A note from Erin:
Dear beautiful human,
I’m sending warm greetings your way from our linden blossom-scented porch. The intoxicating, fleeting scent! I wish I could send it along with these greetings. I hope you are finding many ways to keep returning to your vast and tender heart and grow intimacy with the present moment. Such an important orientation, especially during these difficult times. For me, when the overwhelm sweeps in after I read the news, it helps so much to make these moves: to find greater intimacy with just this – feeling this breath, softening my belly and dropping my shoulders, really hearing the songs of the finches, to drop into deeper intimacy with this being here. At the same time, it helps me to find more spaciousness – to zoom out to the deep-time view and the openness that can hold it all. And then to come home to my heart, and, as kindred spirit Lisa Olivera wrote so beautifully, “Stay devoted to compassion, even when it isn’t reciprocated. Stay devoted to compassion, even when it is misinterpreted. Stay devoted to compassion, even when it at times feels more like a performance than an embodied felt sense. Stay devoted to compassion, even when you will inevitably forget, only to remember you’re just human, just an animal with impulses and history and patterns and needs and longings like everyone else, just ever-practicing.”
Back in the summer of 2011, my extended family gathered at our traditional place – a campground and cabins on the edge of Nolin Lake in Kentucky, near Elizabethtown, where my grandparents lived my whole life. Four generations strong, it was the first reunion with great grandbabies present. My son had recently taken his first steps. Two cousins of mine had littles close to his age. I loved being able to take my babe for a dip in that beloved water body, then to hold him in my arms as we rode around the lake on my grandparents’ pontoon boat, watching him be lulled into a nap by the intoxicating combination of waves, breeze, a warm towel, and the boat motor’s hum.
In his 80s, my grandfather, aka Papa, had begun to take banjo lessons some months before the reunion. Three of my cousins are gifted musicians and they brought instruments to the lake. I’ll never forget the look of astonishment and delight on Papa’s face when my cousins talked him into jamming with them. They played guitar or ukelele as he played the banjo. He was a long time piano player who had never before played banjo with other people. As they spontaneously played, with wide eyes and a big smile, he exclaimed, “WE’RE DOING IT!!!” His expression reminded me of that moment when a kid finds themselves astonished to be riding their bike without someone holding it up, keeping their balance for the very first time. (You can see a photo of this moment below.)
I cried at the sweetness. Now it’s 14 years later and while I’ve been back to Kentucky, I haven’t been back to Nolin Lake. Both of my beloved grandparents and one dear uncle have passed and are now ancestors whose photos sit on my ancestor altar. Many more great grand babies have been added to the family. One cousin is divorced and all the others are now married. Things keep changing. Yet that moment of being together at the campground, laughing, listening to their music, loving each other up, seeing Papa’s beaming face, astonished to be making music with his grandsons, and that exclamation of, “WE’RE DOING IT!!!” is a moment I carry forever in my heart.
Last month during one of the Women Embodied groups I’m lucky enough to facilitate, we were going around the circle checking in with each other. One woman, who has been devoted to anti-war activism especially around the horrors unfolding in Gaza, shared what was in her heart.
Let me tell you that in these groups (as is the case in most gatherings I facilitate) it’s simply a part of the culture that we aim to live into these wise words from Francis Weller: “The task of a mature human being is to hold grief in one hand and gratitude in the other and to be stretched large by them.” That range of human experience is fully welcomed.
While she was deeply connected to and heartbroken by the situation in the Middle East, she shared with wide eyes and a heartfelt smile that she was so pleased by how much she found herself also able to hold gratitude and revel in recent good time spent with her adult children. She was appreciating the beauty of the spring blossoming and while heartbroken and concerned, she was not collapsing in overwhelm and despair. She had that same look on her face as Papa did in the moment of playing music with my cousins. I told her the story of the family reunion and the banjo jam, because what he said about jamming was true about her holding grief and gratitude and being stretched large by them. “WE’RE DOING IT!!!” I said. I think everyone in the room had misty eyes.
What a miracle that we can do it: Hold both. Be stretched. Grow larger and more capacious instead of more small-minded or tight-hearted, even during difficult times.
It takes practice. Steeping in the company of others who are also dedicated to growing into the stretch is good medicine.
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