship I am in now, even though it is the same relationship, is a heavily-edited version of the one I began with my husband so many years ago.
Beginning requires bravery of the obvious variety: boldness and comfort with playing the fool. Staying requires courage more subtle, more stealth: attunement and patience for discomfort, an awareness of the arc beyond the foreseeable future and simultaneous commitment to right now. Staying is the Sattva to crisis management’s Rajas and the Tamasic hibernation I imagine I will experience once the world emerges from this pandemic (yes, an oxymoron: synchronous emergence and retreat, though perhaps I am wrong).
A framework is useful for me; it allows some helpful reflections to forms and a kind of leaning into habits that have served me before. Although I’ve been staying for years, I’m now in a new practice of recognizing and reflecting on it. (Thank you, Mercury retrograde in Aquarius.)
I’ve just finished sharing a meditation & writing mini-immersion (you can join anytime and repeat as often as you like).
LOVE TO ALL+++
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