The Wretchedness Humbles Us and Softens Us

Got back from the hospital yesterday evening and all is well! The ablation was uneventful and successful and we are grateful. Thank you again for your kindness!

I am relieved to have nothing new to grieve this morning, as we examine that sometimes too familiar terrain.

I think I love Pema Chödrön’s work above all others when it comes to grief. She writes:

Can I touch the center of my pain? Can I sit with suffering, both yours and mine, without trying to make it go away? Can I stay present to the ache of loss or disgrace—disappointment in all its many forms—and let it open me?

This question—can it open me?—might be the most important one we can ask ourselves about grief, because always, underneath everything else, that’s what grief is: an invitation to be opened. The question is simply whether we can accept the invitation, or if we will build elaborate systems to protect ourselves from it.

Western culture can’t stand unresolved grief. We offer timelines and stages for grief as if it were a project to be completed, then we pathologize and medicalize it when it lasts too long. Chödrön’s writings suggest we pay a price for this avoidance:

When we protect ourselves so we won’t feel pain, that protection becomes like armor, like armor that imprisons the softness of the heart.

Ultimately, the armor we build against grief keeps us from the depth of feeling that makes sublime joy possible. That same armor also keeps us from the depth of feeling that makes art possible.

Mary Oliver opens her beloved poem, “Wild Geese,” with a string of imperative sentences that offer permission and relief:

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees / for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

I love her assurance that grief requires no performance or justification, and that we owe no penance for the losses we carry. The world goes on—the sun, the rain, the wild geese heading home. In “The Journey,” Oliver describes the moment when a person finally turns from the grief of abuse and begins the long walk toward their own truth. She writes of the voices shouting their bad advice, the wind prying at the foundation, and, finally, the determination to save “the only life you could save.”

She’s referring to our own life, of course.

Those of you who participated in last year’s intensive, The Joy & the Sorrow, where we studied the Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights, know that Gay has also written beautifully about grief and its relationship to delight. Gay says grief and joy are never fully separate—that the capacity for one is inseparable from the capacity for the other. Chödrön says something similar in a passages I return to again and again for its beauty and truth:

Life is glorious, but life is also wretched. It is both. The wretchedness humbles us and softens us.

So, today we give it a form outside the body, a form that can contain what the heart can’t carry any other way. The made thing holds the grief so we can look at it from a position outside of ourselves.

Chödrön writes:

The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.

Today we make something that makes room for this complexity.

Here’s a short video and a few words about the riches you’ll find here (and it’s a place to introduce yourselves, as well). With this Curriculum Index, you can check out all the things we have going on in our incredible archive of essays and writing exercises for any mood.

Right now, we’re smack in the middle of our 100 Days of Making & Writing Practice, Day 54, Dreams! It doesn’t matter if you start on Day 1, Day 12, Day 20, or right now with Day 54. I call each ten-day section a chapter, and we started Chapter Six—Making from Darkness—this week, with this introductory essay and invitation, but you can also explore the entire experience here in any order that suits your desire.

There is no right or wrong way to do this—every day is another chance to choose our own adventure. We’re just so, so glad you’re here!

Welcome, welcome!

Mark your calendars for our 100 Days of Making & Writing Community Zooms for us to come together, share snippets of the work, ask questions, and celebrate the creative synergy. I’ll send out Zoom links closer to the events—and you can always check the WITD calendar of events here, too, but, meanwhile, here are dates to mark:

Today I invite us to make something from grie, something real from a loss or a sorrow. The made thing can be a container for something otherwise uncontainable.

The thing about grief is that it always does its own work on its own schedule, and it rarely if ever