Letting Love In

If I had a wish for me and for you as we head into the new year, it would be to invite love into your home this year to live with you. If you are anything like me, love might stand in your doorway a bit apprehensive and shy. Maybe even jaded. Love doesn’t have a lot of hope about their relationship with me. It isn’t so sure that this year will be any different. Love stands there wondering—Will she listen to me this year? Will she let me be the voice that guides her? Or will meanness and judgment be the only one she listens to again.

I stand in the doorway staring at love, knowing in my bones that if meanness and judgment were actually catalysts for change—the world would be a much different place, and I, myself, would have achieved all the goals I’ve ever had for myself. But meanness and judgement don’t work as catalysts for change. In fact, they may be the strongest guarantee of maintaining the status quo. Or staying stuck. And certainly, staying in an old story. Especially if that story is a story of trauma.

I stand in the doorway, looking at love, and we are in a standoff. Love is quiet. Sad. Hurt. Not because I don’t believe in love. Not because I haven’t taken love into my work and relationships over the years. Truly, I bring love everywhere I can. Except right here. Sitting next to me on the couch. And love stands on my doorstep in the winter wind wondering, “why does she take me everywhere to everyone else but not invite me to live with her?”

And I stand in my doorway wondering, “What will happen if I let love in?”

When you grow up with meanness and judgement, they feel familiar, and for reasons that still aren’t clear to me, it becomes easy to mistake familiar for love. It becomes so easy and so successful that you can actually believe meanness and judgment ARE love. That to abandon them means abandoning yourself. All the while, love sits alone on my porch waiting. Waiting to be invited in.

It’s a crazy kind of brainwashing that makes us believe that meanness is what we need to succeed. And it’s a crazy leap of faith that it takes to let the mean voice yammer away while you turn your head toward love. While you let it quietly listen to your fears.  Or while you ask it to repeat itself again so you can hear it more clearly. While you let it tell you in a timid and tentative voice to make yourself tea. Or to sit and read a book. Or go for a long walk.

I am so very tired of the same old fights with myself. And maybe it’s not so much in hope, but in the exhaustion of despair that I open the door to let love in. Sometimes you have to be tired of yourself. Sometimes you have to be so tired of the old thing, that you let the new thing in.

And so I stand on my back porch, snowflakes visible in the light, and gesture to love, ‘come in out of the cold.’  It tiptoes in and sits across from me in a chair. I feel like I owe it an apology, for all the years of neglect, but love doesn’t seem to care. Love is wondering:

“Will she trust me enough to lean her weight on me this year?”

“Will she tolerate the slowness and in-betweenness that comes from change fueled by love?”

“Will she actually learn to embrace the things that are just fine the way they are?”

And I have my own wonderings. Like suddenly adopting a rescue dog, I realize I don’t know much about love. What does it need for nourishment? Does it have a bedtime? What does my love need to feel at home?

Love curls up next to me on the couch. I sit quietly letting it rest. And I guess we will just figure it out slowly from here. I hope you can too.

© 2025 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

Finding Power in Despair

GLS 1997

GLS 1997

This morning I had to get out for a walk in the woods. It was a grey morning, but the snow was bright. I wanted the fresh air to wash the despair out of my brain and out of my heart. The despair from another terrible mass shooting. The despair from a war with so much violence and so much sorrow. The despair that it happened again. And that it has been happening for a long time. Beirut, Boston, London, Madrid, Mumbai. Newtown, Virginia Tech, Charleston, Chattanooga, Roseburg, Parkland, Ulvade, Pulse Nightclub, Lewiston, and now Brown, and Sydney.

Despair is defined as the complete loss or absence of hope and it is one of the human emotions that can feel the most painful and dark because despair knocks the light right out of you. It leaves you without a compass, without the energy to get up, without a reason to. Despair begins to tell you that there is no point to anything, that you might as well lay there, not get up. Nothing matters.

As someone who is wired as an optimist I find despair one of the most intolerable emotions. I am not just a glass is half-full person, I usually imagine an additional glass entirely. I have wielded hope as a massive source of energy and protection against despair. But eventually it doesn’t work: you find yourself face to face with the endless fight against violence or injustice—against something so very wrong—and whether that injustice or wrong happened just to you, or someone you love, to a group you belong to or all of humanity—you see it for what it is and you can’t imagine how you are going to live in a world and know, really take in, that injustice. That wrong. That level of sorrow for knowing that you can’t change it. The helplessness of seeing just how big it is and not having any idea of how it can be changed. You believe it is impossible. You are brought to your knees.

And paradoxically that is often the turning point of despair. At my most despairing I have gone in to talk to my therapist and chosen to sit on the floor, instead of the chair. I wanted to sit on the floor because I wanted to be where I was—at the very bottom—the place ‘you can’t fall below.’  And in admitting I was at the lowest place possible, I found the ground. I found something that felt real and solid. The healing part of despair is that it can actually be incredibly grounding: you know where you are, you see the world as it is, and you can get some clarity about what is wrong—what is really wrong at the root of it all.

In despair we find the most pessimistic and hardened parts of ourselves. And in despair we find the most pessimistic and hardened parts of our communities. In finding our darker sides we can be, ironically, more whole.

John Lederach who has worked with communities post-conflict on peacebuilding talks about the fact that the pessimism of the people who have lived through the worst cycles of violence may be one the biggest sources of true change. He calls their pessimism a gift, not an obstacle. Lederach calls pessimism grounded realism: “grounded realism constantly explores and questions what constitutes genuine change. For people who have lived for long periods in settings of violence, change poses this challenge: How do we create something that does not yet exist in a context where our legacy and lived history are alive and live before us?”

Despair brings us in contact with our most authentic selves and it compels us to demand that authenticity from the relationships around us. When we are feeling despair we cannot in any way tolerate fakeness, clichés or bullshit. When we are despairing we need authentic, we need real. We need it from ourselves and we need it from others. Hope is the fuel that helps us keep moving toward healing, toward the better imagined state. But hope often keeps us from being able to see and take in the trauma that has occurred- and it keeps us from seeing how we protect ourselves from knowing this—hope can keep us from becoming whole. You can’t do surgery in rose-colored glasses.

Despair is a turning point. In a state of despair you see the bigness of it all—and because of that you are freed from a world of simplistic duality—of there being an easy answer, of it being this-or-that. Despair helps you hold the complexity, which is the only real hope of healing. So we need to sit with our despair, sit on the ground if necessary, and we need to be able to sit with other’s despair as well. We need to trust that the ground that has been burned by despair is preparing for the seeds of change, the seeds of growth. And we must be the faithful gardeners of this growth by holding our pessimism and distrust and risking our hope again. 

© Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD 2025/2015

A sketch toward love

Félix Henri Bracquemond, The Swallows, Art Institute of Chicago, Public Domain

“Let the beauty we love be what we do. There a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”
— Rumi

“There are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground,” Rumi said. And walking around the Princeton University Art Museum I would have to say that he got that right. Each artist looked at the world his way (mostly his way, sometimes her way) –caught light differently, used color differently, and showed us what he saw or felt or what he wanted us to see or feel. Something as common and ubiquitous as a landscape was so varied in the hands of the many. Not a single artist, even when they were trying to match the others, truly matched anyone else. One of the exhibits was of the Italian Master Drawings and even when the artists were copying from a standard book of drawings or from plaster casts—they had their own take on it—the horse looked a little more to the left and the mane curled over, the torso of the figure was more muscular, or there was more of an emphasis on the child.

Each artist kissed his or her ground in a different way, and opened up something else into our view. They cause us to kneel and kiss our own ground in a different way. And in my mind, it is no different with healing from trauma or grief. Each person will catch the light in their own way, will lean into their story in their own way, and will find hope in their own way. Some with broad fast brushstrokes and some with tiny fine lines. There is no way to look at a museum full of art and imagine that there is one approach to healing that would fit all people. There are too many ways to see the world, so many ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

Some of the most beautiful drawings are the sketches. Fragments of drawings or studies that were clearly going to be a small piece of a much larger painting. The artist practicing how to draw a cow, or just the hoof. The turn of the head, or the eyes cast downward. The artist trying to figure out how to catch the experience and make it feel real. Sketches are such important reminders that beauty and art and accomplishment are made up of persistence and attention and devotion. Yes, the finished painting is beautiful. It is what we know as art. But the sketches are beautiful too. They too are art. Each attempt to get the curve of the hand right brings its own beauty, each slightly different. Each attempt has the artist reaching further toward their imagined piece of work. And so it is with your healing. Each attempt at talking, at doing something new, at trying a different way of being—is a sketch toward the art you are creating. A sketch toward love. A sketch toward healing. Each attempt is beautiful in its own right. “Let the beauty we love be what we do. There a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”

 © 2025 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

 

 

 

Halloween: A Chance to Dance with your Shadow

“How can I be substantial if I do not cast a shadow? I must have a dark side also If I am to be whole.”
— C.G. Jung

It was a sunny day yesterday and I took a short walk. At one point as I was looking down because the sun was so bright I saw the perfect shadow of a butterfly. The shadow was huge and flapping and caught me by surprise because you don’t expect to see a butterfly when you look down.

The shadow was this sign that there was something else, something beautiful if I could find it. I looked up and the sun was bright and at first I couldn’t see the actual butterfly, just the shadow, the sunlight obscured the butterfly as a silhouette. I stood patiently, and had to look away from the sun for a moment—and then I saw it. Bright orange and brown. Flapping toward the autumn trees, practically blending in.

I need to see my shadow, befriend it, and by doing so, find my own beauty.

Everyone has a shadow side, the side we don’t want to show the world. The things we don’t like about ourselves or others. Our shadow isn’t always bad, but it’s the part of us we don’t know, don’t want to know, are afraid to know, or don’t know how to handle.

And that brings me to this holiday: Halloween. It is the holiday of shadows—of bringing what most frightens us, what is hidden from us, what is unpracticed in us—out in the open. It is the opportunity to ‘come as you aren’t’—which children know instinctively. They dress as the most powerful beings they can: superheroes, princesses, ninja warriors—they dress in costumes that makes them feel all the power that they usually aren’t permitted to— and they revel in it. The bigger the cape, the longer the dress, the more pretend weapons they carry—the better.

Halloween allows you to literally live and play inside your shadow—dress as your darker side, your lighter side, you more feminine side, your more powerful side. See if you notice an ability to do or say things that you can’t normally do. Ruth Reichl, in her book Garlic & Sapphires, talks about her experience as a NY Times food critic. She would dress in disguise as a variety of characters so that restaurants wouldn’t recognize her and she found that in certain disguises she had the power to do things she couldn’t as her ‘regular self.’ For example, in one disguise, she could assertively send food back to the kitchen –something she normally couldn’t do.

So let this Halloween be a beginning.: A new year’s celebration of your shadows. A chance to bring one of your shadow selves out for a dance—out in to the light for chance to see it’s beauty, it’s usefulness, it’s strength. You could bring it out playfully in costume, or simply in spirit.

And when the holiday is over—you can still find ways to make friends with your shadows. Whatever you are working with right now. My experience is that something happens, some small piece of growth happens, some new view of the world occurs and something cracks. Something cracks enough for light to shine in on the hidden things and you can get a glimpse of the shadow. These cracks are permanent. And once light gets in, the shadow is seen, it’s attached, it’s connected to who you are.

Our shadows, the things we don’t like, can’t do, do too much of, can’t feel, feel too much, feel shame about, can’t tolerate—all these things over the years are hidden—they are our shadows. But they are also what makes us whole. Hidden in our shadows are also our butterfly wings, our superhero capes, and our dancing shoes. Take them out, get to know them, and twirl around. 

© 2015/2025 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD