Gold and Mud, and What I Mean by Kindness

Everything is within you, gold and mud, happiness and pain, the laughter of childhood and the apprehension of death. Say yes to everything, shirk nothing...You are a bird in the storm. Let it storm!" 

~ Hermann Hesse

During my gold year, I entered a process I metaphorically referred to as kintsugi, which refers to the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold. (You can read my musings on that process and how it can apply metaphorically to the inner life here.) And where I stand now, it really does feel like I've been repaired.

Another metaphorical process related to gold that I contemplated last year was chrysopoeia, which is what the ancient alchemists called the transmutation of base metals into gold. According to everyone's good friend, Wikipedia, this transmutation "symbolized [the alchemist's] evolution from ignorance to enlightenment."

(And then there's this perspective, which I also like.)

I certainly don't claim to be enlightened, but I do feel like a transmutation has happened within me. I have these moments, fairly often these days, in which I'm profoundly thankful for my life. I've come through some shitstorms in the past few years, but now my inner and outer landscapes are pretty clear. Not perfect, of course; I still find annoyances and worse in my outer landscape, and pettiness and worse in my inner landscape.

The real difference is that I've learned to give myself a break, and in doing so, have discovered that I love my life just as it is, both the mud and the gold.  The transmutation has resulted in, if not enlightenment, at least a certain kindness.  But the way I mean kindness here is not really in the conventional sense of being super nice and thoughtful and generous; I am definitely not always those things (and am even sort of suspicious of people who are). No, it's more like recognizing that everything is kindness, and simply receiving that.

But I'll leave you with this, because the poet Naomi Shihab Nye writes about it much more eloquently than I:

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

The Flower That Killed My Car

This morning, Jenny Stevning's post, because of its use of the word "enough" reminded me of a particular event in my life from a couple of summers ago. I was going to leave a comment summarizing this event, but as I began to do so, I went back so fully in my memory to this time, that I had to pull out what I wrote about it back then. Reading through it, I was overcome with emotion, since I have recently withdrawn myself from the relationship involved. And I see that it's somehow part of my healing to bring forth this writing. So here it is:

My boyfriend Justin and I are driving across coastal Texas in Henrietta, my maraschino red Ford Escort, who was named as a tip of the hat to Mr. Ford himself. We've been camping at Goose Island State Park and are now headed to Austin. As we cruise down quiet green Highway 35, the sun is just contemplating setting. Suddenly, Justin stops the car next to a tall golden field and wanders off into it. When he comes back, he hands me a huge bell-shaped flower, tissue-paper pink with a deep crimson center and little ridges running through the petals. You could easily imagine one of Cicely Mary Barker’s fairies living inside.

While I'm admiring this flower, Justin turns the ignition and a horrible grinding sound punches from the engine. We don't know it yet, but this is Henrietta's last word, not counting the pathetic gasp that occurs when Justin turns the key again. We momentarily enter that state of denial endemic to the first moments after a death. Henrietta has faithfully escorted me for ten years, over many miles and across many landscapes, never showing signs of illness. This is the equivalent of a major stroke.

We are between two tiny towns in rural Texas during dinnertime on a Saturday. There's no answer at the first towing company. I'm elated when a warm female voice greets me at the second. She assures us that someone will be sent, but from the larger town of Victoria a couple of dozen miles away, so it will take “a little while.”

I admit, I’m not great at dealing with little annoyances. They often seem a personal affront from a god with a mean sense of humor. But when larger obstacles come along, I tend to view them as meaningful, so I'm quick to accept them. Such it is with Henrietta’s death. Justin, however, doesn’t know this about me yet, and I can see him bracing himself for my grumpiness. But I hang the flower from the rearview mirror, dig a knife and perfectly ripe cantaloupe out of the back of the car, and turn on public radio. A show called Art of the Song is featuring a young musician named Meg Hutchinson. Justin and I slurp cantaloupe and listen to this delicious woman speak of her childhood in New England, of attending a little Waldorf school with a garden. How this school gave her “a sense of the interrelatedness of things.” She performs a piece called, “America Enough,” inspired by the notion that “anything taken to its extreme becomes its opposite.” The song is mellow and contemplative, and sends a quiet thrill upon my skin, as she sings:

If there's noise enough, it turns back to silence
If there's crowd enough, it turns back to solitude
If there's pain enough, it turns back to something almost bright...
If there's time enough, there's no such thing as an hour
If there's love enough, the rest of this won't even matter.

And I understand. There is love enough. Justin's face aglow, our flower and fruit, the field, the sunset, and the warm moist air. I am not waiting for anything. Sometimes being forced to stop is the only sweet relief from going on and on. Broken down becomes whole.

But...

It's Sunday now, auto shops closed. We're stuck in Victoria. On the Comfort Inn's lobby computer, I look up the flower that killed Henrietta:  it's a Swamp Rose Mallow. I discover at 2become1weddings.com that the meaning/sentiment of this flower is “Consumed by love.” I also learn that Pliny claimed, “Whosoever shall take a spoonful of the Mallows shall that day be free from all diseases that may come to him.” Well, apparently this magic does not extend to the next day, because yesterday's joy and wonder has shriveled like the flower still attached to poor Henrietta's rearview mirror.

I've learned that the feeling of doom is fleeting and illusory, but if indulged, will bring reality into its pathetic clutches. And so I do what I can to escape it, generally by changing the scenery, getting physically out of where I'm psychologically stuck. Even if it’s just sitting at the top of an outdoor stairwell at a Comfort Inn in a gulf coast thunderstorm, fifteen feet away from the room I share with my boyfriend, who I temporarily can’t stand because he’s chosen the Sci-Fi channel over adventure. Over me.

I'm considering a line from that song - If there's comfort enough, it turns back to sorrow. Last night, when we sat in our broken down car, plagued by humidity, mosquitoes, and ants, I was more comfortable than I am now, lodged in an air-conditioned room with a king-sized bed and cable. There were physical discomforts then, but they weren't important. We had a juicy cantaloupe and great radio. And each other. Now, only partially sheltered from the furious rain and earsplitting thunder, I find more fulfillment gazing over the soggy parking lot of the Comfort Inn than lounging on one of its cushy beds.

An old boyfriend once said I expect too much from daily life. It's true. I want moments of magical transcendence and communion to define my days. This is deeply connected to my desire to travel. In moving from place to place, everything is extraordinary, fluid, and thus primed for moments of transcendence. But just taking a trip is not enough. As Paulo Coelho has said, “God is always hiding hell in the middle of paradise.” Traveling with loved ones inevitably reveals roadblocks within the relationship, the self. And this is a special kind of hell because there are less channels of escape when you're sharing a small hotel room. The swings between transcendence and pettiness get closer together and more distinct. It's alarmingly easy somehow to go from sharing awe over a sunset to cold positioning on opposite sides of a king-sized bed.

After three tense days of coming to terms with Henrietta's demise, we board a bus home. The last leg of our journey is by train, and as I'm gazing out the window another train passes. The view becomes a rapid and chaotic alternation of train, landscape, train, landscape. And a voice inside me says: Don’t strain to see, just let it all pass before your eyes. Let it all be there, and all roll away. I think back over the past few days, about how in relationships, as in travel, it's necessary at times to give up the itinerary and creatively face roadblocks, seeing in them the opportunity to expand limits and face fears. What travel acutely offers is the opportunity to surrender to movement, accept and even embrace unpleasantness in the context of a larger joy. If there's love enough, the rest of this won't even matter. It suddenly hits me that this shift in perception is the true movement of travel.

I reach for the hand that picked the flower that killed my car.

Ghost Ranch Gathering: The Journey There

The open road leads into storm,

through mists and mysteries.

 

Rain patters on the windshield

as I peer into bluster.

 

Skyline rolls along,

 

into varied landscapes

and shifting skyscapes,

tilts and turns

as sun begins

to surface.

 

Through valleys of trees
in their autumn dresses

into canyons and

up and down hills,

on I journey
until I come into the heart
of the high desert.

I meander along
the gravel entrance road,
entranced.

I am
hushed,
beyond words
for this beauty
to which I have arrived.