Beginnings

"I always think that that’s the secret of change: 

that there are huge gestations and fermentations 

going on in us that we are not even aware of; 

and then sometimes, 

when we come to a threshold, crossing over, 

which we need to become different, 

that we’ll be able to be different, 

because secret work has been done in us 

of which we’ve had no inkling." 

-John O’Donohue 

Big Clock (excerpt)

Crossing between gain and loss:

learning new words for the world and the things in it.

Forgetting old words for the heart and the things in it.

And collecting words in a different language

for those three primary colors:

staying, leaving, and returning.

-Li-Young Lee 

Rice Paper Heart | How We Got Here

Tender Tendencies

I have always been tenderhearted. Sensitive, they called it. As a child, it seemed this was something to be mitigated. At times, I was ordered to be less tearful. Some of my most difficult memories are around dismissals of that sensitive nature, and even a directive to stop being so.

But in worship at church, all emotion was welcome. The more undone we were, the closer to God. In church, it seemed the highest calling was not to help the poor but to encounter God in signs and wonders. Our faces were wet from weeping as we crouched on the floor. To feel moved by the Holy Ghost was to feel pulled up to the heavens. The longing of the music―the cries of yearning and lament and repentance, our outstretched arms. I was overcome. I was in love. It was easy for me to enter the collective minor key-change sweetness and be carried away.

Later, I left this faith realizing that a belief centered around death and sin and inherent wickedness was not the path for me. It hurt me. To stay and to leave. And it hurt those I loved. 

Thin Spaces

It wasn’t until years later that I learned of “thin spaces” in Celtic philosophy. Places where the veil between this world and the one beyond―between light and shadow―is very thin. At times, translucent. You can feel this especially when a loved one dies. But if you are awake, you can find the thin spaces easily. 

The present moment is a meeting of past and future, the crosscurrents of a hello and a goodbye―the makeup of all things bittersweet. If we are awake to the holiness of this meeting and its impermanence―if we can apply awareness and gratitude―we have found ourselves in a thin space.

 J.D. Salinger wrote in Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction:

“Seymour once said that all we do our whole lives is go from one little piece of Holy Ground to the next. Is he ever wrong?”

The poet Sharland Sledge described thin spaces:

"Thin places" the Celts call this space

Both seen and unseen,

Where the door between this world

And the next is cracked open for a moment

And the light is not all on the other side.

Leonard Cohen wrote:

There is a crack, a crack in everything

That's how the light gets in.

Poetry

Though I did not have the language for it at the time, when I no longer had the church, I found new thin spaces in poetry. 

The yearning Susan Cain calls the “bittersweet tradition”—from the Sufis to the symphony—was one I had always felt. The ache was always there.

Poetry could somehow perceive and touch both places, the seen and unseen. It was full of sweetness and mystery I could taste.

We are all approximating.  It is the simple act of recording the approximation with honest clarity that creates the poem. –Raymond Carver

Carver’s explanation, the poet’s work of approximating, didn’t feel like just a creative exercise in lyrical metaphor. The poet shares truths our language cannot hold without the help of metaphor.  Jim Bodeen says, “Poetry corrects the language.” Poetry describes the mysteries of what we know but can’t explain. Describes the unseen world with this world’s images. Not asking the reader to suspend their disbelief in “this is like this”, but maybe, they really are the same. In Il Postino, Neruda never answers when the postman asks if the whole world is a metaphor. The language holds the tension of the two worlds; makes the thin space known.

Then I fell in love. I loved the love of Neruda. All ache and flowers and fire. Sacred sweetness. I found a thin space with my beloved. Because I longed for you like I wrote my own name. A holiness within holiness that only we knew. 

Love & Longing

Then my love and my world fell apart, and I spent the whole of my 20s living alone in a one-bedroom apartment built in 1925. It took years of therapy, the faithfulness and patience of friends and mentors, and some friendship with myself to climb out of a dangerous deep well of depression. 

Carefully, with immense trepidation, I found love again. Falling in love with him was a deep remembering. I was home in his blue eyes. And I arrived into my 30s with an unbelievably loving and impossibly good husband, a family so precious I can’t bear to tell you, a new life, an apricot tree. I quite literally survived. And so I made sure to keep my bittersweet nature carefully kept, hemmed in. I was afraid melancholy could take hold if I dwelled too long on the edges of things; if I revisited the valleys in my heart I made myself with my cyclical thought, I might be taken under.

See, I  had written in my 20s: 

Rice Paper Heart

Feeling so much is difficult and

my heart is made of rice paper. 

Thin and translucent and wet with the blood

that needs it to pulse around in me.

My disease is translucent rice paper heart.

It just doesn't hold.

I was sure what my best friend would call our shared “jellyfish” permeable composition was too fragile. That life was much too close to my see-through self, and I was made out of the wrong stuff. Too vulnerable. A fatal flaw. Feeling so much and swerving so close into the longing. I had a journal called “All Ache.” My disease is translucent rice paper heart.

So this tender feature I orphaned inside me. Visited only with care and with fear. Unsure of how to tap into the tenderness, the places that show the shape of shadow, the cracks that open to the transcendent—how could I call them back? Into my wholeness?

But having a child opens all the places between light and shadow—whether you want it to happen or not. Death and life are so close. Moments are so close. Our fragility is so close. Our imperfection. Our love. Our beating hearts in the dark.

And having your husband undergo serious heart surgery opens all the places between light and shadow—whether you want it to happen or not. Death and life are so close. Moments are so close. Our fragility is so close. Our imperfection. Our love. Our beating hearts in the dark.

And losing a brother opens all the places between light and shadow—whether you want it to happen or not. Death and life are so close. Moments are so close. Our fragility is so close. Our imperfection. Our love. Just your beating heart in the dark.

Recovering Bittersweetness

Then I read Bittersweet by Susan Cain, and she—in a masterful tapestry of ancient wisdom, science, intuition, psychology, and global history—restored my bittersweet nature to me by outlining bittersweetness through the ages as both a sensibility and a tradition. 

She offers Rumi’s poem Love Dogs to explain the value of longing:

Love Dogs

One night a man was crying, Allah! Allah!

His lips grew sweet with praising,

until a cynic said, “So!

I’ve heard you calling our, but have you ever

gotten any response?”

The man had no answer to that.

He quit praying and fell into a confused sleep.

He dreamed he saw Khidr, the guide of souls,

in a thick, green foliage.

“Why did you stop praising?” “Because

I’ve never heard anything back.”

“This longing you express

is the return message.”

The grief you cry out from

draws you toward union.

Your pure sadness

that wants help

is the secret cup.

Listen to the moan of a dog for its master.

That whining is the connection.

There are love dogs

no one knows the names of.

Give your life

to be one of them.

Sufi teacher Dr. Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee explains, “Longing is the sweet pain of belonging to God. Once longing is awakened within the heart it is the most direct way Home. Like the magnet, it draws us deep within our own heart where we are made whole and transformed.”

I realized I can become a practitioner of bittersweetness without slipping into the emptiness of loss and sorrow. With my hands on the scaffolding of the heart, I can learn the different contours of bittersweetness, of melancholy, of depression. Inhabit a sensibility around the function of my longing that senses and pulls me—if I recognize the longing is the return message.  The yearning is the tether—from me to the unseen.

Now without fear of its magnetic pull, I am reclaiming bittersweetness as a sacred facet of life. The crack in the heavens. Life’s fragility, our precious impermanence. Reintegrating, bringing back into the fold, this part of me I mistook for a gravity that could bury me. That gravity is very real, but it has a different name:  Depression isolates, bittersweetness binds.

Re-seeing

When I was a child, I didn’t understand the tradition of yearning I’d inherited in nearly two decades of worship and scripture was bent by a wrong belief about my configuration. That yearning was for redemption, a plea. 

And I didn’t yet understand that the true yearning was inseparable from me—that it didn’t signify desperation but belonging. I didn’t yet know that the sensitive nature I’d inherited was my link to life’s tender sweetness, which is what sustains us. The joy and its precious impermanence doesn't have to crush us—it could be our ladder to the heavens—the lifelines we loop around each other again and again.

In my 20s, bereft and undone by rejection and separation from my beloved, I couldn’t see that that was when I was most close to the throbbing heartbeat of my humanity. The aquifer of love inside me. I was ready to give it but could not see how to direct it anywhere else. I mistook the porous heart for weakness, for deficiency.  I didn’t know then, that permeability, my rice paper heart, was the place where the sparks fly. A thin space within me. 

And also, and this is a big sentence, with help, I needed to relearn love and relationships and worth. 

Music, Myth, Homecoming, An Offering

Music

As a child, my leaning toward music with that great ache was only available to me in worship. Those were songs of love but also supplication, often begging forgiveness, admitting unworthiness, showing gratitude for undeserved salvation. 

Having departed that church and view, I now had the whole world’s yearning available to me. Heading straight to the record store after work, I collected hundreds of cds with tip money. Made playlists and looped songs for days. Songs that soared and dipped and sailed. Then, once heartbroken, their pull was my medicine, but also my vortex. I couldn’t break out of the melancholy I’d fallen into. My love became smaller, focused, so specific and hallowed it tethered me to no one.

Arrived on another shore, I am learning now to reintegrate songs full of ache I love. (And I do love music full of joy and lightness, too.) Chapter 2 in Susan Cain’s Bittersweet, particularly helped with this. Some songs may be the same I looped before, but the discernment is in my listening closely—not for desperation or defeat—but for the longing as the action. The root words of longing are verbs “to grow long or extend.” So, a reaching out.

The heartbreak and loss may be there, and there may be no resolution, but it is our plight. If I listen well, I know the music full of the sadness, loss, and longing of others is the music that ties me to everyone who knows it. Our longing is the tie of the shadow to light. And that is a beautiful communion.

Myth

There is another lens to see our cracks and broken places. 

The wound is where the Light enters you. -Rumi

There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in. -Leonard Cohen

Leonard Cohen grew up in a Jewish family, and while he grew to no longer consider himself religious, he drew especially from the Kabbalah.

In mystic  Judaism, Kabbalah, God created the world by contracting himself into divine light that filled special vessels. But the light could not be contained and shattered the vessels. The shards are our imperfect, broken world. Most of the light returned to their divine source, while some holy sparks fell and attached themselves to the broken shards. The sparks long to return to their source. Many believe it is the task of humans to repair the world by returning the holy sparks to the divine light. 

While Kabbalistic beliefs are complex and interpreted intensely, I think when we can enter the thin spaces and notice the shards and sparks, we remember our home. We can find the sparks down here in all the brokenness. 

Whether you find this as metaphor, myth, or mysticism, you probably know moments of awe and of ache, of a homesickness we can’t seem to name. Was it Northern Lights that brought this feeling to you? Or holding a brand new baby, their tiny eyebrows in the sunlight like stardust? Hearing a cello's song go all the way inside you? 

“A myth is something that has never happened, but is happening all the time.” - Joseph Campbell 

Myths are recursive, telling us again and again what we already know but forgot. 

Or how Buddhists say Our eyes were originally right but went wrong because of teachers.

If this myth is too big a leap for you, perhaps the ache of longing to return home found here—on a cosmic atom-to-atom level—in Marie Howe’s poem “Singularity” will ring true somewhere inside you. Does it echo what we know already?

Excerpt:

For every atom belonging to me as good

Belongs to you.   Remember?

…

Can molecules recall it?

what once was?    before anything happened?

No I, no We, no one. No was

No verb      no noun

only a tiny tiny dot brimming with 

is is is is is

All   everything   home

Only with decades of perspective, I can see now—religion, poetry, loving fiercely—they were all my spirit’s scouts looking for footholds to the stars. At times, I got so close. At times, I was all light. 

Homecoming

Eleven years ago, when I was still caught in a net of hurt, my mentor Dan Peters wrote me a generous letter in reply to my seeking advice:

“...Tolstoy said you must be wounded into writing, but you musn't write until the wound has healed. And, like Jim's line about broken sides, I don't think he meant don't write at all, I think he meant don't write for others.

I get the sense that your poems hover on this line. There's a turn that happening (think of a big ship at sea making a turn) where I can hear the pain giving way to something bigger.  Something consoling to others…The revision process is just starting.  And I mean revision in the biggest sense of the word.  Re-seeing. And the hovering on the line is exciting, too. When I hear the "you" in the poems, sometimes I substitute "god."  When the poems can be read either way, they knock me completely over. That seems like a key to making this bigger. That tension in the writer, is tension for the reader. Is there meaning in this pain? You don't even have to answer that question in your writing, but it is a question to be asked openly.”

I didn’t understand fully then that this letter mapped the constellations out for me, told me the course for the turn at sea: the pain, the turn toward the Beloved from the beloved, the medicine of shared humanity. The god here is much bigger than religion.

It took a long time to turn the ship. But here I am. Do you know how grateful I am, to have had this kindness and help? Maybe this site can be the kind letter that helps you.

An Offering, for Brendan

My brother died last year by suicide, and I didn’t know he was suffering, and so I wasn’t there to help. I didn’t know what was needed. He was beautiful and wounded and full of music and light and shadow. I am homesick for him. I long for him every day. He should be here.

In the immediate aftermath, my friend shared exercepts from  A River Runs Through It and Other Stories. Later, a different friend gifted me the book. It spoke so clearly to the trouble of helping those we love:

"Help," he said, "is giving part of yourself to somebody who comes to accept it willingly and needs it badly."

"So it is," he said, using an old homiletic transition, "that we can seldom help anybody. Either we don't know what part to give or maybe we don't like to give any part of ourselves. Then, more often than not, the part that is needed is not wanted.  And even more often, we do not have the part that is needed...

"In fact, one of my troubles is that I don't even know whether he needs help. I don't know, that's my trouble..."

"We are willing to help, Lord, but what, if anything, is needed?"...

"It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us."

"But you can love completely without complete understanding."

"He was beautiful."

-Norman Maclean

I loved Brendan completely without complete understanding. How I desperately wish I might have helped him, taken his hand. So you see, deep in grief and regret and heartbreak, I hope to offer some help now to you, if it is needed.

I am wanting to rescue our understanding of all the light and shadow so we know we belong. So we know we can withstand it, that we are not alone. 

⏦⏦⏦⏦⏦⏦⏦⏦⏦⏦⏦⏦⏦⏦⏦⏦⏦⏦⏦⏦

I don’t have the answers; at times I’m full of doubt. But often, when I choose to accept the mysteries, to go deeper into the cathedral of questions, there is a comfort in all that isn’t ours to know. 

For now, I only hope not to chase certitude (this is difficult) but to walk deeper into mystery with you—all the ways the shadows are tied to the light. It could be, much of love is love in reaching—more longing than love in hand. The pain of that can’t be overstated and is inseparable from our contract with love. It does break us. 

On how we are to integrate all the sorrow with the sweet, Susan Cain writes “…the most difficult answer to grasp is also the one that can save you. The love you lost, or the love you wished for and never had: That love exists eternally.  It shifts its shape, but it’s always there. The task is to recognize it in its new form.”

Though we may never know or have that perfect iteration again, it is also eternal. 

Sometimes, I’m afraid. It’s true—I could lose everything. In tragedy, all of this could be lost to me. That could happen. But I hope this collection may come back again to me and save me, again, one day. After all, medicine is recursive, too. And if I die before we are ready, I hope this collection will come back again to save the ones I love. If you are reading this love letter, darling, I am there with you. 

⏦⏦⏦⏦⏦⏦⏦⏦⏦⏦⏦⏦⏦⏦⏦⏦⏦⏦⏦⏦

"The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way...to see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion all in one." -John Ruskin

This is my humble offering to you. Following the pull, answering the longing to make this site—​​it’s all I have to give, and who am I not to give it? This site, Of Light & Shadow, is devoted to helping us look for the cracks, the thin spaces, the holy sparks. I hope it will help us discover all the ways we are not alone. All the ways we belong. I dedicate it to my brother, who was bright with divine sparks inside him. Brendan, I love you now and always.

As I find my way in becoming a practitioner of bittersweetness, as I am learning to befriend impermanence, to admit into our belonging all the broken places—I offer this site as a reference library for the full circumference of all suffering and sweetness. And for our two homes: in oneself and in the Beloved, the beyond. 

With love, 

kcmp