If you can’t remove yourself from life, what choice have you but to join with it? Love it. Love yourself. Love yourself enough to accept yourself. Love will transform normal, ordinary, life into extraordinary life. Loving exactly who you are and where you are in every moment is what will cause the transformation that will end your desire to remove yourself from life. All those frustrations you currently feel have a purpose: To move you through them and beyond them—to acceptance. D:Day8.2
After an annual school-break excursion with my family to the small river town of Red Wing, I came home in time to take my mom to church. It was another passage. I pulled up to the front of the church to walk her up the ramp instead of the steps she was able to climb the last time we attended Mass. The parking was uncharacteristically tight and ushers ran up to tell me I couldn’t stop there. I said, “I need to walk my mom in.” A young man rushed forward eagerly. “I’ll do it,” he said. I bent to help Mom out of the car. “Is that okay?” “I guess,” she said uncertainly. But the young man was so sweet that I thought it would be alright, and left her on his arm, parked the car, and returned. Then I looked for Mom in our usual spot and she wasn’t there. Finding her, I said, “You’re not in our usual spot!” She said, “It was too far to walk.”
And so, in such small ways, life changes again.
At home a few hours later, I worked on Red Wing pictures for two hours—pulled them into my editing program, cropped them, named them, and added them to a Red Wing Album. Then I went back and deleted the files I’d started with. But . . . they were deleted completely . . . gone from my camera, from the files showing on the computer, and from the editing program too. I couldn’t believe it. There were a couple of pictures that were so good. I still mourn that I’ll never see them again. This annual trip is half photo taking excursion. Each year we stand in the same places. I wailed inside. “My family counted on me to get these pictures. And they’re gone.” All that was left were 15 pictures that I hadn’t thought good enough to go into the album. The two on this page are from those, and still, I’m glad I have them.
It took me a while to reconcile this loss. To come to believe it had actually occurred. I wailed again, “They were irreplaceable!” I took the photo card out. Put it back in. Did file searches for 2015 and Red Wing. I thought I’d done all the right things. I felt buffaloed. I blamed it on the new Windows 10. I cursed and I stayed up way too late. I just did not want to accept that those pictures were gone!
I do not want to accept that my mom can hardly get to Mass anymore either.
The closing hymn of the Mass was “Lead Me, Guide Me.” I thought of it this morning as I came to write of my series of unfortunate events; as I came to my computer journal to lament.
The chorus goes like this:
Lead me, guide me along the way./For if you lead me I cannot stray./Lord let me walk each day with Thee./Lead me, oh Lord lead me. (by Doris Atkers)
I believe in lamenting. This hymn’s words are full of faith, but the sound of it is still one of lament. How else do you come to accept all those feelings and get all those feelings out of you? This has worked for me so many times that I can’t believe it has anything to do with going astray.
I’ve been pleased to see so many books recommending journaling your way through the rough patches of life. Books that say, Put it all out there unvarnished. Wail. Flail. Fling your words at the page. Don’t leave anything out. Don’t judge. Don’t get stuck in wondering why. Just get it out. Swear if you want to. Over many years I have found this process to be life-saving. A decade or more ago, my sister told me, “Once you write about something, you think it’s over.” She was talking of all the things I didn’t tell her, the private things that I didn’t share in conversation. I thought it was as true a statement as she’d ever said. Sometimes, when I push things out through writing, I am done with it. Whatever it was, and the charge of it, has left me. At other times, there is much more that needs to be done before the situation is resolved. Often I’ve been able to tell the difference, but at other times not.
In A Course of Love, Jesus calls this “moving through.” Whatever each of us need to do to move through the various situations of our lives and the feelings they instill, are essential to recognize, if sometimes slow to come into focus. Journal writing is sharing with myself. Other writing is sharing with others. At times, conversation and action are needed too. Many things—like the plight of an aging parent—or the misfortunes of technology—take both an internal and external engagement. Attention to a process of moving through can bring the sweet and uncomplicated acceptance of what is . . . a completion that can still be tinged with the poignancy of the heart’s aching desires.
The purpose of the final lessons are both unlearning and moving through unlearning to new learning. These lessons must be accomplished in life and require an engagement with life. This engagement is a promise, a commitment. It requires participation, involvement, attention, being present. C:24.4
I love this post, Mari, and thank you for it. When I get in tough spots it seems you have really summarized the path thru by normalizing it, giving permission to lament and not judge yourself, to express, – maybe to be “as a little child” -only conscious and accepting of yourself. I could really relate to your stories of your mom and the loss of the red wing photos. Perfect examples of the passionate engagement of life that lead us to ourselves if we don’t censor anything and dare to feel it all!
Oh, Mari, this post really moved me so deeply. Your posts pretty much always do, but this one held, again, such great personal resonance for me. I read it right after walking in the door from a family reunion weekend in my little hometown of Monroe, Georgia and an evening spent listening to my Dad’s stories. My dad and I keep saying we are each writing books, but mostly we end up telling each other stories…it was such a rich, poignant time for me, but also fraught with the pain of watching my stepmom Joan’s struggle with dementia. Moving through. It doesn’t seem like an oxymoron in terms of contradicting the notion of being present. I know the term isn’t strictly yours per se, but it also reminds me of Eliot’s still point, of that presence that holds acceptance at its heart and in so doing refuses to become bogged down and stuck in the stasis of despair and fear. I am struggling with that some but not as much as I might be, I think, without ACOL specifically. I thought too of this blog entry I wrote several years ago after deleting a beloved set of photos taken up on Fort Mountain here in Georgia. http://oldcoveroad.blogspot.com/2011/08/capture-and-witness.html
(Pardon the presumption of my adding that link, and feel free to ignore it. ) I felt oddly sanguine about that event, that ‘loss.’ Now I think about your photos and I do not think I would be at all sanguine about losing photos that were so connected to my family, to experiences shared with them. But it doesn’t feel like that sadness would be a ‘stuck’ or somehow unhelpful response to have, really, and not even contradictory to acceptance. Part of it, probably. This is speculation, of course, but it helps me think about how important it is not to hide from the sadness of being emotionally engaged and connected to my dad and stepmom. It comes back to my thoughts from earlier in the year, during Lent, about Heart and being broken open to vulnerability. I’m very grateful for how you help keep me present. It is quite a gift.
Laura, I love it that you shared your post of memory of a similar event. I want to include some of it here: photographs for me are gifts of spirit. They’re a collaboration between my eye and the world with its tenderness and its sternness. They’re not about capturing but about witnessing and being there to let something come through. This process isn’t about passivity or even just receptivity, though: I think one has to seek, or at least open up, in order to receive. But it can and for me should be a sort of prayer, even in the goofiest and most playful of moments. If I carry this sensibility with me then my photographs will do the same thing for me that animals can: ground me in the thisness of now in a way that will nurture and befriend the spirits who see them.
The funny thing is that my lament ended up getting my photos back. I was still emoting with some fervor the next day when my friend Mary came over for a cup of coffee. I was lamenting with my helplessness to do anything about the situation, and she said, “We can get them back.” She’s my techno whiz and she proceeded to do just that.
When I saw them again, I knew exactly why I’d felt as strongly as I did about them. There was one — one photo of my grandson Henry– that captured something of him that I’d never seen before. I was delighted to have them all back, but that one was what had made me heartsick. And so what you say about the spirit really spoke to me. There are other occasion on which I was doing photograph for the sweet adventure of discovery that I felt more as you describe–the collaboration and befriending. But I’m also aware that you and I also can, at times, capture the spirit “of”, which this photo felt to me to do.
I am moved by your beautiful writing and spirit. Thank you so much!
Christie, I am thrilled and comforted that you found something in this post, and of your likening it to being “as a little child.” One of the things I discovered in mothering was about always meeting a child where she or he is in the moment. Like…you don’t say, “Be a big girl” when your daughter comes in crying with a skinned knee or your son gets sick for the field trip day. First you embrace them as they are. “Then” you can move on. And I guess that is another way we could describe how we need to be with ourselves. Instead of trying to jump right to “being an adult” or whatever, we let ourselves be as we are. Thank you for that insight.
Dear sweet Mari, I simply love this! I’m discovering more and more it’s the business of living, engaging …participating in life that I come to know the depths of me.
Love you girl
Mary
Mary, I completely get this discovery that you’re experiencing through living and I love how you say it take you to your depths. You go girl!
It may not be a direct comment, but I experienced that first I get to be aware, to recognize, to admit; then there comes acceptance; then comes to welcome; and finally to love all that seems to show up. Things are placed or situated. And peace Is.
Love,
Jacques, what a beautiful description of of the movement to peace. Thank you.