The Guest House

Never in my life have I met anyone who felt music so intensely as my father. He could not help listening to it; when he heard music that pleased him he became excited and there was a contraction in his throat; he sobbed and shed tears. The feelings aroused in him were unreasoning emotion and excitement. Sometimes it excited him against his will and even tormented him, and he would say: que me veut cette musique? (what does that music want of me?)  - Tolstoy, C. S., & Maude, A. (1926). Music in Tolstoy’s Life. The Musical Times, 67(1000), 516–518.

A few weeks ago, while circling the driveway of an elementary school, I received a directive from an old friend via text: listen for nostalgia. Another bell tone followed, delivering a link to an interview about a song I had nearly forgotten in the decade since I last heard it. I am not in the habit of listening to music podcasts. Rarely have I memorized lyrics or researched the story behind a song, believing instead in the primacy of learning a song by heart, through its melodic currents and timbre. But I can understand Tolstoy’s question what does that music want of me? If I find myself intrigued by a song, I like to get quiet and listen with my whole body, and then return again and again until the song becomes a friend and I notice myself asking strange questions like what’s happening here? and why does this feel meaningful to me?

I first heard the song “The District Sleeps Alone Tonight” as a freshman in college. It opens with three incantatory notes from a synthesized organ (C, Dm, Am) and then begins to layer disarmingly self-conscious lyrics, smeared black ink, your palms are sweaty, I’m barely listening, swelling into a melodious revelation: I am finally seeing why I was the one worth leaving. The bridge repeatedly chimes where I am, where I am, offering a gentle allowance to accept where we are and have been.

For those of us for whom Washington, DC in the early 2000s was not just a city but the proving ground of our relational lives, “The District Sleeps Alone Tonight” touched a relatable quality of loneliness, an effervescent tension between wanting to sense our worthiness and dignity on one hand, and the public absurdities and private regrets that are emblematic of a certain chapter of life on the other.  

From Hrishikesh Hirway’s recently remastered interview with Jimmy Tamborello and Ben Gibbard, the unlikely halves of an indie-electronic duo called The Postal Service, I learned some informative details. Their collaboration began at the fringes of their early twenties, when, living in different cities, broke, and barely acquainted, they began mailing fragments of songs back and forth to each other. Fresh musical layers were decanted in the days between sending and receiving them. Gibbard would walk through his neighborhood at night listening to that day’s delivery through wire headphones; his mind would slide around with Tamborello’s instrumentals until an unexpected image or memory would emerge; then he would pull a notebook out of his pocket and start scribbling. It was a faithful process. They asked another acquaintance, Jenny Lewis, to contribute harmonies, and, after some months, they christened their first and only album Give Up.

Give Up was a good one, as it turned out. It is considered a landmark album for its unique fusion of indie-rock and electronic elements; to the artists’ surprise, it sold more than a million records. Warm vocals stream above experimental sounds in what Tamborello and Gibbard dubbed an “80’s electro-pop revival record.” Even now, the songs feel at once familiar and yet serendipitous. We sense two artists on their way somewhere else, but just available enough to slip into a creative portal meant just for them.

Of the album’s first song, Gibbard explains that his first love had left him to pursue a job in Washington, DC. A few months later, he was passing through on tour with Death Cab for Cutie. It felt strange to be in the vicinity of her new life, so they arranged a reunion at the venue before the show. The sweaty palms were hers; the smeared black ink, a list of grievances she had inscribed on her skin earlier that day lest she forget one in the bewilderment of the moment. Her confidence was foam, easily dissolving into anxiety, and her yearning was thick with the conviction that some mutual ground could be found, something taken could be given back.

I remember the cathartic resonance of chanting I was the one worth leaving with a hundred strangers at The Black Cat in the Spring of 2003. I did not know then about the girl who had stood outside the entrance, heart blazing, nor about the boy’s shifty discomfort as ticket holders passed them — I’m staring at the asphalt wondering what’s buried underneath. And yet I did know the girl. I understood her longing to be heard and her futile bids for validation. And I knew the boy, his disassociation, his numbing. We recognized some part of ourselves in their awkward grappling as we had all, in one ragged moment or another, subjected our hearts to over-exposure or barely listened for fear of what would spill over.

The experience of certain feelings can seem particularly pregnant with desire for resolution: loneliness, boredom, anxiety. Unless we can relax with these feelings, it’s very hard to stay in the middle when we experience them. We want victory or defeat, praise or blame. For example, if somebody abandons us, we don’t want to be with that raw discomfort. Instead, we conjure up a familiar identity of ourselves as a hapless victim. Or maybe we avoid the rawness by acting out and righteously telling the person how messed up he or she is. We automatically want to cover over the pain in one way or another, identifying with victory or victimhood.

 – Pema Chodron, “Pema Chodron’s Six Kinds of Loneliness”

February is advertised for romance – but love is not a narrow teacher. No matter our age or stage of life, we want to believe in our worthiness to be met. We have all failed at one time or another to meet another. The stories we have told ourselves are not special, yet they merit our healing attention. Rather than narrowing our treatment of love, rather than setting ourselves up for disappointment on the axis of praise or blame or any of the worldly winds, could we reframe loneliness as an invitation to a more generous and wakeful experience of love?

Beloved Buddhist nun and teacher, Pema Chodron, distinguishes hot loneliness: restless and angsty and pregnant with the desire for resolution; from cool loneliness: an awareness of the groundlessness of life wherein we can observe fear-based patterns without stumbling headlong into them. She explores six facets of cool loneliness that, when integrated through practice over time, amount to a revolution in dignified steadiness, a middle way of presence between the traps of grasping and avoidance. They are “less desire,” or the willingness to be lonely without grasping for a fix – as the Zen master Katagirir Roshi often said, “One can be lonely and not be tossed away by it;” “contentment,” a synonym for accepting the texture of the moment as it is rather than grasping to quell the discomfort; “avoiding unnecessary activities,” an invitation to quit flailing around to escape being with ourselves; “complete discipline,” a willingness to come back again and again, naming and noting and bowing to the profound insolvability of life and our place in it; “not wandering the world of desire,” which is an acknowledgment of false refuge and an invitation to cultivate sobriety in our thoughts and actions; and “not seeking security from one’s discursive thoughts,” an antidote to the subtle ways we measure ourselves against self-inflicted and perceived expectations.  

Let’s be kind, we must remind ourselves, for this is the work of lifetimes. The word “nostalgia” is from the Greek compound nostos (meaning ‘return home’) and algos (meaning ‘pain’). Some memories become eddies; once recalled, we can swirl to make meaning of them. The ache of an unfinished conversation can baffle us not for what happened then, which matters little now, but for what it can reveal about the maturation of love. For we are seekers – we study consciousness through its prisms of knowing and not knowing, of forgetting and remembering. When our attention migrates back to a place where we have surprised, disappointed, or even harmed ourselves, it is calling us to recognize and befriend the hidden forces within us that are subject to swirl in the first place.

~~~

In closing, a small prompt for your consideration: what is a song or a poem or a piece of art or a scene from a movie that stirs your heart to deeper inquiry? What about it draws you closer? Where in your memory does it lead, and how can you more lovingly make sense of or relate to those memories now? What does that music want of you?

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My guest today is Leigh Marz. Leigh is an author, leadership coach, and collaboration consultant. She’s led diverse initiatives, including a training program to promote an experimental mindset among multi-generational teams at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and a decade-long cross-sector collaboration to reduce toxic chemicals in partnership with the Green Science Policy Institute, Harvard University, IKEA, Google Green Team, Kaiser Permanente, and many others. 

Most notably for today’s conversation, Leigh is the author, along with her co-author Justin Zorn, of Golden: The Power of Silence in a World of Noise, published by HarperCollins and now being translated into 13 languages. 

Resource Links:

* Find Golden: The Power of Silence in a World of Noise at HarperCollins, Amazon, Bookshop, or anywhere you buy books.

* Pre-order the Golden paperback on Amazon.

* Listen to the Golden audiobook on Audible, read by Prentice Onayemi.

* Foreign publications are available in the UK/Commonwealth, Italy, Portugal, Brazil, Spain, Germany, Slovakia, Japan, The Netherlands, Korea, Russia, Poland, China, and Denmark.

* Visit Leigh and Jason’s website at astreastrategies.com for articles, podcasts, and media coverage tailored to specific audiences such as business, health & wellness, politics, and more.

* Connect with Leigh on LinkedIn @leigh-marz or through her website at leighmarz.com.

* Follow Jarvis through his website, freejarvis.org for information and updates on his case and current appeal.

* Sign the petition to free Jarvis Jay Masters - join the group of over 10k individuals speaking up for Justice for Jarvis.

* Check out Jarvis’ books Finding Freedom: How Death Row Broke and Opened My Heart and Oprah’s book club pick, That Bird Has My Wings: The Autobiography of an Innocent Man on Death Row.  

* Subscribe to The Guest House on Substack for regular essays, podcast episodes, and more.

* ShawnParell.com - Check out Shawn's website to learn more about her work and upcoming events.

* Stay connected with Shawn and join for live sits on Instagram @ShawnParell for live weekly meditations and prompts for practice.

Brene Brown wrapped the term “midlove” around herself like a blanket in her forties. The famous shame researcher rebranded this psychological classic in an essay called “The Midlife Unraveling,” in which she described the nearly universal longing for alignment that accompanies waves of realization of our impermanence at a certain stage of life. Here, she characterizes the tension between the responsible bearings of adulthood and the radical impulse toward authenticity that can emerge as we begin to grok our humble status before time.

We go to work and unload the dishwasher and love our families and get our hair cut. Everything looks pretty normal on the outside. But on the inside we’re barely holding it together. We want to reach out, but judgment (the currency of the midlife realm) holds us back. It’s a terrible case of cognitive dissonance—the psychologically painful process of trying to hold two competing truths in a mind that was engineered to constantly reduce conflict and minimize dissension (e.g., I’m falling apart and need to slow down and ask for help. Only needy, flaky, unstable people fall apart and ask for help).

It’s human nature and brain biology to do whatever it takes to resolve cognitive dissonance—lie, cheat, rationalize, justify, ignore. For most of us, this is where our expertise in managing perception bites us on the ass. We are torn between desperately wanting everyone to see our struggle so that we can stop pretending and desperately doing whatever it takes to make sure no one ever sees anything except what we’ve edited and approved for posting.

What bubbles up from this internal turmoil is fantasy. We might glance over at a cheap motel while we’re driving down the highway and think, I’ll just check in and stay there until they come looking for me. Then they’ll know I’m losing my mind. Or maybe we’re standing in the kitchen unloading the dishwasher when we suddenly find ourselves holding up a glass and wondering, Would my family take this struggle more seriously if I just started hurling all this s**t through the window?

Most of us opt out of these choices. We’d have to arrange to let the dog out and have the kids picked up before we checked into the lonely roadside motel. We’d spend hours cleaning up glass and apologizing for our “bad choices” to our temper tantrum–prone toddlers. It just wouldn’t be worth it, so most of us just push through until “losing it” is no longer a voluntary fantasy.

Most women can relate to a secret glimpse of these thoughts, standing at the dishwasher and wondering how they got there, deliberating what to do about it, and then concluding in a repressively closed loop that self-sabotage might not be worth the trouble. Such inner dialogue could burn down the house. But it can also find healthy integration if we can befriend the survival instincts within us that are pointing us toward deeper congruence.

In a recent interview, Brooke Estin, a creative recovery coach, said “So many people come to me because they built the thing, and now they kind of hate the thing.” It’s particularly complex when we don’t hate the thing, but sincerely and profoundly love the thing. The kids, the partner, the dog — the life that we have painstakingly authored over decades. The life that is also a source of unspeakable joy. But we’re passing through a threshold now and a compass deep within us is asserting itself, mandating that we refine course maybe just by a few degrees. We are crossing the equator, pollywogs becoming shellbacks. We are way-finding now.

I have a feeling that my boathas struck, down there in the depths,against a great thing.

And nothinghappens!Nothing . . . Silence . . . Waves . . .

– Nothing happens?Or has everything happened,and are we standing now, quietly, in the new life?

-Juan Ramon Jimenez, “Oceans”

Today is my 40th birthday. I’m writing these words in the indigo hours of a new decade, in the company of a single source of candlelight. Not much will change between yesterday and today; I’m grateful for loving reflections from family and friends. And yet, in this expansive silence, I sense a rippling — some presence in the depths, a quiet stirring.

A threshold birthday can tune our awareness to read the signs. What is stirring within me? What wants to be met or reclaimed? What are my senses reporting? At first, our hearts might feel bewildered by the distance between the energetic blueprint of our spirit and its current iteration. We may have to grieve while paddling if we find ourselves having veered far from our intended course. But simple tacks carve change over time. With a rendering of midlove that includes patience, steadiness, courage, confidence, and intuition, we can firm ourselves on the path that is ours alone.

FREE for The Guest House subscribers - Brooke’s digital class, Unlocking Creativity for Wellness.

Brooke is a certified brand strategist. She's a TED speaker. She's an artist, a designer, and host of the podcast The Art of Lost and Found. She also founded the internationally sought-after design studio called I Know A Gal.

Brooke describes herself as a Creative Amplifier. Her genius zone is in helping people unblock their creative energy and channel it strategically. In addition to working with social entrepreneurs, coaches, freelancers, and artists, Brooke has also worked with all of the globally recognized big logos like Google, TED, Disney, etc. The list goes on.

I'm so happy to have Brooke with us here today at The Guest House. I have worked with Brooke personally and I don't know that The Guest House would exist or at least that I would feel as supported in taking creative risks in my life at this point were it not for the support, the ushering, the therapizing that Brooke has brought to my life in over the past year or so of us working together.

So I'm excited and I'm grateful to share our conversation with everybody who's listening.

Resource Links:

* Brookeestin.com - Learn more about Brooke and how to work with her.

* iknowagal.co - Check out Brooke's studio for transformational website design.

* Connect with Brooke on Instagram at @BrookeEstin.

* Or follow her on Linkedin.

* Curious about Brooke's podcast, The Art of Lost and Found? Listen at https://brookeestin.com/podcast.

* Subscribe to The Guest House on Substack for regular essays, podcast episodes, and more.

* ShawnParell.com - Check out Shawn's website to learn more about her work and upcoming events.

* Stay connected with Shawn and join for live sits on Instagram @ShawnParell for live weekly meditations and prompts for practice.

Of the many invitations for mindful self-improvement that landed in my inbox at the turn of the year, one piqued my interest — a daily sensory incantation from . The instructions are simple: set a timer for five minutes and record, without interruption and preferably with pen and paper, “close, meticulous, external” notes on your immediate surroundings. No interpretations, no personal commentary, no embellishments allowed.

Now here’s the twist —

Once the timer goes off, look over your fragments and find the five that are the most interesting, the most unique, the most jagged, the strangest. Imagine the paper is on fire and you can save only five fragments before it burns. Put a star by those. Now, read them out loud with the words “I am” in front of them (I am the morning light on the carpet, I am footsteps on the porch, I am rain splattering on the window, I am a baby crying).

The primary aim of this practice is to translate sensory impressions of the particular onto the page. But it also points to a deeper incantation of ourselves as dynamic, mosaic creatures. It’s a nod to the irreducible reality of who we are.

Authenticity is a worthwhile study in this strange new world. Consumer research points to a longing for sincere human connection. Skepticism of the public arena is at an all-time high while our private lives have frayed from isolation and siloing, resulting in a degrading mistrust of those we identify as other.

We are a culture sick of being sold and challenged to assess what’s vital and honest behind everything and everyone we encounter. 

But what exactly is authenticity? Among researchers, it’s a debated concept. Back in 2000, psychologists Michael Kernis and Brian Goldman distilled decades of scholarly work into a roadmap Authenticity Inventory. Their research landed on authenticity as “the unimpeded operation of one’s core or true self in one’s daily enterprise” as operationalized by four contributing factors: awareness, distortion-free (or unbiased) mental processing, ways of behaving, and relational orientation.  

Despite the bumper sticker platitudes of pseudo-spirituality — follow your bliss! Speak your truth! You do you! — an important caveat about “relational orientation” must be made: authenticity is not an unalloyed good. If the goal were for everyone to express absolute congruence between their outer behavior and whatever developmental, psychological, and circumstantial access they might have to their “core or true self” at the current moment — well, God help us. Let’s keep our most primal, unfiltered instincts and perspectives to ourselves, thank you very much.

In my clinical training as a therapist, I often turned to the research of Brene Brown, who famously explores the emotions that make us human. Brown speaks here about authenticity as radical participation in our felt experience of life.

“Authenticity is the daily practice of letting go of who we think we’re supposed to be and embracing who we are. Choosing authenticity means cultivating the courage to be imperfect, to set boundaries, and to allow ourselves to be vulnerable; exercising the compassion that comes from knowing that we are all made of strength and struggle; and nurturing the connection and sense of belonging that can only happen when we believe that we are enough. Authenticity demands Wholehearted living and loving—even when it’s hard, even when we’re wrestling with the shame and fear of not being good enough, and especially when the joy is so intense that we’re afraid to let ourselves feel it. Mindfully practicing authenticity during our most soul-searching struggles is how we invite grace, joy, and gratitude into our lives.”

― Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are

Brene’s words feel germane to the creative frontier on which many of us stand. Perhaps this is because being ourselves is an antidote to the erosive superficiality of our times; sorely, obviously needed, and yet too often relegated only to the safest harbors of our emotional lives. We feel orphaned from a sense of moral and social belonging. Yet authenticity remains among our most formidable teachers, demanding steadfast discipline, the maturation of vulnerability, courage, and forgiveness, and the grace of our mutual wholeheartedness. 

Many years ago, in the first season of our relationship, in an outstretched moment of indecision on my part, my now-husband, exasperated, exclaimed: “Will you please just say what you want to do?” I was startled by his question, even agitated. After a relatively successful launch into adulthood (I had a real job, after all), the truth was I had no idea what to do with an un-pressured Sunday afternoon and a considerate man asking about my desires. 

Knowing ourselves, much less being and expressing ourselves, is not our default. It hasn’t been since we were very young. To study the origins of our estrangement, we begin with a tender revisit to that young part within us for whom the existence of magic was disproven. We review how our innate experience of wonder was truncated by loss, trauma, or neglect — or simply by the systematic message of our too-muchness. 

In a gradual and largely subconscious process, we learn to prune the unique signature of ourselves. First, we sense our social context. Then, we compartmentalize and subjugate the parts of ourselves we internalize as undesirable. We become adept at making bids for approval (a process of influencing others’ perceptions that sociologist Erving Goffman aptly coined “impression management”). Over time, the Edenic qualities that might otherwise have ushered us into authentic expression dry up on the stalk, and we abandon the luminous wholeness with which we arrived.

In other words, we adapt. It seems a matter of survival. A pleased teacher or parent, a nod from a boss, a compliment from a new acquaintance – any small gesture of allegiance can make us feel secure and optimal. Our nervous systems seem to approve of preserving and promoting only those parts that the world deems worthy of praise. Perfectionist values become our unacknowledged norm, subtly affirmed by those who groom us into adulthood.

Underground go the needier parts, the messier parts — the brilliant, irreducible parts. 

“The only antidote to perfectionism is to turn away from every whiff of plastic and gloss and follow our grief, pursue our imperfections, and exaggerate our eccentricities until the things we once sought to hide reveal themselves as our majesty.”

― Toko-pa Turner, Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home

Self-exile serves us for a while. We become palatable and productive and we reap the benefits. Eventually, though, those long-forgotten, chthonic parts begin to emerge. By some subconscious hand, they are unearthed and delivered like a pile of soiled bones to the back porch in early Spring.

[I recently spoke with poet about revelation through a geologic lens.]

We begin to test and taste the tin of our words and all we’ve left unspoken and feel the fatigue of triangulating around our native energies and desires. We realize the irony of shaping ourselves around implicit expectations only to earn enough caché to be ourselves. We recognize the limits of pleasing others as a currency of well-being, suffer the grief of inner scarcity, and feel the shame of chronic self-abandonment — and, ultimately, we feel our hunger for the true and holy gravity of belonging. 

“…The bud

stands for all things,

even for those things that don’t flower,

for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;

though sometimes it is necessary

to reteach a thing its loveliness,

to put a hand on its brow

of the flower

and retell it in words and in touch

it is lovely

until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing.”

― Galway Kinnell, “Saint Francis and the Sow”

Sometimes it’s necessary to re-teach a thing its loveliness. It took years for my nervous system to relax enough to perceive my instincts for a Sunday afternoon. A slow cup of tea, a hike with my family, a cooking project, listening to Nina Simone while organizing a pantry… It took a gradual incantation of myself to myself and to those who cared enough to keep asking, season after season.

Coming home to ourselves is a dedicated practice with the promise of profound alignment and personal agency. Classical yoga philosophy offers svādhyāya (a compound Sanskrit word composed of sva (स्व) "own, one's own, self, the human soul" + adhyāya (अध्याय) "a lesson, lecture, chapter; reading") as the fundamental study of our unmasking. It’s a gradual process of yoking back to our most integrated, dynamic whole.

“You see, I want a lot.

Perhaps I want everything

the darkness that comes with every infinite fall

and the shivering blaze of every step up.

So many live on and want nothing

And are raised to the rank of prince

By the slippery ease of their light judgments

But what you love to see are faces

that do work and feel thirst.

You love most of all those who need you

as they need a crowbar or a hoe.

You have not grown old, and it is not too late

To dive into your increasing depths

where life calmly gives out its own secret.”

― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

Authenticity is an essential kind of remembering. It’s the art of coiling our attention inwardly, through layers of anxiety, fear, and shame, to the shelter of our original ownership. 

To author our way home, to make a song of this being human, first, we get in touch with our want to be ourselves – “to dive into [our] increasing depths.” Then, we commit our oar to the waters of radical self-honesty and become an authority on the subject of rowing against the current of our conditioning. We nurture ourselves courageously through the many mistakes and missteps along the way, making regular visits to the dirt altar of a forgiving heart. 

“Anyhow, the older I get, the less impressed I become with originality. These days, I’m far more moved by authenticity. Attempts at originality can often feel forced and precious, but authenticity has quiet resonance that never fails to stir me.”

― Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

Authenticity has a quiet resonance that never fails. We feel safest with those who are themselves in our company. Those rare friends who “need [us] as they need a crowbar or a hoe,” who reflect to us our worthiness to be beholden, become our particular kin. Gradually, like St. Francis’ sow, we relearn the distinct manner of our loveliness. And thus, the life that’s here can once again become a refuge of belonging.

Today —

[I am] freckles sprayed across an aging hand.

[I am] the long-bodied breath of a sleeping dog.

[I am] the small animal rustling in the arroyo.

[I am] steam rising from a mug.

[I am] the thick leaves of a fig in a clay pot.

To the New Year

With what stillness at last

you appear in the valley

your first sunlight reaching down

to touch the tips of a few

high leaves that do not stir

as though they had not noticed

and did not know you at all

then the voice of a dove calls

from far away in itself

to the hush of the morning

so this is the sound of you

here and now whether or not

anyone hears it this is

where we have come with our age

our knowledge such as it is

and our hopes such as they are

invisible before us

untouched and still possible

- W. S. Merwin, “To the New Year” from Present Company 

What is the sound of a New Year arriving? For some, it may be the willful crack of a firework or the click of the minute hand. The whisper of a beloved in one’s sleeping ear. In W.S. Merwin’s poem “To the New Year," sunrise touches the tips of a few high leaves, and distant birdsong is heard. This quiet renewal, the lightest touch of a blessing, stirs the poet's senses— so this is the sound of you — and beckons us, the reader, to listen more closely. 

In the southernmost part of the Caribbean, on the island of Grenada, there is an overlook I like to visit at dusk: a rugged, unnamed cliff at the top of a grassy hill from which the ocean expands into a circular horizon. 

This is a place one might imagine is hers alone, a place to commune with water, earth, air, and sunlight. Climbing the hill, I find my attention thickening, my pace gradually slowing to the point where someone might come along and find me standing still, un-noticing of their presence. 

Being suspended between worlds is familiar to me. Among my siblings, I was notoriously difficult to pull away from imaginative play or an absorbing book. My children joke “Wake up, Mommy!” when they find me staring into the middle distance. My closest people are accustomed to my non-sequiturs and kindly allow for stone-skipping conversation. 

You see, there’s the front edge of being here — our feet on the ground, present and accounted for. And then there’s the unnamed expanse that speaks through dreams and intuition, the inarticulate, emergent knowing to which we also belong. This is the background into which Merwin listens for the sound of nature’s arrival in a New Year, “here and now whether or not anyone hears it.” These are Robert Frost’s woods, which he refers to only as “lovely, dark, and deep.” 

Shifting the lens from background to foreground, foreground to background, we are not lost, but refreshing our focus. A friend who speaks the language of computer programming offers the technical term for this: context-switching. We are sensing our way between worlds, cultivating an integrative awareness.

To this, Rumi says “The only real rest comes when you’re alone with God. Live in the nowhere that you came from, even though you have an address here.”

The passing of one year into the next can be an integrative threshold, a place of unspooling and re-spooling the thread that we follow. We are among the fortunate ones who have returned to where we began a year ago, and a year before that, and so on around the spiral — newly endowed with the green-tipped growth and thickening ring of four more human seasons.

We’ve arrived here before, but never with these present circumstances, never with this specific configuration of consciousness. What will we do with it? We are moving from a year that has been, laid bare for review, and a year that will be, revealed as yet only through trajectory and imagination.

This time of year the light returns across a slant of shallow sky, so gradually, almost imperceptibly — who would fault us for not noticing? Dr. Seuss said sometimes we never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory.

But we do have a choice. We can get quiet enough to listen.

What I wish for you is this: listen at the threshold of this New Year. Avoid the overwhelm of a rap sheet of measurable resolutions, and instead open to whatever within is asking for your benevolent attendance. Soften your vigilance and invite your attention to migrate from foreground to background — which is to say, make room for your inner life, from which a single word or theme might just emerge as your compass. If you journal only once a year, let today be your day. For age and knowledge may be as they are but hope is “still invisible before us, untouched and possible.” May you find yourself arriving on higher ground.

Dear one —

Your message arrived this morning as we were dragging the tree to the curb and packing suitcases in the trunk. Now at 35,000 feet, as is often the case when I am among the clouds, I find myself reflecting on your words. 

What you meant about feeling heavy-hearted and adrift, I understand. Feelings are rarely single-noted, and our mandate is to bear witness in this paradoxical season. Who has real answers? Reality is as it is and what we can do, palms turned upward, is ask what Love wants of us.

I read how Bethlehem was closed for Christmas this year. Hauntingly, the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church placed its nativity scene beneath the rubble.

A memory from more than a decade ago articulates itself more clearly to me now. I’m in the West Bank, among the limestone hills just South of Jerusalem, with the ostensible purpose of training mindfulness teachers who serve in refugee camps. 

A friend brings me to Bethlehem from Ramallah to visit the Church of the Nativity, built above the site where Jesus is believed to have been born. As we pass through checkpoints along the way, I reflect on how today everything seems so dangerously close here. But it must have seemed a great distance for a Jewish family from Nazareth, more than 70 miles from Bethlehem, to be summoned for a census two thousand years ago. For a woman so close to giving birth.

My friend is Muslim and wraps her days in prayer. Our visit is her suggestion. After all, the Church of the Nativity’s original structure was built in the 4th century, making it the oldest pilgrimage site in the Christian tradition.

Admittedly, I agree to go in deference to her kindness. I don’t identify as Christian; in fact, I’m less and less interested in any particular identity. Despite singing in the choir and serving as an acolyte throughout my childhood, I associate Christianity with secular tradition and a complicated historical inheritance.

Meanwhile, over the years I’ve found my way to contemplative practice and the poetry of the mystics. Here’s 12th century Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi speaking of the caravan of all religion —

My heart wears all forms:

For gazelles it is an open field,for monks a cloister.

      It is a temple for idols,      and for pilgrims the Ka’ba.

            It is the Torah’s tablets            and the pages of the Quran.

Love is the faith I follow.

Whichever path Love’s caravan takes,      that is my road and my religion.

Dear, do you remember how the Upanishads describe the heart as hridaya guhā, a cave of hidden wonder? We’ve spoken of how one must step inside with a lowered head. How one’s eyes must adjust to the dim, warm light.

Of what this memory shows me now, of what it meant to descend the worn stone stairs and step into the grotto beneath the pews, to touch the inlaid silver star that millions have touched before , I can say only this: I felt an ancient peace.

Do what you can to light your lamp this week between the years. Make simple gestures of reconciliation. Take heart wherever you can. I’ll leave you for now with Rilke — anther mystic, another century, another adherent to the original religion of Love.

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,go to the limits of your longing.Embody me.

Flare up like a flameand make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.Just keep going. No feeling is final.Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

- Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Hours, I 59, translated by Joanna Macy

David Keplinger is the distinguished author of eight collections of poetry — including his most recent book, Ice. He has received prestigious awards throughout his career and was honored as Scholar-Teacher of the Year in 2022 at American University in Washington, DC, where he has taught since 2007. He's also a dear friend and the only person I imagined featuring on this, our first podcast episode at The Guest House. Sitting together in David's study, we discuss the revelatory nature of memory and how poetry and mindfulness as spiritual practices can help us explore our place in the layered history of this spinning Earth.

Resource Links:

* Davidkeplingerpoetry.com - Learn more about David, his poetry collections, workshops, and more on his website.

* The Mindfulness Initiative - Participate for free in live, guided meditations with David in collaboration with American University’s Department of Literature and The College of Arts and Sciences.

* Ice - Purchase a copy of Ice, the collection of poems we explore in this episode.

* Subscribe to The Guest House on Substack for regular essays, podcast episodes, and more.

* ShawnParell.com - Check out Shawn's website to learn more about her work and upcoming events.

* Stay connected with Shawn and join for live sits on Instagram @ShawnParell for live weekly meditations and prompts for practice.

I’ve decided in recent years that waking up before dawn is the most practical thing I can do.

When the morning is at its deepest, my mind at its most liminal, my children’s soft bodies still tucked warmly beneath their blankets, I can slip into the wilderness of an unobserved inner communion for a while.

I’m careful not to overlay this practice with too much prescription, especially as the days spiral inward on themselves with the approach of Winter Solstice. Each morning is its own creative act. What I want, simply, is to listen. To enter a silence from which some giving presence may emerge.

I may sit for a timeless hour, journaling small bits as I go. That’s a good morning. Often, my tea has just steeped when the sound of little feet scampering down the hallway arrives to announce the day. Mine is a practice of allowing life to flow in while maintaining an inner gaze — for this is my life, multi-hyphenated and brimming with kids still young enough to want my company.

Brene Brown wrote about midlife in this way: “You can’t cure the midlife unraveling with control any more than the acquisitions, accomplishments, and alpha-parenting of our thirties cured our deep longing for permission to slow down and be imperfect.” Straddled between my thirties and forties, I resonate with both the longing for permission and the sentiment of unraveling. As artists and contemplative practitioners, as human beings, we must claim the ground that offers itself to us at any stage of life. In some moments, like after a baby is born or when our professional or relational demands are completely overflowing, our sense of self-nurturance might seem fully buried. But even a longing remembrance of those hibernating parts is a kind of attention to our wellbeing.

To everything, there is a season. This week, backlit by the arrival of December, unanswered emails blared from the inbox of my closed computer. I could find no respite from the checklist scrolling through my head. There were the food drives, the winter showcase, the holiday markets, potlucks, and travel arrangements — plus all the gifts that had to be afforded, acquired, and organized. Plus, I was nursing a sinus infection.

These are signs of a bustling communal life, endowed with celebration. A life I love. ‘Tis the season, I remind myself. You can do it, I remind myself.

But I’ve come to suspect that many of us, especially parents and introverts, my primary camps, privately hang on by a thread through the holidays. There’s so much to do before year’s end. So many loose ends to tie up. “You can tell a lot about a person by the way they handle three things: a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights,” wrote Maya Angelou. For those who celebrate the religious holidays this month American-style, the mandate is to spend, deck, wrap, tinsel, carol, swap, bake, hustle, and repeat. Time can feel like a horse breaking for the barn as momentum builds toward the end of the year — with us, heels clenched in stirrups, its anxious riders.

Thoreau wrote, “In Winter, warmth stands for all virtue.” For all the wisdom in retreating to the hearth as the darkness deepens, our curious cultural instinct is to push and grasp, to cram all the nooks and crannies of the month with consumerism and acquaintanceship. Our commonplace addictions can become more pronounced, luring us into the false solace of empty carbs and agitating the spirit. Loosely considered resolutions tend not to extend beyond the halo of the disco ball, if we attempt them at all. The New Year arrives with its promise of renewal, and we show up for it with meager provisions… in the words of Hunter S. Thompson, “thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a Ride!”

Our approach to December might offer insight if we consider what we are unconsciously and collectively avoiding. Solstice is Nature’s annual sermon on death and rebirth, on darkness and light. The season challenges our senses to recognize the beauty of barren trees and frozen ground — and the tenderness that can be found deep within sorrow.

“There is a slumbering subterranean fire in nature which never goes out, and which no cold can chill. …This subterranean fire has its altar in each man's breast; for in the coldest day, and on the bleakest hill, the traveler cherishes a warmer fire within the folds of his cloak than is kindled on any hearth. A healthy man, indeed, is the complement of the seasons, and in winter, summer is in his heart.”

-Henry David Thoreau, “A Winter Walk”

There is a hearth that can only be accessed if we give ourselves permission to feel the sadness that is intrinsic to this human season. It’s the warmth Thoreau points to at the altar of the heart, the joy of Joni Mitchell wishing for a river she could skate away on. It’s not the most! wonderful! time! of the year! but the comfort of deep and abiding presence.

If you haven’t yet read ‘s Wintering, take yourself to the local bookshop and then prepare to curl up on your sofa for the long haul. She illuminates the lessons of the cold and dark, gifting us a roadmap for the season.

“I recognized winter. I saw it coming (a mile off, since you ask), and I looked it in the eye. I greeted it and let it in. I had some tricks up my sleeve, you see. I've learned them the hard way. When I started feeling the drag of winter, I began to treat myself like a favored child: with kindness and love. I assumed my needs were reasonable and that my feelings were signals of something important. I kept myself well fed and made sure I was getting enough sleep. I took myself for walks in the fresh air and spent time doing things that soothed me. I asked myself: What is this winter all about? I asked myself: What change is coming?

― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

We can slow down and give ourselves permission to relate to this unraveling season more meaningfully. If we treat ourselves with respect and understanding, if we nurture down to the nadir, then Winter can provide us the conditions to meet our sorrows and avoidances with a bow of inquiry: What is this winter all about? What change is coming? The essence of advent, of awaiting an auspicious arrival, is to hold space for that which has not yet broken ground, that which is unseeable but faithfully becoming. We need only the willingness to wake up in the dark.

A few references for working with gratitude this week …

* Gratitude is a felt practice. It’s not a cognitive list-making process, nor is it the self-satisfied reassurance that could result from surveying the relative comfort and privilege of our lives. To feel gratitude, we have to pause and allow our subject to emerge, and then we have to train our attention on presence so that our hearts can naturally enter a state of generous appreciation. Rick Hanson calls this installing the trait. We have to feel into it, again and again.

* What keeps us from gratitude? To open to the presence of heart wherein gratitude is abundantly available, we must also open to grief — for they are inextricably bound. We must sense the unreal othering (Tara Brach’s term) of millions of indigenous lives, as well as other, subtler layers of the season: the climate impact of travel and unbridled consumerism, the millions of trees cut down and turkeys slaughtered for the feast, the pain of those for whom the holidays magnify loneliness and loss, our personal fears and anxieties. We have to open our hearts unconditionally if we are to tap into the unspeakable thanks that is the silence beneath all noise.

* First we thought, then we thanked. The word “thank” emerged from the word “think” as follows: the Old English þancian, þoncian "to give thanks, thank, to recompense, to reward," from Proto-Germanic thankōjanan (source also of Old Saxon thancon, Old Norse þakka, Danish takke, Old Frisian thankia, Old High German danchon, Middle Dutch, Dutch, German danken "to thank"), from thankoz "thought; gratitude," from root tong- "to think, feel."

* In Sanskrit, Kritajna is translated as gratitude. Its roots are krita meaning “cultivated” and jna referring to “wisdom,” pointing to the practice of gratitude as a means to cultivate consciousness and wisdom.

* I read yesterday that the Israeli defenses released the Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha after detaining him for questioning for two days. At the moment when Mosab was captured, he was walking with his family to the Rafah border crossing with Egypt in southern Gaza, for his was one of the fortunate few names on a State Department evacuation list. He was carrying his three year old son, Mustafa, on his shoulders. Here’s one more thing about Mosab Abu Toha: he recently calculated that it would take him 56 years to read all the books in his library, provided he could average reading 80 books per year. Provided he could be alive and reading in his library.

We love what we have, no matter how little,

because if we don’t, everything will be gone. If we don’t,

we will no longer exist, since there will be nothing here for us.

What’s here is something that we are still

building. It’s something we cannot yet see,

because we are a part

of it.

Someday soon, this building will stand on its own, while we,

we will be the trees that protect it from the fierce

wind, the trees that will give shade

to children sleeping inside or playing on swings.

-Mosab Abu Toha

* Salah Abu Ali, who tends his family’s orchards in a village on the outskirts of Bethlemen, often sleeps beneath the gnarled trunk of Al Badawi, an ancient olive tree. At 4000-5000 years old, Al Badawi is one of the oldest living trees on Earth and still produces nearly 900 pounds of olives every year. This is one definition of love.

* Gumbo. Roasted chicken. Cherry kugel. Apricot rugelach. The jewels are spilling out of the freezer. My husband’s 97 year old Jewish grandmother spent the past month preparing from scratch one dish per day in anticipation of hosting 20 family members for three days in her home. She would have it no other way. It’s been two years since her husband, to whom she was married for 75 years, passed away.

* "I believe that appreciation is a holy thing," Fred Rogers said. Loss and delight thread their way through each of our lives. We can count our days and blessings, and we can also put ourselves in the place to touch awe. We are rooted in an ancient weave and today, unfathomably, we are here. Today, we have breath in our bodies and love is here to be stewarded. Thanks comes from think. Grateful comes from grace. Gratitude is living presence.

The Guest House is a reader-supported publication. Essays are offered freely, but these essays are made possible through the generosity of paid subscriptions. Your support matters.

Do not try to savethe whole worldor do anything grandiose.Instead, createa clearingin the dense forestof your lifeand wait therepatiently,until the songthat is your lifefalls into your own cupped handsand you recognize and greet it.Only then will you knowhow to give yourself to this worldso worthy of rescue.

- Martha Postlethwaite, “The Clearing”

Journalling was my first formal practice. At the age of seven, I opened a spiral notebook with a sunflower painted on the cover (I adored that notebook) and thereafter wrote into the headwinds of my growing years with inexplicable regularity. I smudged the creases along the pinkie line of my left hand through dozens of notebooks. Many of my most formative experiences spilled out over the page, and those that didn’t felt passed by like landscapes framed through the window of a moving train.

In retrospect, I see how writing was a kind of communion for me — a small clearing in the thicket of daily life where I could tend to my heart in private while cultivating the beginnings of the spiritual practice of paying attention. It taught me about ritual and rhythm, and also about vulnerability and meeting our creative edges with fortitude.

My writing practice went dormant at the threshold of adulthood. At the time, if you’d asked, I would have pointed to a kind of transmigration from the written word to yoga and meditation as primary vehicles for inner inquiry. I still believe to every practice there is a season, but over the years I’ve also questioned if, subconsciously, I put my pencil down to distance myself from the unabashed loops and sweeps of my puerile penmanship.

Elif Batuman recently published an essay entitled “I’m Done Worrying About Self-Plagiarism” in which she explores the concept of diachronic writing (as in, writing wherein the growth that is intrinsic to the process is actually reflected in the form rather than edited out): “what if we don’t try to erase, from a given text, the fact that a writer was changed by/during the act of writing?” 

By understanding former iterations of our practice, our work, ourselves, as layers over time, we can recognize the presence of a trajectory, an evolution — and we can also study how those layers relate to each other (hello Internal Family Systems). Which is all to say: where are all your journals tucked away?

Michelangelo was once asked how he would carve an elephant: “I would take a large piece of stone and take away everything that was not the elephant.” Perhaps this is the work of any practice (or sadhana, from the Sanskrit root meaning “to sit with truth”). We stay with our subject. We commit our attention and learn the craft of our practice — and, in time, a natural chiseling away of what isn’t essential begins to occur as well as the emergence of what is.

[For your consideration: Michelangelo began apprenticing at the age of 13. He carved David out of a piece of discarded marble. He was known to work tirelessly, often for 18 hours a day. He also said “faith in oneself is the best and safest course.” These details seem not insignificant.]

Keeping company with a large stone is daunting, no doubt. Barack Obama said “nothing is more terrifying than the blank page” (likely a hyperbolic statement given his access to the nuclear codes, but nevertheless…). If we are choosing to expand as humans, our return to any creative edge will almost certainly stir the classical hindrances of insecurity, self-criticism, and doubt. I am not Michelangelo, we may state the obvious. What if I can’t find my elephant?

We are not the only ones. Here’s Errol Morris, a 58-year-old giant of contemporary documentary filmmaking, as recently quoted by David Marchese in the New York Times:

“I think my whole life has been dominated by feeling like I’m a fraud of some kind… How is my work different than painting by numbers? Is it that different? Thinking you’re a fraud may be similar to thinking that you don’t know what you’re doing. I don’t know, really, what I’m doing.”

Working with self-doubt demands sincere courage. First, we have to grow very tired of avoidance as an alternative. We have to remember that the source of our perceived inadequacy is not our ostensible failures, nor is the solution in striving for perfection. Fear doesn’t necessarily dissolve with time, but it can be recast. It can sharpen our sense of focus as we lean into and develop trust in our practice over time.

Anne C. Klein, a professor and lama in the Nyingma tradition, frames the invitation like this: “To recognize all practices and experiences as backlit by the sun of their own great completeness is to find a horizon that never narrows.”

I found myself not long ago unpacking a box of old journals on the floor of a new house. Holding them in my hands again, I was reminded of the significance of my earliest practice — the dignified instinct to create a clearing in the dense forest of my growing years. Blushing and messy as they were, and are, those entries contain small moments of coherence, of song, of light.

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Washington was the city of my formation. It’s where I arrived as an undergrad with a box of scribbled journals and a smoking habit. Also, where I smoked my last cigarette. It’s where I met my husband and landed my first job, among many other firsts.

Now that I’ve resided among the juniper and chamisa of the Southwest as long as I resided among the cherry blossoms, even a quick visit to the District is a swirl of tactile reconnection. I teach a philosophy workshop in the studio where I spent a decade studying the craft. I check in on my people. They check in on me. We scan each other’s faces for how life’s really been going. We grieve for the world together. I feel a private sense of relief when the owner of the teahouse still remembers me.

Walking down the alphabetized streets of my old neighborhood feels meaningful in a way that’s difficult to explain. I walk slowly, searchingly, in solitude. Things have changed in the years since I left. The brownstone’s been painted. The streets seem weathered, which I attribute to a profusion of political protests of late. But there’s muscle memory here. I find small signs of a previous life inside the life that’s here. Here, a familiar maple tree; here, how shadow falls across the park at a certain time of day.

Perhaps you have places you carry, too — places that invite your senses to return. Interestingly, the word “nostalgia” is from the Greek compound nostos (meaning ‘return home’) and algos (meaning ‘pain’). To come home is to feel our way back. Somewhere in my body, a spool of memory begins to loosen. I sense the girl who lived here — who, for safe-keeping, tucked parts of herself away in apartments once shared with lovers and friends.

“There is a common superstition that ‘self-respect’ is a kind of charm against snakes, something that keeps those who have it locked in some unblighted Eden, out of strange beds, ambivalent conversations, and trouble in general. It does not at all. It has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation.” - Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

The Latin root of respect means “to look again.” Joan Didion’s treatment of self-respect eschews appearances and, instead, points to a quiet fortress of self-regard and forgiveness: “a separate peace, a private reconciliation.”

David Keplinger, beloved poet and friend, describes Is and Was as “the first sparring gods.” A return to the country of Was is a sacred invitation to reckon with the parts we may have left behind. As we retrace our path, our practice is to notice, step by step — and, thereby, to integrate the emergence of what Was (or what wasn’t or what could have been) in the light of what Is.

We are speaking of the practice of inner reconciliation. Gandhi is often misquoted as encouraging us to “be the change we want to see in the world.” His actual teaching — the one from which the misquote derived — reads as follows:

“We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.”

Reconciliation, simply, is the restoration of relations. It can refer to past and present, private and public, or to the parts of a thing as they relate to the whole. In the absence of agreement, it’s a commitment to the possibility of peaceful co-existence.

We may feel powerless against the abject failures of humanity pouring out through our screens all day every day, but we are not. We but mirror the world, Gandhi says. This is not to say that centuries of collective trauma can be bypassed. They cannot. It’s only to share a reminder that our own healing work does matter in service to the world in which we live together. We need not wait to see what others do, Gandhi advises. Even a pixel of change matters.

Love remains our private mandate if we are to remember the just and necessary arch of our mutual fate. When we make room for our own human experience, we bring ourselves into the circle. When we pay attention with vital presence (which will also let us know when we need to shore up our own nervous systems against empathic overload), we train our humanity in thought, word, and action. Only then, rather than fear or de-humanization, love can fuel our advocacy, diplomacy, and service. Love can put all the posters up, rather than tear any of them down.

In closing, a poem that paves a path for the imagination by Puerto Rican Jewish poet and activist Aurora Levins Morales:

We cannot cross until we carry each other,all of us refugees, all of us prophets.No more taking turns on history’s wheel,trying to collect old debts no-one can pay.The sea will not open that way.

This time that countryis what we promise each other,our rage pressed cheek to cheekuntil tears flood the space between,until there are no enemies left,because this time no one will be left to drownand all of us must be chosen.This time it’s all of us or none.

- Aurora Levins Morales, “The Red Sea”

Thank you for reading The Guest House. You’re welcome to add your voice to the conversation with a comment or share this essay with a loved one.

Deep autumn. Breath takes shape again on the air. Walking with the ghosts of this warring world as day tips toward evening on the cross-quarter between Equinox and Solstice.

Within each of us exists an encoded instinct to burrow. The farmers (who are among the remaining few of us with seasonal sensibility), have gathered their harvest and readied their stores for Winter, and now they’re moving toward home and hearth.

A society that has forgotten its own circadian rhythms senses the signs but struggles to recognize the shift. In the Tantric system of swara yoga, this phase of the year is perceived in the emptying half of the exhale. We’re invited to reflect on the extent to which we have readied ourselves to let go. I’ve noticed through decades of embodiment practice that we tend not to fully actualize the exhale; and, thus, the air left stagnant in the basin of the lungs tends to interfere with the clean initiation of a new cycle. Within the tradition, it’s a teaching on preparing for death.

In the Celtic tradition, the death of the old year is preceded by a thinning of the veil between the spirit and physical worlds. Samhain, like Dia de los Muertos and similar traditions around the world, honors how sacred the field around the living and dying can become — how spiritually vital.

…Now when dying grasses veil

earth from the sky in one last pale

wave, as autumn dies to bring

winter back, and then the spring,

we who die ourselves can peel

back another kind of veil

that hangs among us like thick smoke.

Tonight at last I feel it shake.

I feel the nights stretching away

thousands long behind the days

till they reach the darkness where

all of me is ancestor…

- Annie Finch, “Samhain”

A different quality of light presents. This is not the light of the noontime sun; not the brash and exposing light of the mid-summer. And it’s also not a dimming. The light slants along the horizon. In a sense, it becomes more direct - inviting to us level our gaze on the place “where all of me is ancestor.”

If we are paying attention, we’re summoned to reconcile the busyness (the business) of our lives with the passage of time and its inevitable implications — not only the vibrancy of our life force, but also the darkness that frames it. We’re tasked to find perspective.

D.H. Lawrence wrote of death as “the last wonder.” A new study revealed heightened brain activity and connectivity in a surge of gamma waves at the final transition toward death. Rather than conceptualizing consciousness as diminishing or fading as death approaches, this revelatory research points to the opposite. Human beings can become more wakeful as the veil thins.

Adornments are set on the ofrenda. The warmth of marigolds and candlelight abounds. As we ritualize this night, we step into an interstitial place — a place of looking forward and back, of reflecting on what’s passed and incubating what’s to come. We are composting. We are grieving. We are rinsing. We are releasing what we can of our wins and losses. We are apprentices spiraling around what it means to be human.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve often noticed the part of me that longs for silence, for inner coherence in a fractured world. The part that doesn’t want to say a word that could disturb the air, nor add an ounce of the weight in my heart (the inverse of hope, which Emily Dickinson described as “the thing with feathers”) to the too-delicate balance of so many others’ hearts.

It takes time, integrity, and inner resource to orient toward the din of humanity’s anguish and rage. Our prefrontal empathic sensors weren’t built for this scale. In some moments, usually toward evening, I’ve found myself in an inarticulate withdrawal, like a simple sea-thing. I’ve watched the trees bare themselves to the elements as they curl warmly inward and noticed within myself a seasonal instinct toward self-preservation. “We have seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones,” writes Katherine May.

Mary Oliver once wrote, “I hardly move, though really I’m traveling a terrific distance.” At surface, I may appear as though distracted (in fact, I’m accustomed to being interpreted as aloof and have worked with the resulting relational nuances throughout my life). My people, the ones who know me well, have learned over the years to soften toward my tendency to slip into the primordial. They understand the moments when I’m at once far away and too near.

These moments might sound unproductive, even myopic — like pressing an ear into the oceanic drone of a shell. But they are really seasons of integration and calibration.

Joy Harjo’s poem, “For Calling the Spirit Back from Wandering the Earth in Its Human Feet” begins with the indelible imperative “put down that bag of potato chips,” and counsels:

“Call upon the help of those who love you. These helpers take many forms: animal, element, bird, angel, saint, stone, or ancestor. Call your spirit back. It may be caught in corners and creases of shame, judgment, and human abuse. You must call in a way that your spirit will want to return. Speak to it as you would to a beloved child.”

Stop anesthetizing, the poet says. Call upon the help of those who love you. Call to your spirit as you would to a beloved child.

The first of the Four Noble Truths (which meditation teacher Henry Shukman re-phrases as “ennobling tasks”) is the truth of suffering. The truth of suffering is the host who meets us at the door of spiritual practice. To step in, we must allow ourselves to feel — or, in David Whyte’s words, to “[turn] down through…black waters to the place we cannot breathe.”**

Those who will not slip beneath    the still surface on the well of grief,turning down through its black water    to the place we cannot breathe,will never know the source from which we drink,    the secret water, cold and clear,nor find in the darkness glimmering,    the small round coins,          thrown by those who wished for something else.

-David Whyte, “The Well of Grief”

**[A disclaimer from your therapist friend here: skillful means are necessary to come into relationship with any “unbreathable” place. Titration helps. For example, we can find internal presence, touch into a feeling briefly, and then guide our attention back outward, noticing light, objects, colors, sensory input, etc. If there’s the potential for trauma triggering, practice this with professional support.]

As shunya is to purna, emptiness to wholeness, depths of quiet can open us, ultimately, to the great hum of our common wellbeing. In this native place, with its “secret water, cold and clear,” we can offer our broken bits to the healing source. We can learn to drink, to receive.

Kintsugi is the Japanese art of mending broken pottery. If a bowl is broken, rather than discarding the pieces, urushi sap is mixed with gold, silver, or platinum and applied to the faults. The wound is tended with lacquer, skill, and utmost care. And thus, wholeness and transformation — a seasoned beauty — is reclaimed.

The art of mending pottery symbolizes what David Whyte describes as “find[ing] in the darkness glimmering, the small round coins thrown by those who wished for something else.” It’s what Joy Harjo refers to as the practice of “calling the spirit back.” Our task is to listen deeply in order to remember — to piece back together — our willingness to feel and to be felt. The beauty is in finding and being re-found.

It’s a grace in my life that my people know when to take my hands and call me back. Friends: we must do this, at times, for each other. We must love each other well enough to know, when necessary, how to call each other back. Courage is our sap.

Sunday morning at home. The hum of my children’s voices. The scent of cinnamon and pumpkin waffles. I roam from room to room, seeking a patch of autumn light on which to lay my mat. I settle on a place in the midst of it all, between the portal and the kitchen — only to discover this morning’s practice is simply to lay my tired heart in sunlight.

“In Blackwater Woods” is with me again. Some poems are like this — seasonal visitors. Some poems are very old friends.

Look, the trees are turning their own bodies into pillars

of light,are giving off the rich fragrance of cinnamon and fulfillment,

the long tapers of cattails are bursting and floating away over the blue shoulders

of the ponds,and every pond, no matter what its name is, is

nameless now. Every year everything I have ever learned

in my lifetime leads back to this: the fires and the black river of loss whose other side

is salvation, whose meaningnone of us will ever know. To live in this world

you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it

against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.

-“In Blackwater Woods” by Mary Oliver, from American Primitive

Mary Oliver published “In Blackwater Woods” in 1983, near the time when I was born. She won the Pulitzer Prize for American Primitive a year later. It’s a feat I wonder about, as my mother (also named Mary and endowed with unassuming brilliance) accomplished things in her professional life and suffered notoriety for it.

I consider “In Blackwater Woods” a friend. You may, too. This was Mary’s magic. She made us feel like kin — muddling through the woods of life together until, possibly, stumbling into splendorous stillness.

There’s a story about how she once found herself in the woods with no writing implement, and thereafter began to hide pencils in the trees.

The moment of the season has arrived when I find myself once again in Blackwater Woods. Among its short lines and spare turns, this poem has offered me generous attendance over the years. Some years have felt like cinnamon and fulfillment. Some, like nameless ponds.

In Blackwater Woods, we come to witness. We are tasked with the joy and grief of this place. It’s a practice of bearing presence. Paradox is a formidable teacher. How can we embrace ephemerality? How can we give ourselves to grief while not allowing it to swallow us whole? How can we live in this world, hold it against our bones, knowing it can burn?

Make no mistake, Blackwater Woods is burning. Nevertheless, the cattails are our brothers and sisters. The autumn, our guide. The trees are golden in their essence. The setting (which my dear friend Lindsay, no stranger to Blackwater Woods, describes as no grand forest but a humble place…) shimmers with teachings.

Here, simplicity is resplendent. We give our attention. We study our namelessness, all that which was never ours to keep. We lay down in the sorrow and solace that touches everything. And, somehow, in so doing, we learn to live in this world with its watery depths and a singular word: salvation.

Today. Scenes from inside Gaza’s Shifa Hospital, where thousands are sheltering and seeking care.

Three or four children are curled in each bed.

A fatherly-looking doctor pauses. He wraps a child in his arms. He turns her face so she won’t notice how he is cupping silent sobs into her hair.

There’s an ache in my arms. In my bones. In the ground beneath my feet. In the leaves.

And this reminder from Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye that we are never not in it together…

Shoulders

A man crosses the street in rain, stepping gently, looking two times north and south, because his son is asleep on his shoulder.

No car must splash him. No car drive too near to his shadow.

This man carries the world’s most sensitive cargobut he’s not marked. Nowhere does his jacket say FRAGILE, HANDLE WITH CARE.

His ear fills up with breathing. He hears the hum of a boy’s dreamdeep inside him.

We’re not going to be able to live in this world if we’re not willing to do what he’s doing with one another.

The road will only be wide. The rain will never stop falling.

- Naomi Shihab Nye, “Shoulders” from Red Suitcase

I have a quiet aversion to conversations about wellbeing. The term conjures images of privilege and appropriation, like the time I was instructed to wave a stick of incense at a merchandised “altar" before disrobing for a spa treatment. Over the years, I’ve heard many conversations in yoga studio lobbies devolve into insensitive recommendations for the latest bestseller on grief or a self-paced online course designed to transform. The word draws my attention to the thin line between holistic health and aspirations of self-optimization, control, and certainty.

Quality is fine by me — I delight in an organic smoothie and consider myself a connoisseur of pillows. I buy the beeswax candles from the endcap display at the grocery store regularly. I’ve brokered in wellness my entire professional life, and I do believe in wellbeing. I want wellbeing for you and me and every living thing. 

What gets me is how ideas of wellness have become conflated with a cultural mythology around wealth. We are inundated by a profit industry built on the  premise that we are not ok and that buying something — anything — will change that. Our sense of wellbeing has become conflated with purchasing power. 

It’s a cheap ordeal, and we know it: the epitome of what the Buddha pointed to as “false refuge.” Wellbeing can’t be bottled and bought. We’ve tried that. We’re mistrustful of being sold on miracle drugs, fad diets, and unverified health claims. We’re tired of measuring ourselves by industry standards (a colossal industry, by the way — the global wellness industry was valued at over $4.5 trillion in pre-Pandemic 2019, according to the Global Wellness Institute). 

Discourse on wellbeing can sound tone deaf when juxtaposed with the existential challenges of our time. In the context of a growing disparity in health outcomes across income groups, for example, our cultural obsession with weight loss flaunts itself next to families unable to afford proper fruits and vegetables. We are a society of dissonance when it comes to wellbeing – constantly trying to perfect ourselves while failing to meet the basic requirements for wellbeing as outlined by Maslow’s objective hierarchy of physiological needs, safety, love and belonging, esteem, and self-actualization. 

But what exactly is wellbeing, we might ask. A standard definition refers to our holistic health as constituted by the vital interplay of our physical, emotional, social, environmental, and spiritual layers. Less a state than an integrative process, wellbeing is our access to a wholesome, creative, dynamic, and resilient sense of equilibrium. 

The word for wellbeing in Sanskrit is “sukha,” which shares an etymological root with our modern English words sucrose and sugar. So there’s a flavor of sweetness to wellbeing. Its original context in the Vedas, according to Monier-Williams (1964), referred to how well a chariot axle was positioned to maintain the rotational balance between wheels and support the chariot’s weight, thus allowing it to move smoothly forward: "su ['good'] + kha ['aperture'] to mean originally 'having a good axle-hole.'”   Things haven’t changed much in that regard – today as always, a vehicle that has good suspension is what we want when traversing the rough roads we must travel.

We are talking here about receptivity and steadiness, and also about order and flow. Among the early scriptures, “sukha” is associated with “shreya,” meaning “that which produces lasting benefit” — in other words, it’s enduring. Shreya is contrasted with “preya,” a word epitomizing immediate gratification. Modern researchers similarly differentiate hedonism, characterized by the instinct toward pleasure and away from pain, and eudaimonism, a more lasting sense of fulfillment through growth and purpose.

Wellbeing is measured by four convergent methods: the presence of (1) positive emotions and the absence of negative emotions, (2) mature character traits, including self-directedness, cooperativeness, and self-transcendence, (3) life satisfaction or quality of life, and (4) character strengths and virtues, such as hope, compassion, and courage (Peterson and Seligman, 2004). These features interact cooperatively such that a person cannot feel good (as measured by positive emotions and life satisfaction) without doing good (as measured by maturity of character and virtuous conduct) (Cloninger, 2004).

Here’s a simple case study for your consideration. Social psychologist Elizabeth Dunn of the University of British Columbia (UBC) wanted to find out what kind of spending makes people happy, so she and colleagues surveyed 109 UBC students. Not surprisingly, most said they would be happier with $20 in their pocket than they would with $5. They also said they'd rather spend the money on themselves than on someone else. But when Dunn's team gave 46 other students envelopes containing either a $5 bill or a $20 bill and told them how to spend it, those who donated to charity or bought a gift reported feeling happier at the end of the day than those who spent on themselves. 

Herein lies the distinction between self-indulgence and self-care. A benign expression of self-indulgence might be a well-earned treat like an ice cream cone with sprinkles or a Saturday afternoon lounging on the sofa. Self-indulgence is not necessarily unhealthy, though nor is it enduring. It is simply sensory delight, known as “pāmojja” in Pali. And it can, in fact, be bought.

Self-care, on the other hand, consists of the specific choices and behaviors that lead to a quality of feeling over time. Self-care is how we contribute to our own wellbeing at any given moment and under any given circumstance. It’s any benevolent mechanism by which we nurture presence and alignment with our values. It’s reflected in our intentions, actions, and habits, as well as in pausing to integrate and recalibrate. Self-care is setting boundaries to mitigate depletion when appropriate and equally expanding beyond the habit of navel-gazing to show up for others.

Many of us sense an undercurrent of disassociation beneath the surface of our lives. We feel more emotionally isolated than ever before (a phenomenon amply attested to by recent studies, including one ranging from 1990 to 2021 which indicated a 25% decrease in the number of Americans who reported having five or more close friends). We long for more intimacy, connection, and belonging, but we’ve chosen social structures that reinforce individualism over community. 

Henry Ward Beecher posited that “the art of being happy lies in the power of extracting happiness from common things.” The practice of such extraction requires intention, engagement, awareness, and surrender to balance and nurture the dynamic facets of our humanness. Wellbeing requires both personal agency (which, yes, is a privilege) and interwoven structures of support and belonging. We might feel relaxed after a massage, but true wellbeing emerges only through the sustained practice of leaning into the kinship we share — the double entendre of our “common” things.

Perhaps the most misguided notion about wellbeing is that it's a solitary pursuit, wherein the responsibility falls on individuals to succeed or fail rather than on our communal web. Fariha Róisín’s book, “Who Is Wellness For? An Examination of Wellness Culture and Who It Leaves Behind,” tracks the author’s personal experience of seeking healing from trauma while simultaneously exposing the wellness industrial complex and its myriad failures. “Capitalism tricks us into believing that we don't need each other,” the author poignantly shares. 

Somehow, glimmers are possible under extraordinary circumstances. Our teachers here are those who touch ecstatic aliveness in cycles of profound grief, who praise the rising sun in war zones. I recently heard meditation teacher Tara Brach respond when a student asked about how to stay connected to life while facing the staggering uncertainty of a child’s diagnosis: “the doorway to wellbeing is always through the heart,” she softly said.  

If each day falls inside each night,

There exists a well

where clarity

is imprisoned.

We need to sit on the rim

of the well of darkness

and fish for fallen light,

with patience.

- Pablo Neruda, “Si cada día cae/If each day falls" 

Wellbeing is both a practice and the reservoir of having opened to the fullness of our felt experience — having sat “on the rim of the well of darkness and fish[ed] for fallen light” — many times over. 

Jarvis Jay Masters, a Buddhist writer and teacher who endured a mind-boggling 21 years of solitary confinement based on wrongful conspiracy charges, offers this sage reflection in his memoir:

Over the years, I have been asked when it was that I “saw the light,” had a dream, or heard a voice. What experience created a reverberation that transformed me from the person I was then to the person I am today? The truth of the matter is that I have never changed. Rather, I have simply discovered who I’ve always been: the young child who knew that his life mattered, that he could make a difference in the world, and that he was born to fly. — Jarvis Jay Masters, That Bird Has My Wings

Jarvis re-discovered the life that matters within him.

To me, the 13th c. Sufi mystic Rumi’s timeless question “do you make regular visits to yourself?” offers us a compass. What could come from giving ourselves permission to meet our experience with consistency, honesty, and generosity?

As it happens, I do make regular visits to myself. I'm fortunate to live on the rim of a trail system in the vast landscape of Northern New Mexico. My wonder hour, which I hold in grateful contrast to the happy hours of my younger years, is the early morning, a time that favors contemplation and communion. It’s known as “Brahmamuhurta" in India — the hour of God — and referenced by David in Psalm 5: “O Lord, in the morning you hear my voice.”

Cold air in my lungs, solid ground beneath my feet, I make my way along the trails around my home, slowly unspooling my heart to the juniper, the chamisa, and the pine. They receive with fraternity all that which I have to give. Most mornings, by the time the sun has pushed up the day, I can sense, along with care for the heartbroken bits, an embodied enough-ness. It’s a remembered hum in my human heart. To me, this is what wellbeing must be. And it’s priceless.