Irish Spring

No, not that kind. Today, February 1st. Irish Spring, Imbolc, a very ancient festival of spring, later St. Brigid's day. It's a time for dancing and lighting fires, for beginnings, a day to look forward to brighter things. As the wind throws rain against the window like hail, I have to laugh. Okay, it's spring. If you say so. 

It was a busy winter. Lots of travel and lots of new plans. Yet another change in direction. I feel stronger and surer than ever before. I feel healed in new ways. The first month of this new year is already past and I hardly felt it go. I didn't make any resolutions this year, in particular. I have remained very quiet internally. The same washes of stress and anxiety come from time to time, but I've been waiting them out. I've marveled at the love and patience of my nearest and dearest when my fretting makes me irritable or just annoyingly obsessive. I've taken that love and patience with gratitude and wonder, and it's made me less trapped, more open, more able to extend love and patience myself. It's a virtuous cycle, and it's a precious thing.

The closest thing to a resolution, I guess, has been a commitment to that quietness of heart, and also to letting some of my harder scales fall away. I've build up a residue of cynical self-protection over the years. I am a natural critic, which has great usefulness in my life, but it had gotten out of balance. I instantly see the cracks in most things first, before I see anything else, and my perception has too often stopped there. I am a great skeptic, and I have a hair-trigger bullshit detector, and I am grateful for both, but I have also dismissed many things out of hand. My instincts have become reflexes, and my reflexes have been too quick. I've kicked out and fended off many moments which may have been bringing me gifts. Inspired and instructed by some dear examples, I'm trying to do that less. It's working. It's strange. There are many gifts.

I am open to small joys. I have permission to embrace the "corny", the "cheesy", the emotionally frank. Underneath the scales I am softer. God forbid, more sensitive. I cry a lot, at silly things, which always makes me laugh. They are a different sort of tears, and it is a different kind of laugh than I've known in the past. 

Sensitivity is a funny thing. Like vulnerability. As a child and young adult I was excruciatingly sensitive. Ridiculously, maladaptively vulnerable. Having very little skin wasn't a safe way to be, and I was wounded often, until I was so sore and scabby that I wasn't much use. 

Nobody can get on my nerves faster than C.S. Lewis. I suppose he's like family that way. But as I was typing this I thought of one of the most arresting scenes in Narnia. In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, greedy grumpy Eustace has become a dragon. I'll skip over everything until we get to the un-Dragoning. Basically, Eustace peels and peels and peels, but can't get all his dragon skin off. It takes Aslan's claws, and a lot of pain, for the boy to break free. I've thought about this scene a lot in my life. It sticks in the head, probably because of the graphic comparison to the wonderful sensation of peeling a ripe scab. (Ugh! And yet...but ugh!) For other reasons, too. The dreadfully literal allegorical idea of God stripping your heart bare is a useful one. A bit violent, a bit redolent of "this is for your own good..." but effective. I have often thought back to this moment when I was in pain for one reason or another. I have spent a lot of energy in self-examination and self-flagellation for one thing or another. I have decided that the pain I've endured, I've earned. Or at least needed. That it was for my own good, somehow.

It's complicated, because, yes. I have learned and grown a great deal from a lot of the pain I've been through. I have learned lessons about empathy, and lessons about forgiveness. The idea that pain is, or can be, transformative is a powerful idea. We don't have to go all the way to the crucifixion to talk about that.

And yet. I read a comment from a friend somewhere on Facebook which struck me dumb for days. It was in response to the casual use of rape depictions in TV as a plot device, or as a vehicle for growth for the character. I wish I could remember or find it again because she said it so beautifully, but her point was this: the pain and trauma caused by violence (sexual, physical, emotional) are a net loss. The energy and resources which must go into repair and recovery are a loss. Yes, triumph over victimhood, yes, redemption, yes, yes, yes, but personal growth? That is a very tricky equation. How much personal growth could have been for the survivor who didn't have to spend years processing the traumatic experience?

I just hadn't thought about it that way before. And yet, of course.

So anyway. Back to the scab. Back to sensitivity. Back to vulnerability.

I've talked a lot about healing in this past year. Healing is kind of a gross process, physically. An example: I burned my leg severely last summer, and the burn got infected. It was painful, it was disgusting, it was inconvenient, and it was disfiguring. I had to lie on the couch a lot and have things brought to me. I had to rest. I had to take a lot of pills. I cried. My leg leaked. I had to have professional bandage changers. I couldn't work. I was useless and irritable and exhausted, and my whole world seemed to shrink until it revolved around this stupid, stinking, searing wound.

I have a big obvious metaphor to put here, and I'll skip to the gist. I was cared for. I recovered in safety. I didn't even form a scab, because the doctors carefully protected my wound with a second skin. That second skin couldn't come off until the healing had finished. And it was removed very, very gently, with regard for the tenderness beneath.

Physically, emotionally, and spiritually, these are the conditions under which healing can take place.

When I think about Aslan and the Eustace-dragon, I feel sad. I came into this world tender and open. I knew how to be generous and compassionate before I was hurt. The hard scabs and scales I've been bearing are the result of injuries received under frantic circumstances, where the necessary care wasn't available, for one reason or another. I could not be sensitive and vulnerable in productive ways without a sense of safety. To recover, I didn't need more violence from myself, or the world, or the universe, or a God-lion with fearsome claws.  When I thought I least deserved sympathy and tenderness, I needed it the most.

So, I've been giving myself safe and quiet and careful places in which to recover. I've received priceless gifts of acceptance and understanding from others. My sins of selfishness, of irritability, of weakness, of uselessness, which no amount of shouting at myself have ever cured, have responded to love and patience, gentleness and kindness. (There's a long way to go yet, but there's been some movement.)

I don't know what next. I know the call of faithfulness does require that we step outside of our shelter, outside of our safe spaces, that we love much and risk much. To suffer for others. I aspire (have always aspired) to that. My miscalculations in this regard, however, have caused resounding failures, for myself and other people. A net loss. I don't say this in despair but in thoughtfulness.