02 Nisan - Bless (#blogExodus)

Sometimes, I'm convinced that I am cursed. Sometimes, I'm absolutely certain that my Higher Power, whom I mostly call God, but occasionally call something more suitable for an R-18 rated essay - I am certain that S/He is, in actuality, God's evil twin, and S/He is definitely out to get me.

I know this because life can be really crappy. Not just the every day crappy of traffic jams and paper cuts. I'm talking the huge, almost insurmountable crappy that can seep into all the cracks of your life, spreading over everything, until it's just ooze, from here to infinity plus three. It's all that big stuff that tears you apart, fills you with shame, tastes like despair. And after two or three or six times you realize that the bottom you swore you had finally landed on turns out to be just another trap door - all of that crap seems to wrap around you like cotton, muffling all the sounds, and blurring all the light.

Hard to see blessings through all that cotton batting and those loose trap doors.

So I curse, from the depths of whatever sub-basement of the six kinds of hell into which I've fallen. And into that echo-y, empty space that contains no light and holds less hope, I cry and mumble and dream and yell (depending upon the day, or the phases of the moon, or just how depressed/angry/ scared I really am) a string of invective that could blister ice. I swear - really, really swear. And I curse. A helluva lot. 

There's not a blessing to be found. 

This is what I tell myself: I must be cursed, and since this must be true, I only have curses to give. And I give them all to God. That's what fills this basket I carry with me - my anger. My pain. My despair. All the broken bits and open wounds. I carry it all with me, cursing God, cursing me, over and over, again and again.

But at some point in my twisty, winding, stumbling life, I learned this one holy thing: this, too, shall pass.

It is a holy thing. Trite to be sure, but no less a holy statement for all of that. This will pass. I know this, I have experienced is time and again, yet I wrap myself in that cotton, I slog through that desert of ooze that sucks at my feet and swallows my shoes, I curse and I moan and feel lost in forever. And I am surprised, still (always), that it does. There are times when I have no idea why it passes, just that one day, I felt buried by a mound of fifty-seven things that I couldn't climb on a good day with every superhuman power anyone could ever think of, and the next I wasn't.

Don't get me wrong. The crappy stuff, from tiny and stupid and annoying to the huge stuff that crushes your spirit and sips at your soul - all that crappy stuff is still there. The job is still lost. The bills are still stacked and overdue. People you love still die. Life is still hard. 

What changes though, is not the stuff. What changes is you. Perhaps it's all the cursing. I am convinced that it doesn't ever matter what you pray, only that you pray. It is my continuing conversation with God - whatever God's name I call Her/Him, whatever mask I demand God wear - that makes a difference and changes me. 

I don't know the mechanism for this change, or the equation that solves for X, where X is my pain, traveling along the Y-axis of my doubt divided by time and intention. I have no clue, and I am, much to my surprise, okay with that. I am learning to let be, let go, breathe. And you know what? That, too - that enlightened, spiritually wonky place of serenity and being-ness - that, too will pass. No matter how tightly I hold on, they pass.

Here's what I do know - when I stumble, when I stagger under the weight of my despair, there have been people who have caught me and carried me until I found firmer ground to stand on. There have been hands to hold in the darkness, shoulders upon which to lean and hearts to shine a light on hidden paths. I have been offered kindness, I have felt love. I have seen my son smile and heard him laugh as if pain had never been invented. 

I may carry my curses with me, lugging them along as I trudge from place to place. But I carry my blessings, too. 

I am blessed beyond imaging.

Once we were slaves, now we are free.

#BlogElul 3 - Bless

I spent most of the day at the hospital, talking about really uncomfortable things. 

If the heart stops, do we try to start it again? This has nothing to do with a broken heart, but a beaten, barely beating one. What then? If the heart doesn't quite stop, but falters, what then? How much do we try to restore it? 

And what about an invasion, not of soldiers or marauders (or at least, not in any human form, but microscopic ones, who invade the blood and infect the body) do we fight them off? Do we go bravely into battle until they are routed, every last one of them?

When do we stop trying to... I can't even imagine the proper infinitive that belongs in that blank space. Is it to try, or maybe to will, or to fix and mend and heal and ---

Please God, let there be no pain. How about that? Just: no pain. 

That's a perfect goal, though it doesn't fall into a tidy infinitive. Right about now, I am hungering for tidy, for neat little boxes that fit, with no lumps or leftover parts. 

Thing is, life isn't tidy. at least, not any of the lives I've met. Not now. Not anywhen. Not ever. Life is filled with messy, and lumpy and almost-but-not-quite fitting. There is no symmetry, no equal and opposite reaction, no tried and true equation that says "for every Part A of Sadness, add a Part B of Kindness..." Every soul, every life, is a jumble of goodness and meanness and pity and thoughtlessness and grand generosity and fear and glee and on and on. We are human, and so we have within us the seeds of everything imaginable (and a few not so imaginable, maybe, things that, by definition, I cannot even conceive of right now, or then, or ever).

So the man laying in the hospital bed, in the room of the very uncomfortable discussions, was just that: filled with huge generosity and the finer points of cruelty. He was kind and happy and mean depressed and generous and growing confused. He was in pain and rich in spirit. He loved fiercely and hated with passion. It did not balance. The pendulum swung wildly, less a back and forth and more a whirling gyroscope that spun madly - but it was beautiful and drew your eye.

This is my uncle, whose madly spinning life is starting to wobble and sway and slow. This is my uncle, who is complex and difficult and brilliantly present, and his life is fraying around the edges. This is my uncle, and discussions concerning him are less about healing and more - Please God, let there be no pain.

And all the while, today, while we talked, my mother and my cousins and the whole team of caregivers who were present in that room, I could only think that the room was filled with a thousand thousand blessings. 

My uncle is pretty sick. He's dying, in fact. Conversation is no longer about healing, but is laced with words like "palliative" and "comfort" and the alphabet soup of DNRs and POAs. We all hate it. We all love him. We all want to make sure that he's comfortable, that he's getting all the care that he needs. There was a team of caregivers present, to match the team of relatives and loved ones sitting in a small circle of sun and warmth and too-bright light that streamed through those huge windows. We all had a single purpose - let's figure out what this man needs and make sure that we can give it to him.

This man, this human being who has lived his life to the very edges, who is so very human, whose life is messy and whose breath is raspy and harsh and his arms seem to have shrunk even while his hands have remained so huge - big enough to conquer the world, surely - my uncle sits surrounded by care and concern and love. We cannot save him. We cannot heal him. We can go back and forth and around again about keeping his broken heart beating.

He is surrounded be love.

For all of his pain, for all that his ferocity and great, gawping energy is quieting - he is surrounded by love. 

During Elul, I am called to shift, to change, to turn the kaleidoscope so that the light bends and flows and the jeweled bits dance. Here is my lesson on blessings today: they are all around us, even in the discomforting, uncomfortable parts. There is grace in that, and infinite, boundless love.

Stacey Zisook Robinson

2014

07 Nisan - Bless

I do not feel very blessed these days.

I do not feel...

And there I stop. I do not feel. All that numbness, all that ice and gray. I am locked up tight in my private tower, invisible to the eye, but with walls so thick, with neither windows nor doors, it's tough-- it's impossible-- for light to get in, or air or blessings. I tell myself that it keeps the panic at bay. But the ghostly tendrils of panic pool at my feet and coil up my legs, clinging to me like those no-seeum spiderwebs that stretch across a garden path.

It's a spiderweb kind of day.

These are the times when wiser heads than I say "Look for the blessings..." Personally, I would like to spit at those people, those know-it-all, smug and spiritually fit people. I do not like those trite little exercises, these Kumbaya moments. Not now. Now I prefer the safety of my tower, with its hollow silence and stillness.

Thoughts, though-- they have a life of their own. They skitter and slip sideways. They aren't particulate, like light, so they need no cracks, no hidden pathways to circle and whistle and draw attention to themselves. They sing, unbidden, and flit in manic disarray. 

I have been at this too long. I have listened once to often. There are blessings.

Even rooted in my tower, in the middle of whatever pain or brokenness that has tethered me to this spot (this one spot, moving neither left nor right, forward or back)-- there are blessings. Dammit. Like a soothing balm, they tumble forth, catching some inner light so that I see them all, just out of the corner of my eye, like bright feathers the color of jewels.

What are my blessings? Dammit-- what are they? I have to name them, acknowledge them, and so make them real-- for me. This is a reminder, no matter how much I whine about it. I need reminders.

• I didn't take a drink today. Life abounds with miracles.
• I have a roof over my head, food on the table.
• I have heat in the winter, clean running water, cooling when it's hot.
• I have access to medical care and medicines.
• I have skills. No job right now, but skills that I can market. Eventually. When I remember all the blessings that surround me, and leave the tower behind.
• I have friends. Real ones, the kind that stick around and care and are kind and funny and smart and they call me when I least expect it (like today), and they love me enough to call my on my BS. They're my chosen family, the ones I've found along the way who help to raise me (and each other) up.
• I have family, blood family, who bicker and squabble and sometimes play mean, but they come together, in love, when it's needed most. They let me come home again, let me rant a while, tell me stupid jokes-- and then let me go when it's time. Until the next time (and they don't seem to care that there's always a next time).
• I have a son-- a brilliant and glorious son who is growing into a human being. Proud doesn't even come close to what I feel for him. Awed is much closer, tangled with annoyed (he is, after all, fifteen). Loved beyond belief. Staggered by the responsibility and the joy of walking with him for this short time, before he soars on his own.

I have been given grace and light and hope. I have been blessed beyond imagining. The tower? It's my illusion. All I need to do is take one step, one single step and I am free. 

c Stacey Zisook Robinson

07 April 2014

#blogElul  #Exodusgram