Inner Eclipses: Waiting for the Return of our Hidden Suns

“It began with no ado. Odd that such a well-advertised public event should have no starting gun, no overture, no introductory speaker. I should have known right then that I was out of my depth. Without pause or preamble, silent as orbits, a piece of the sun went away. We looked at it through welders’ goggles. A piece of the sun was missing; in its place we saw empty sky.”
— Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk

I have run into a lot of despair this week. At times my own. But also, others. People who hold others’ difficult stories. Who witness others’ suffering. People who don’t know how to support learning the way they want to. People who are ill or injured. It’s a despair that holds more than despair—it also holds care. It holds concern and responsibility. It holds a fierce persistence. And maybe, maybe, it holds the tiniest bit of hope. Hope that sometimes showed up as possibility, but often looked more like exhaustion and the willingness to surrender the old thing and let something else emerge.

In my imagination I picture despair not so much like night, but more like a total solar eclipse. Where the sun had been, it is suddenly gone. The world has gone dark. The color fades. Despair isn’t like night because night is supposed to be dark. But in an eclipse, there is darkness where there is supposed to be light. The loss of the sun feels total and permanent in that moment.

And maybe despair feels more like an eclipse than some long, dark night because I have lived through both: despair and eclipse. And I have gotten to see the totality of darkness, but also how it eventually passes. Neither remains permanent—no matter how permanent they feel at the time.

A solar eclipse happens when the sun, the moon, and the earth completely align. The moon passes between the earth and the sun, blocking the sun’s light completely. The sun will completely darken, but sometimes, if the weather is right, you can see the sun’s corona—the outside edge of the sun—something that’s often invisible. There’s a way that an eclipse is an integration of sorts: it only happens when things come into contact with one another. When too many truths collide. When you can see the problem all too clearly and the solutions seem impossibly far away.

In 2017 there was solar eclipse in August. Everyone in my neighborhood was out, including a family with kids. They were all in their driveway holding colored boxes—when I looked closely, I could see that they were cereal boxes.

The youngest boy in the family, maybe 8 or 9, came walking over to me, seeing me standing in my driveway without any equipment—and he handed me a Frosted Flakes box that had holes that had been cut and covered with foil. And one of the holes had a small hole. He pointed at where I could look through and said I could keep it—they had made a lot. So I got to peer at the eclipse safely, with Tony the Tiger and an 8 year old boy as companions.

The way to safely view an eclipse is through goggles or a tiny hole. You need protection so you aren’t hurt. And holding despair may be the same. You need the ability to take in just a small view of something so big. The things that happen that bring forth despair in us are things that are not only big--they are what makes us human.  Despair is the ultimate experience of being mortal—of knowing that in that moment our biggest power is the power to witness what is true, even if the truth is hard, or awful or unbearable. Witnessing despair doesn’t mean inaction. It just means, not yet.

I now have enough practice with despair to know that I get stuck when I think it’s my job to remove the darkness—as if I thought it was my job to move the moon so the sun could shine. I forget that it’s my job to witness—to see what is blocking my sun, our sun, the light in the world. I forget it’s the smallest voice, or the smallest parts of ourselves that offer the solutions—the cereal box, carefully taped—to witness the process, and see whatever we are capable of taking in at that time. To remember that the sun will emerge again, and at the edges of despair and darkness, sometimes things become more clear.

©2023 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

Gurus in Life Preservers

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It’s summer and on my walk in the morning I can literally smell the sunshine coming off the lake that I walk by and my mind keeps going back to the lake at a camp where I taught swimming lessons. It brings me back to four girls who have been my gurus for the past couple of weeks. It was a wonderful summer for so many reasons, but nearly thirty years later, I hang on to the lessons that those girls taught me about courage and trust and perseverance.

I had one group of African-American teenage girls from Newark who had never been swimming before. And certainly never swam in a lake (“EEEEW there are fish in there! They are going to bite me!”) They stated from the outset that they were NEVER going to go in. But swim lessons were basically mandatory, so they had to come to the lake anyway, so the four of them humored me and came to the lake, but refused to wear suits and refused to get in.

So I called their bluff and I brought down a giant mixing bowl from the kitchen, and filled it with lake water. We had our lesson on the dock so they could learn to blow bubbles and do the rhythmic breathing required of the crawl stroke right there in the mixing bowl. They thought it was hilarious and played along. Then they practiced just dangling their legs in. When it was agreed that they could get in the water, they said they weren’t getting in the water unless they could do something. And that was, they each went and got two life preservers, and put both of them on. And two kickboards. And for the next couple of days they just stood in the water, brave enough to stand waist deep, wearing their life preservers and holding their kickboards. They didn’t care what they looked like. They didn’t care that they were the only ones with that much equipment at the waterfront. They just did what they needed to do. It was slow and incremental over the two weeks that they were there. Being brave enough to dunk their whole body in. Brave enough to pick their feet off the ground. And brave enough, eventually, to take the life preservers off and try swimming. And they did it. All of them passed the Red Cross Beginner’s test that session.

I have never forgotten this because I am still in awe about how brave they were to try something that they were so frightened of, and how smart they were to ask for what would allow them to feel safe enough to try. I have never forgotten their willingness to learn something that was so difficult for them and to keep at it. To be willing to be a beginner at something that all of their peers could already do. To decide that learning was more important than saving face.  And their genius at knowing themselves well enough and listening to themselves about their own incremental steps.

Maya Angelou used to say that we are never alone. That wherever we go and whatever we do we can bring others with us. We can bring ancestors, teachers, loved ones with us. Of my many inner teachers and gurus I pull on, these girls hold a particularly revered spot. I pull on them whenever I need compassion for myself or someone else who is up against a big fear. Up against something they wish they could do, but can’t. Something everyone else seems to do, but you can’t. They are the perfect visual reminder of what it takes to bravely overcome your fears—you get interested in taking on the challenge, you start as small as you possibly can, you oversupport yourself, and you stay with it day in and day out.

And this wisdom from them is especially useful when you are learning to dive in to emotions you find frightening. Almost everyone has an emotion that is more difficult for them than the others and if you have experienced trauma, the emotions can feel louder and more extreme. They can have an all-or-nothing quality not unlike how my camper girls saw the lake water: either I am safe on the dock or I will drown in the water. There is no middle ground.

The lake and swimming in it are intertwined. The girls were afraid of the lake and they hadn’t learned to swim. And I could say the same about my experience. My emotion and the way I protect myself from my emotions are also intertwined. It’s a big lake of emotion and I am still learning how to swim in them.

The key to stretching your capacity with difficult emotions is to do exactly what those girls did: Find the smallest possible increment to feel it. And stay with that until you are ready to move on.

What I have found helpful is the sheer repetition of talking about it: Sometimes even just saying the same sentence again. Even if it feels silly. Even if it is the emotional equivalent of blowing bubbles in a big bowl. Or sometimes if it gets to be too much. Stopping the conversation. Getting out of the water for a moment. And then dangling my feet in the water, heading back in to the conversation slowly. This practice of feeling something, pulling away from it, and heading back to it helps you reestablish a sense of control again.

Keeping those girls in mind helped me see what I needed to do. These past couple of weeks I have struggled with disappointment—an emotion I detest. I had the mistaken notion that ‘good disappointment’ looked like “Oh well.” As in, “Oh well, it didn’t work out.” But, in fact, this isn’t good disappointment, it’s indifference. This isn’t swimming with the emotion. This is staying on shore. What I needed to do was figure out what my life preservers were and stand knee deep in the emotion. Not drown in it. But just stand in it. Bravely. Knowing I had what I needed to be safe. And having the hope one day of freely splashing around.

The thing is you don’t have to swim perfectly to have a sense of accomplishment. The whole experience gives you pieces of that feeling. Every day those girls came to the waterfront—they tried something new, and they laughed, and they met a part of themselves they hadn’t met before. This is really what it is all about. You become bigger each time you meet a new part of yourself. You don’t make the difficult emotion smaller. You make yourself bigger. You meet parts of yourself you haven’t met before.  The lake didn’t change. The girls did. I didn’t master disappointment this week. But I ventured into deeper water than I had before without going under. I met parts of myself I hadn’t met before. And so what if I am still holding a kickboard as I stand in the water. It means I am closer to swimming than I was before.

© 2023/2015 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

 

Ring the bells that you can ring

Ring the bells that you can ring, forget your perfect offering. I could recite this hourly, when clock bells are set to ring, and I would still forget and need the reminder an hour later. Ring the bells that you can ring. I am always reaching for some other bell. It kills me. I am always looking for the other thing, the next thing, the thing I can’t do. Forget your perfect offering. And just offer.

In college I took a great art class, or really it was just an art class with a great teacher. We did a lot of drawing and a lot of figure drawings and she quite rightly read the group early on and recognized that we weren’t ringing our bells, we were desperately looking for the perfect offering, frozen in place with our charcoal crayons.  So she created assignment after assignment to dispel us of our fear. For weeks we did our figure drawings on top of previous sketches. You can't ‘mess up’ a drawing that is, by design, already messed up. We did hours of sketches in public places in phone books. And really, there is no perfect way to sketch in a phone book, even I could admit that. We cut up our old drawings and paintings to create collages. So all our art became new art—so there were no mistakes - only future art. 

Imagine. Imagine if you thought of all your mistakes as future art? What a different experience of a day or of learning! Any bell, any ring will do because it will eventually become a song, some song, your song. Ring the bells that you can ring, forget your perfect offering, there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.

With thanks and credit to Leonard Cohen: Anthem, and to Colleen Hayward for a lifetime of learning. 

© Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD 2023/2014

The Tyranny of Good

“In feigned completeness I would walk the lonely/ longest distance between all points and all others/ because in their connection my geometry will have/ been faithful to its own imagined laws.”
— Barbara Kingsolver, American Biographies

Trauma survivors don’t own the territory of good, but we are some of its most loyal subjects.

Good might make you feel good when you are a little kid. It might make you feel safe if you grow up in a crazy household. It might help you imagine that love is possible.  It might give you hope that your boss will promote you.  Good can motivate you to persevere, it can help you survive, it can endear you to others, sometimes.

But there is something about good that goes beyond rational judgment. Good can become a religion. Good can feel like it is one of the natural laws—break it and you die.

The commandments of good are that if I can just be good enough, perfectly good, if I can just get it right, then somehow in a feat of backwards time travel, everything bad that ever happened would undo itself. If you can just be good enough, no one will ever see your worst moments or know your shame, including you. The problem with good is that there is no middle ground. If you are not good, then you are bad, or horrible, or unlovable. You have to desperately cling to good in order not to fall into the abyss of bad. I’m not even sure that I can even do this dichotomy justice but I will try: Good is staying on that flimsy ladder over the crevasse on Mount Everest. Bad is falling off of the ladder.

I can get exhausted simply thinking about the many, many years of trying to get it all right. Living by so many rules always trying to be good. It was an endless and impossible task. And even now when I am tired or feeling lost or something triggers an old fear, I can find myself back in the fight to be good. Back in the place where that is all I want—to be good, to get it right.

The good news is (and it won’t feel like good news at first): At some point, if you let yourself begin to grow, good begins to crack. Growth is just too big for good. 

When good begins to crack --what protected you—the illusion of safety that good provides—is no longer there. There can be shame, because all of what you have tried to hide in the cupboards and drawers of good starts to come out in to the open. Sometimes it can crack all at once in a crisis and you can go from good to a disaster in one move which can oddly feel like a relief. But more often than not it happens in increments, in jerks and starts, and it mostly feels anything but good.

Good is an internal tornado and an external affair—you are working off an imagined external judge and jury, or as Anne Lamott once described—you are treating everyone in your life like a flight attendant trying to make all of the passengers happy.  But if you can tolerate this messiness. If you can tolerate the terror of being what you have been calling ‘bad.’ You can come to understand something crucial: good is a very, very small world.

It's an astonishing realization—when you come to see your world of ‘good’ is actually quite small. It makes you sit kind of blinking and squinting suddenly at your life—with the clarity of a new set of glasses, or a really bright light shining on the landscape ahead of you.

I had a dream not long ago that I was living in a house that I had lived in for years and I pushed open a door in a back room and found that there was actually an entire house that had been there all along. I had been living in this tiny space, and all along there had been this huge, expansive space to live in. In the dream, I stood in this doorway and stared into the space with both disbelief and sadness. It had been there all this time.

And that’s where you build the muscles to live without the old protections of good. You stay right there on that threshold—between the rooms of good that you used to inhabit--- the old, small, safe space—with your feet on the threshold of looking out into the new, unknown, expansive space that can hold it all. It’s been there all this time—waiting for you.

© 2023 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD