And when I found out I had been living a parallel life, a dishonest life, it crushed me. But I have often thought that it made me a nicer person, I really do. When you are truly humbled, that can happen. I have come to notice this in life. You can become bigger or bitter, this is what I think. And as a result of that pain, I became bigger.

Yes, this is a story about grief. But it is not just about grieving the loss of a loved one. It is about grieving a host of large and small losses, the very rhythms of life. In this book Elizabeth Strout takes us to one couple’s experience of the pandemic in a small coastal town in Maine where they have escaped their home in New York.

Too soon? I pondered as I read the blurb on the inside cover. Maybe…

But I brought it home anyway. And as I was reading I found myself lying in bed one night trying to remember my experience of 2020. It’s a way that I handle grief, I noticed after Roy died. Counting down the years of my life and assembling a linear sort of memory bank of experiences. With the pandemic, I tried counting down the months. But I could not place events in any orderly, linear timeframe. I could only construct isolated memories: a drive-by birthday party for my mom, working on a book with my writing partner, reviewing edits over the phone, a collective Easter celebration on TV watching Andre Bocelli perform and sweeping views of empty streets in Italy.

Did that really happen? I pondered to myself, though I know that it did. And what, in fact, happened in my own life? Coming on the heels of grieving Roy, I believe now that it was simply an extension of the unreality I had already been experiencing as my brain continued to put new pieces of my life in place.

Strout’s story of the pandemic illustrates not just the external circumstances of the event, but also the internal struggles I believe we shared as a global community. She takes us into the psyche of two pretty normal seniors who are invited by the pandemic to ponder their own mortality, along with concerns about their adult children. We watch them forge new, unexpected relationships in social distanced outdoor spaces. We watch them live through four seasons in a climate and community very different from the one they called normal. And we watched how two people who had grown apart, came back together in a humbler, kinder, more authentic and honest way.

The protagonist Lucy, who is also the storyteller, gives us a glimpse of her insomniac mental wanderings:

I stayed awake and I thought: We all live with people—and places—and things—that we have given great weight to. But we are weightless, in the end.

People complained about February; it was cold and snowy and oftentimes wet and damp and people were ready for spring. But for Cindy the light of the month had always been like a secret, and it remained a secret even now. Because in February the days were really getting longer and you could see it, if you really looked. You could see how at the end of each day the world seemed cracked open and the extra light made its way across the stark trees, and promised. It promised, that light, and what a thing that was…she could see this even now, the gold of the last light opening the world.

In most novels, the protagonist is the very movement of the plot. How that character creates their own problems, then tries to resolve them, is what sweeps us into the narrative and keeps us reading. But in Olive, Again the protagonist Olive Kittridge, is simply the hub, steady, present, observing and responding to the whirlwind of lives around her. I am beginning to think this is how life in my senior years feels. The Christmas letters shift from vignettes about my activites, to commentary about those of my children and granddaughter. It feels like lives around me are in constant motion, and I am the wayside oasis where they stop for a rest, a piece of advice, some comfort or reassurance.

Though Olive seems to be anything BUT the supportive balast in the lives of those around her, with her irritable responses, rough criticism and brusque manner, in this story, we see how she navigates not only her own life, but the many lives she encounters in her seemingly mundane existence as a senior citizen. She is a retired math teacher and her past students are adults now. She has quite a few chance (and not-so-chance) encounters with them.

How Strout creates simple characters with familiar lives, and observes them with a mix of humor and poignant painful suffering is a lesson I want to learn. I laugh out loud when I read about the couple who have divided their living room down the middle with yellow construction tape, each watching heir own television with escalating volume. And at the same time I see the pain and struggle that has pushed them to this solution, the daily irritations and distancing that has left them talking to each other through their daughter.

Each of the characters, from Olive’s view, are met with equal amounts of humor, distain, and compassion, including herself. Dealing with mixed families, ailing neighbors and retiriing professionals, Olive’s is a practial, matter-of-fact comfort. To a young neighbor with a 50/50 diagnosis who asks her if she is afraid to die, Olive says:

Oh, Godfrey, there were days I’d have liked to have been dead. But I’m still scared of dying. You know, Cindy, if you should be dying, if you do die, the truth is—we’re all just a few steps behind you. Twenty minutes behind you and that’s the truth.”

And each story somehow includes a beauty infused in the struggle. Says a woman, puzzling out her relationships with religion:

‘I’ve thought about this a lot. A lot. And here is the well, the phrase I’ve come up with, I mean just for myself, but this is the phrase that goes through my head. I think our job—maybe even our duty—is to—’ her voice became calm, adultlike. ‘to bear the burden of the mystery with as much grace as we can.’

The further on I find myself in this journey, the more I know that this is true.

When she saw the FOR SALE sign in front of the house she and Henry had built for Christopher, it was as though splinters of wood were shoved into her heart.

Oh, the beautiful writing of Elizabeth Strout. I resisted reading her work for years, while she was busy acheiving critical acclaim and a Pulitzer Prize among many others. Finally, when listening to an interview with an author I admired, she said she thought Elizabeth Strout was the best writer she’d read.

Really?

So I exchanged my resistance for curiosity and dove into her early writing. Perhaps when I’d first read her work I hadn’t had the life experience to appreciate what Elizabeth Strout did with her writing, and the brilliance of it. Perhaps I didn’t have the experience plodding along as a writer to see her genius.

But this time, I did.

I didn’t want to like her protagonist Olive Kitteridge. I didn’t want to identify with her. She was an aging, cratchety, no-nonsense former math teacher in a small town. She was still surrounded by her former students, now on their own trajectory into middle age.

But I fell in love with her. I thought about her all the time. When one of the stories Strout included in the book had Olive only in the periphery, I read quickly through it, rushing to get back to Olive. I think, now, a lot about why I fell in love with Olive. And I decided it is because she is a character I can trust. She doesn’t seem to have the capacity to play emotional games, which usually puts her on the fringe of the inner circle. But I know I can trust that what she says is really what she is thinking. And what she is thinking is a pretty good barometer of what she is feeling. Her feelings reside deep in her character. And just when I think Olive will not be able to absorb any more pain from her family, or her former students, she works her thoughts like a cleanly resolved quadratic equation and finds a response which makes me ache with the pain lying beneath it.

I do love Olive Kitteridge. And though I am much more a “wear it on your sleeve” type when it comes to emotion, I also identify with her. Aging has its own indignities. But also it’s own dignities. And we as humans get to choose which we will embrace. Olive kept showing me how to embrace the dignity.

After all, life was a gift—one of those things about getting older was knowing that so many moments weren’t just moments, they were gifts. No matter what people’s lives might hold…still and all, people were compelled to celebrate because they knew, somehow, in their different ways, that life was a thing to celebrate.

I am not sure if the word orphan can be applied to a woman in her forties, but I felt very, very alone.

As I move through my third signifcant experience of grief, with the loss of my mother, I am especially struck by how this one is so incredibly different from losing my dad and Roy. This time, Mary-Frances O’Connor’s personal and professional work in The Grieving Brain has helped me better understand why my spirit, mind, and body responds to each loss the way they do. O’Connor is a professor of psychology at the University of Arizona and studies how the brain experiences grief. She artfully takes a very complicated science regarding neurons and synapses and makes it easy to grasp. She infuses research with personal stories of her own experience of loss to draw her research from the lab into lived experience.

I especially like her explanation of accepting, a step in the grieving process which seems to be required in order to remake a healthy life after loss.

The key to accepting is not doing anything with what you are experiencing; not askiing what your feelings mean, or how long they will last. Accepting is not about pushing them away and saying that you cannot bear it. It is not about believing that you are now a broken person, since no one can bring your parents back and you will never get another set. It is about noticing how it feels at that moment, letting your tears come, and then letting them go. Knowing that the moment of grief will overwhelm you, feeling its familiar knot in your throat, and knowing that it will recede. Like the rain.

For this latest loss, her work brought clarity to a grief practice I had been stumbling around with, but hadn’t yet been able to articulate. It is a practice of pendulating between the memories of the past (which, she says can be healing, but can also lead to ruminating) and imagination about my future life. I was excellent at the memories of the past part. And the very nature of life forced me to consider my present and future (even if not with a lot of imagination). But after reading her description, I could really catch when memories of the past tipped over into ruminating and caused me undue pain. And this time, I have imagined a new life for myself with family and growing friendships, and could begin to use my imagination to engage there. Pendulation. Back and forth.

After Roy died, I had a quote from Trevor Noah done in calligraphy and hung it in my bedroom: “You can only dream of what you can imagine.”

Now I believe that imagination is one of the key faculties for transforming the grieving experience into a growing and thriving life.

By Viola Davis

The question still echoes, how did I claw my way out? There is no out. Every painful memory, every mentor, every friend and foe served as a chisel, a leap pad that has shaped “ME!” The imperfect but blessed sculpture that is Viola is still growing and still being chiseled. My elixir? I’m no longer ashamed of me. I own everything that has ever happened to me. The parts that were a source of shame are actually my warrior fuel. I see people…in a way that is hyperfocused because of my past. I’m an artist because there’s no separation from me and every human being that has passed through the world including my mom.

Actor Viola Davis’ life is like a magnifying glass, that brought into focus and enlarged a story that resonates with every person who has suffered. I admit I can’t compare my suffering to hers. I want to say, oh her experiences were wayyyyy worse than mine. Viola grew up poor. I grew up in a stable middle class family. Viola grew up black. I grew up white. Viola grew up witnisseing and experiencing abuses that made her fear for her life and the safety of her loved ones. The source of my childhood fears was much more tame in comparison. But by showing me an experience of enlarged and magnified suffering in her own life, Viola helped me resonate with the reverberations of my own struggles, my own shame, and my growing ownership and appreciation for all that has made me who I am today.

As an artist, that’s what she brought to the stage, screen, and now to this book.

She used Joseph Campbell’s mono-myth of the Hero’s journey to make sense of her life, which also reminded me of my own view of my journey through that lense. Viola Davis has known more success in her acting career than 99% of the actors out there. But the point of her book is that this success is not what defines her. That what defines her is the journey that allowed her to find a career where she could take every scrap of suffering, see it, accept it, find forgiveness, and redemption and use it for good. And that’s healing.

To me, Viola is a super woman figure to have not only survived her childhood, but also to have integrated it into her adult life. I won’t use the word “overcome” as I don’t think she would describe it that way. She is also everywoman. Because reading her book makes me feel akin to her. That she knows my suffering because she, too has suffered. That she knows my struggle toward growth and healing, and finding myself, because she, too, understands that it’s an everyday project, not a destination.

Along with harrowing memories, and joyfull successes, Davis describes the real life experience of being an actor. She showed that the glamour we see on award shows is the very tip of a deep iceberg of sacrifice, hustle, hard work, and luck. Show shows the full reality of the experience, not just the dressed up, cleaned up media version.

It’s a hard, painful read. But it’s also an incredible inspiration. I found that when I could hang in there with Viola to read about her sufferings, I could also engage with the joy that she emanates like light shining in the darknes.

Bird and Margaret’s world isn’t exactly our world, but it isn’t not ours, either. Most of the events and occurrences in this book do not have direct analogues, but I drew inspiration from many real-life events, both past and current—and in some cases, things I’d imagined had become realities by the time the novel was done.

~From the Author’s Note

Haunting. That’s the word I kept searching for as I moved deeper into this story about a young boy’s quest to find his mother. I was surprised to see Celeste Ng move into dystopia as a genre. Of her other books, I had only read Little Fires Everywhere, very contempory and very much about modern culture. This story is haunting, and writing it had to take courage. The story is Ng’s imagining of an America existing in a twisted sort of fascism based on the double-speak we see coming from politicians and media pundits today. The most haunting thing about it was how Ng shows us that what we think as events relegated to a dystopian future, are in fact already happening and have happened in many parts of our country today. (No spoiler alerts!) Her dystopian world is close enough to home to raise the hair on the back of my neck.

But it’s also beautiful story. Ng somehow manages to create, within her dystopian world, a story about connection. And the way stories connect us. And how critical it is for us as individuals, and as separate but intermingled cultures to tell stories and to keep stories alive.

There is a lot of room for allegory and healing symbolism here. Most poignant for me is the yearning for “Mother” both as archetype and felt experience. Do mothers and children communicate energetically when they are separate in time or space? Or even through the curtain of death? As the protagonist, Bird, searches for his mother, we see and feel the fear, longing, tenderness, and love between a mother and child. And I am reminded that yes, although it feels to me as though this love must originate from the mother, I know from experience, it also originates from the child. Sometimes I am astounded at the depth of my children’s love for me. These are the messages echoing from Ng’s story.

She shows us how that story connects us. She leds readers down a mysterious road anticipating the violence expected in our culture. And then she takes a right turn to show us how love and story, not violence, are what redeems us and keeps us connected. No happy endings here, but definitely satisfying. Oh so satisfying.

My emotional lineage ends with you

Since my mother’s death, I have been thinking about lineage and ancestry. My namesake, my mother’s grandmother, had thirteen children. Eight were girls. As I grew into adulthood I referred to them as “The Matriarchy.” My family moved away from my parents’ home city of Chicago, so I would see the “Aunts” only so often. But their presence loomed large in conversations, family stories and Christmas cards. According to legend they were strong women, usually managing hard-working, hard-drinking husbands and a brood of kids. They reminded me of the adage from My Greek Wedding, “the man may be the head of the family but the woman is the neck. And the neck turns the head.”

I’ve been collecting old photos and marinating in memory. But I had not thought of the term “emotional lineage” until I read Isabel Allende’s newest novel.

Her story of a life spanning two world-wide epidemics, cultural revolution, and brutal bloody regime changes is far more dramatic than my lineage of farmers, blue collar workers and a few captains of industry. But In reading the history of Violeta’s life—the painting Allende creates of emotional lineage—I saw a road map. I observed, step by step, how she emotionally navigated her journey in and around that of her culture, her family, and her environment.

I pondered her phrase “emotional lineage” and what Violeta meant in acknowledging an endpoint. I thought about the emotional lineage I received, and what I hope to leave my children. How new science about epigenetics suggests to us that emotional experiences create physical change which doesn’t, in fact, end with a single generation. It is passed down.

When I had a young family, I remember reading and hearing that my generation would not be able to improve on the prosperity of our parent's generation - the American dream. I remember thinking at that time, and I still believe this, that we may not improve on the prosperity, but hopefully we can improve the psycho/emotional/spiritual quality of our children’s lives. For I, as a young woman, had at my disposal resources in therapy and mental health support that my mother’s generation, and my grandmother’s couldn’t imagine or believe they would ever need.

My emotional lineage is one of women navigating marriage and family to create what they knew to be a better life. In my family, my generation was the first where women attended college. We were likely the first where leaving a difficult marriage by divorce was ever an option. Am I any better off emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, than the lineage I inherited? I like to think so, also recognizing that I stand on the shoulders of women who invested in the hopes and dreams they held for their children in the best way they knew how. And I hope that the lessons I have learned about healing emotional wounds, cultivating personal empowerment, and engaging healthier relationships are passed down to my children.

At the end of her life, Violeta mourned her losses and limitations, came to terms with what she wasn’t able to change or save, and savored the experiences of truth and beauty in her life. I hope to be able to do the same.

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]]>VioletaBody/Mind/SpiritCreativityChristine ChristmanMon, 14 Nov 2022 22:36:00 +0000https://www.christinechristman.com/blog/s6haew9h265cxx2htppbmxtnpkcy7j5376535ae4b0f28da14e24b2:53dd5696e4b0731d05b9a05f:635acac4bf6485031adc6299

By Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

A few quotes in the opening of this book that hit me right where I am living….

Happiness, in fact, is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated, and defended privately by each person. People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us can come to being happy.

For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue…as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a course greater than oneself.

The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.

Flow is a word that is used quite a bit these days: in the athletic world (being in the flow during a great athletic performance, or just a good run), the creative world (the flow of experiencing the muse working through us) and the world of science and invention (that breakthrough experience which seems to defy material expectations).

In this book Csikszentmihalyi takes a very deep dive into research on consciousness, psychic energy, focus and other aspects of what he calls “flow” or the “phenomenology of enjoyment.” He identifies eight components to this phenomenology. He says “when people reflect on how it feels when their experience is most positive, they mention at least one, and often all, of the following:”

1. The experience usually occurs when we confront tasks we have a chance of completing.

2. We must be able to concentrate on what we are doing.

3. The concentration is usually possible because the task undertaken has clear goals and…

4. The task provides opportunities for immediate feedback.

5. One acts with a deep but effortless involvement that removes from awareness the worries and frustrations of everyday life.

6. Enjoyable experiences allow people to exercise a sense of control over their actions.

7. Concern for the self disappears, yet paradoxically the sense of self emerges stronger after the flow experience is over.

8. The sense of the duration of time is altered; hours pass by in minutes, and minutes can stretch out to seem like hours.

“The combination of all these elements causes a sense of deep enjoyment that is so rewarding people feel that expending a great deal of energy is worthwhile simply to be able to feel it. “

This book is a guide to practicing these elements in our lives. It is part research, part anecdote and lots of inspiration for a creative and enjoyable life. I will return to it over and over.

Elizabeth Zott held grudges too. Except her grudges were mainly reserved for a patriarchal society founded on the idea that women were less. Less capable. Less intelligent. Less inventive. A society that believed men went to work and did important things—discovered planets, developed products, created laws—and women stayed at home and raised children. She didn’t want children—she knew this about herself—but she also knew that plenty of other women did want children and a career. And what was wrong with that? Nothing. It was exactly what men got.

In just a few sentences on page 14 of this novel we see what author Bonnie Garmus is up to. But unlike other books I have read on the subject, both fiction and non-fiction, Garmus uses a disarming and unapologetic humor to point out the absurdities and, crimes, perpetuated in the patriarchal system.

Her protagonist, Elizabeth Zott has the lack of emotional affect one often expects from a scientist. She is a chemist who also has the gift of saying exactly what she thinks, not swayed by the expectations of friends, coworkers or the culture at large. Yes, it gets her into trouble. A lot. Which also makes my sympathize with her. A lot.

The fun relational connections in the story are woven through like a web providing the mystery about her story which kept me reading. The absurdities of living in a patriarchal culture are wrought with such obvious examples and humor they had me laughing and nodding throughout. The suffering is written with such empathy that it had me weeping for her pain, seeing my own pain, and acknowledging yet again the pain which patriarchy inflicts on us all.

But the saddest aspect of this book is that it is set in the 1950’s and 60’s. Perhaps it is easier to stomach these realities when we can laugh at them as part of our past. Yes, we have made progress. But much of what I read about, nodded my head at, and laughed about is still pervasive in our culture—70 years later.

Here’s a few subjects she tackles:

Suspicion about the reasons a woman is successful in an organization:

She tried to talk with them, but each gave her the cold shoulder in their own way, and later, as she was walking by the lounge, she overheard the same few grousing about her—about how she took herself so seriously, how she thought she was better than any of them, how she’d refused dates from all of them, even the single men. And how the only way she could have possibly gotten her master’s from UCLA in organic chemistry was the hard way—the word “hard” being accompanied by rude gestures and tight laughter. Who did she think she was anyway?

Career and parenting roles in cultures:

She’d recently read about some country where both parents worked and took part in raising the children. Where was that, again? Sweden? She couldn’t remember. But the upshot was, it functioned very well. Productivity was higher; families were stronger. She saw herself living in such a society. A place that didn’t always automatically mistake her for a secretary, a place where, when she presented her findings in a meeting, she didn’t have to brace herself for the men who would invariably talk over her, or worse, take credit for her work. Elizabeth shook her head. When it came to equality, 1952 was a real disappointment.

Sexual Harassment :

Until the day he called her into his office, ostensibly to talk about her admittance to his doctoral program, but instead shoving his hand up her skirt. Furious, she forcibly removed it, then threatened to report him.

“To whom?” he laughed. Then he admonished her for being “no fun” and swatted her bottom, demanding that she go fetch his coat from his office closet, knowing that when she opened the door she would find it lined with pictures of topless women…

The chain of cultural oppression for women:

“The problem,” she asserted, “is that half the population is being wasted. It’s not just that I can’t get the supplies I need to complete my work, it’s that women can’t get the education they need to do what they’re meant to do. And even if they do attend college, it will never be a place like Cambridge. Which means they won’t be offered the same opportunities nor afforded the same respect. They’ll start at the bottom and stay there. Don’t even get me started on pay. And all because they didn’t attend a school that wouldn’t admit them in the first place.”

What passed for “wisdom” handed down from mother to daughter:

Her mother had always insisted that the measure of a woman was how well she married. “By the way, Elizabeth, when you do get engaged, insist on the biggest rock possible. That way, if the marriage doesn’t work out, you can hock it.”

The double standard around pregnancy in the workplace:

“I’m confused,” [Elizabeth said]. “You’re firing me on the basis of being pregnant and unwed. What about the man?“

“What man? You mean Evans?” Donatti asked.

“Any man. When a woman gets pregnant outside of marriage, does the man who made her pregnant get fired too?”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“Would you have fired Calvin, for instance?

“Of course not!”

“If not, then, technically, you have no grounds to fire me.”

Donatti looked confused. What? “Of course, I do,” he stumbled. “Of course, I do! You’re the woman! You’re the one who got knocked up!”

“That’s generally how it works, but you do realize that a pregnancy requires a man’s sperm.”

“Miss Zott, I’m warning you. Watch your language.”

Assumed authority of the masculine:

“I bought it for the title,” Elizabeth admitted. “Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care. There seems to be so much. nonsense about how one raises a baby—so. much over-complication.”

“Funny, isn’t it?” Mrs. Sloan said. “A man writes a book about things of which he has absolutely no first-hand knowledge—childbirth and its aftermath, I mean—and yet: boom. Bestseller. My suspicion? His wife wrote the whole thing, then put his name on it. A man’s name gives it more authority, don’t you think?”

“No,” Elizabeth said.

The irony of perceptions v reality around women’s experiences in the workplace:

“I think you might be the only woman at Hastings—out of three thousand employees, mind you—who isn’t a secretary. I can’t imagine how that could have happened. And yet you still tried to pass yourself off as a man. Is there any level to which you won’t stoop? By the way, do you know why the institute says we ladies aren’t a good investment? It’s because we’re always running off and having babies. Like you did.”

“I was fired,” Elizabeth said.

And if you’ve read this far, you really need to support Bonnie Garmus and go buy the book! Because while it is set in the 1950’s and yes, we have seen progress, it’s still a pretty good road map for the feminine experience in the workplace.

And the secret sauce? It’s chock full of messages, both humorous and poignant to debunk that deeply embedded belief that women are less. When I finished I wanted to stand up and cheer. Oh, and there’s a dog.

~Jacob Tobia

I would like to step into the ring with the other millions who are thanking Jacob Tobia for writing this honest and vulnerable account of their experience discovering their gender nonconforming self. (I have to go back and change “his” to “their” almost every time because using pronouns of choice is a new skill for me!)

When I first picked up the book to read for our book group, I admit I felt resistance. Resistance, I suppose, because I didn’t want another thrashing, as a white woman of privilege, from yet another marginalized person. Shame on me. It took just a few pages for Jacob to break down my resistance. They are really good at that, because they are so vulnerable and honest about the journey to understanding their self-hood. While I cannot even pretend to relate to the gender nonconforming experience, I can relate to one of Jacob’s other experiences: not conforming to a spiritual community which I wanted to call home.

Jacob’s is a book of many many layers. But at its core is the struggle for self-hood and self-expression in a world where conformity can be, sometimes quite literally, required for survival. Examples of blatant discrimination, harassment and abuse are, of course, horrible. Those actions are easy for most of us to name as horrible. But most discrimination is of the micro-aggression type, a constant abrasion to the soul. The deepest gift of this book is how Jacob walks us right into the subtle micro-agressions of discrimination that the dominate culture doesn’t see. Like the simple act of dividing a small group for conversation into men and women. And Jacob does it with an emotional intelligence and wry sense of humor that, while not letting anyone off the hook, invites the reader into the story as if we are their close friend.

They reminded me that to truly be myself is the most risky, vulnerable action I can take in my life, and that I need to practice and practice because the bar keeps moving. While they spoke to gender conformity, I believe this is one example of conformity to a larger system whether it be spiritual, intellectual or emotional. The tricky part, as Jacob emphasizes over and over, is the ability for anyone to really know who they are. They encouraged me that it’s a journey. That in all aspects of self, my sense of who I am is fluid and changing, if I am committed to growth and change as a human being. So my expression of that self also shifts and changes. Culture in the form of friends, family, work associates, want us to be conforming, predictable and static. It creates a false sense of safety.

By sharing their own struggle for self-awareness and self-expression, they encouraged me to continue the search for my own.

And that I need to practice using they/their as the correct pronouns. Not necessarily proud of that.

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]]>SissyChristine ChristmanMon, 24 Oct 2022 22:41:03 +0000https://www.christinechristman.com/blog/rawmdb28zg5pmp3xdf5ja6lwkre3cd5376535ae4b0f28da14e24b2:53dd5696e4b0731d05b9a05f:635182955b74323d01f28389We live in language like a fish lives in water…

Something to consider…how powerful language is to both shape and influence our lives.

If the arrow button doesn’t work you can use this link: https://youtu.be/6CEEyB2Z4xU

Tragedy and trauma are not guarantees for a transformational spiritual experience, but they are opportunities. They are invitations to sit in the fire and allow it to transfigure us.

How does one become a mystic? I’ve never asked that question before. I guess I always imagined they sprang that way full blown from their mothers’ wombs. Mystics were and are always meant to be mystics, right?

Well, in telling her story of suffering and transformation, Mirabai Starr showed me one path to the mystic life. (Even her naming was a mystical experience). By telling the story of her childhood, her personal journey, and her suffering, Starr showed me one beautiful portrait of the human journey within, and the resulting expression of spirituality.

And it wasn’t through what I would call traditional spiritual channels.

Early in her life, Starr’s mother set upon exploring alternative lifestyles. Not just the dusty secondary research many academics undertake in the tidy stacks of the libraries. Starr’s parents sold everything they owned and traveled to experience communal living in a variety of locations from Belize to the Yucatan Peninsula to New Mexico. As an adolescent and young adult, Starr rubbed shoulders with Ram Dass and Pema Chodron. The adults in her life were the people exploring and experimenting with psilocibyn, marijuana and various types of family constellations. All the while she explored and tried to understand her own mystical experiences and spirituality in a world that seemed quick to interpret it all for her.

She shows us, in this book, the raw material of her spiritual transformation. I am especially taken with her tenacity at weaving these tragedies, traumas, and everyday confusions into a beautiful tapestry of bringing new translations to mystical writings, speaking and leading retreats on the mystics and contemplative life.

Richard Rohr says in his book Everything Belongs:

Religion, as the very word, re-ligio, indicates, is the task of putting our divided realities back together: human and divine, male and female, heaven and earth, sin and salvation, mistake and glory. The mystics are those who put it together very well.

I have gratitude for Mirabai and her willingness to show us how she does this in the daily, earth-bound circumstances of her life. How she does the work of alchemy, turning the dross to gold.

By Anthony Doerr

Don’t be so quick to dismiss yourself. Sometimes the things we think are lost are only hidden, waiting to be rediscovered.

This is a story about stories. About a love of story. About how the love and life of a single story shows us the resilience and necessity of story itself. It suggests that the way stories are told will morph and change over time, but the essence of story is hard-wired into the human experience.

The book includes several very interesting characters, but the protagonist, it seems, it a story that travels through time.

“The 2019 discovery of the late Greek prose tale Cloud Cuckoo Land inside a badly corrupted codex in the Vatican Library briefly set the world of Greco-Roman scholarship aflame. Alas, what archivists were able to salvage of the text left plenty to be desired: twenty-four mangled folios, each damaged to some degree. Chronology confuses and lacunae abound.”

With this introduction we move back in time to the story’s origins circa 1400 Bulgaria, and forward to its existence in a digital future.

I found Doerr’s fantastical fable endearing in its obvious love of stories, libraries and and the printed word. I also felt a disturbed by his futuristic world where print takes a back seat to VR and other technology-driven access points to information and experience.

This story is so rich and full of messages, that I couldn’t find a single, coherent theme to feature. So I hope to, instead, offer a few quotes as a glimpse into the breadth of thinking about stories that Doerr invited me into.

He begins by showing us beautifully how the love of story takes root in the heart. Set in 1400’s Bulgaria, we are introduced to a character’s thirst for letters, words and knowledge

As she sweeps the workroom floor, as she lugs another roll of fabric or another bucket of charcoal, as she sits in the workroom beside Maria, fingers numb, breath pluming over the silk, she practices her letters on the thousand blank pages of her mind. Each sign signifies a sound, and to link sounds is to form words, and to link words is to construct worlds. Weary Ulysses sets forth upon his raft from the case of Calypso; the spray of the ocean wets his face; the shadow of the sea-god, kelp streaming from his blue hair, flashes beneath the surface.

He claims books as the “Repository of Memories”:

The wind lifts one of the quires from his fingers and Anna chases it down and brushes it off and returns it to his lap. Licinius rests his eyelids a long time. “Repository,” he finally says, “you know this word? A resting place. A text—a book—is a resting place for the memories of people who have lived before. A way for the memory to stay fixed after the soul has traveled on.

He suggests that books sustain us in the worst of suffering:

Singular and plural, noun stems and verb cases: Rex’s enthusiasm for ancient Greek carries them through the worst hours. One February night, after dar, huddled around the fire in the kitchen shed, Rex uses his piece of charcoal to scratch two lines of Homer onto a board and passes it over …. Through gaps in the shed walls, stars hang above the mountains. Zeno feels the cold at his back, the light pressure of Rex’s frame against his own: they are hardly more than skeletons…..

Zeno breathes, the fire sputters, the walls of the shed fall away, and in a crease of his mind, unreachable by the guards, hunger, or pain, the meaning of the verse ascends through the centuries:

“That’s what the gods do,” he says, ‘they spin threads of ruin through the fabric of our lives, all to make a song for generations to come.” Rex looks at the Greek on the board, at Zeno, back at the Greek. He shakes his head. “Well, that’s just brilliant, Absolutely bloody brilliant.”

He points to the fragility of books:

One evening at the end of the month, walking the eastern section of the city, scrounging for food, Anna is rounding the great weathered bulk of the Hagia Sophia when she stops. Between the houses, tucked against the harbor, the priory on the rock stands silhouetted against the sea and it is on fire. Flames flicker in crumbled windows, and a pillar of black smoke twists into the sky.

Bells ring—whether to urge people to fight the fire or for another purpose, she could not say. Perhaps they ring simply to exhort the people to carry on. An abbot, eyes closed, shuffles past carrying an icon, trailed by two monks, each with a smoking censer, and the smoke from the priory lingers in the dusk. She thinks of those dank, rotting halls, the moldering library beneath its broken arches. The codex back in her cell.

Day after day, the tall Italian said, year after year, time wipes the old books from the world.

One bad-tempered abbot, the tall scribe said, one clumsy friar, one invading barbarian, an overturned candle, a hungry worm—and all those centuries are undone. You can cling to this world for a thousand years and still be plucked out of it in a breath.

He plays with story and truth:

“Do you think it’s really true, Anna? A fish so large it could swallow ships whole?”

A mouse scrabbles across the stone and rises onto its hind legs and stands twitching its nose at her with its head cocked as though awaiting her answer. Anna thinks of the last time she sat with Licinius …, he wrote, mythos, a conversation, a talk, a legend from the darkness before the days of Christ.

“Some stories,” she says, “Can be both false and true at the same time.”

He shows us the many ways stories have traveled over time:

She wraps the old goatskin codex and the snuffbox in Maria’s hood and puts them in the bottom of Himerius’s sack. Then she sets the bread and salt fish on top and ties the bag shut. All she owns in the world.

Anna escaping with the codex.

As she nears the breakwater, she pauses to bail the skiff with the earthenware jug, as Himerius used to do. Somewhere inside the city walls, a glow rises: a sunrise in the wrong place and time. Strange how suffering can look beautiful if you get far enough away.

He invites us to grieve for lost stories:

Books have always seemed to him like clouds or trees, things that were just there, on the shelves at the Lakeport Public Library. But to know someone who made one? “Take the tragedies alone,” Rex is saying. “We know that at least one thousand of them were written and performed in Greek theaters in the fifth century B.C. You know how many we have left? Thirty-two. Seven of Aschylus’s eighty-one. Seven of Sophocles’s one hundred and twenty-three. Aristophanes wrote forty comedies that we know of—we have eleven, not all of them complete.

He warns us of the empty promises of technology:

How many times, as a little girl, was she assured that Sybil contained everything she could ever imagine, everything she would ever need? …all right here, the collected cultural and scientific output of human civilization nested inside the strange filaments of Sybil at the heart of the ship. The premier achievement of human history, they said, the triumph of memory over the obliterating forces of destruction and erasure.

But it wasn’t true. Sybil couldn’t stop a contagion from spreading through the crew. She couldn’t save Zeke or Dr. Pori or Mrs. Lee or anybody else, it seems. Sybil still doesn’t know if it’s safe for Konstance outside of Vault One.

There are things that Sybil doesn’t know. Sybil doesn’t know what it meant to be held by your father inside the leafy green twilight of Farm 4, or how it felt to sift through your mother’s button bag and wonder about the provenance of each button.

He illuminates the healing power of story:

One morning in Anna’s twenty-fifth winter, on a night cold enough to freeze the water across the top of the kettle, her youngest son descends into fever. His eyes smolder in their sockets, and he soaks his clothes with sweat. She sits on the stack of rugs where they sleep, puts sthe sick boy’s head in her lap, and strokes his hair, and Omeir paces, clenching and unclenching his fists. Finally he fills the lamp, lights it, and goes out, and returns covered with snow. From his coat he produces the bundle wrapped in waxed oxhide and hands it to her with great solemnity and she understands that he believes the book can save their son as he believes it saved them on their journey here more than a decade before.

Finally, he invites us into the cosmic potential of story:

Toward the end of her life [her] memories intermingle with memories of the stories she has loved: homesick Ulysses abandoning his raft in the storm and swimming toward the island of the Phoeacians, Aethon-the-donkey wrapping his soft lips around a stinging nettle, all times and all stories being one and the same in the end.

If you’ve read to the end, thanks! This is a long one. So is the book. I read it twice. It is a book to not only digest, but to also metabolize. To take in.

Perhaps we are in this world to search for love, find it and lose it, again and again. With each love, we are born anew, and with each love that ends we collect a new wound. I am covered with proud scars.

Isabel Allende is not afraid to go deep into her wounds. Her two memoirs My Invented Country, and this story of her relationship with her daughter, show that she learned, early in her life, to use the written word as a solace, a tonic and a balm to heal the wounds she encountered. Not so very different from the wounds we all encounter.

In this particular memoir, the wound runs deep. Perhaps as deep a wound as a mother can experience. Allende shares the story of losing her daughter to a crippling disease with vulnerability and honesty. After her adult daughter’s death, she says:

I am a raft without a rudder, adrift on a sea of pain. During these long months I have been peeling away like an onion, layer after layer, changing; I am not the same woman, my daughter has given me the opportunity to look inside myself and discover interior spaces—empty, dark, strangely peaceful—I had never explored before. These are holy places, and to reach them I must travel a narrow road blocked with many obstacles, vanquish the beasts of imagination that jump out in my path. When terror paralyzes me, I close my eyes and give myself to it with the sensation of sinking into storm-tossed waters, pounded by the fury of the waves. For a few instants that are a true eternity, I think I am dying, but little by little I comprehend that, despite everything, I am still alive because in the ferocious whirlpool there is a merciful shaft through which I can breathe. Unresisting, I let myself be dragged down, and gradually the fear recedes. I float into an underwater cave, and rest there for a while, safe from the dragons of despair. Raw and bleeding inside, I cry without tears, as animals may cry, but then the sun comes up and the cat comes to ask for her breakfast, and I hear Willie’s footsteps in the kitchen, and the odor of coffee spreads through the house. Another day is beginning, a day like any other.

How I would have benefitted from having this description when I was in the throes of grief. I read a great deal, but nowhere did I see a description of the experience that so completely echoed my own. Allende describes exactly how I felt on many occasions. Though I did not “give myself to it” as she did. I thrashed. I resisted. I flailed. I called in my support. But eventually. Eventually I found the courage that she describes here to give myself to it. I simply could not trust, at the time, in the ebb and flow of such ferocious emotions. I, as she did, thought I would die.

I find myself now six years out, having survived. The waves are much less frequent, much gentler now. I now know through experience that the ferocious intensity of the emotion would not be the end of me, but would instead birth me into a new person. I echo Allende’s realization; I am not the same woman.

A prolific writer, Allende also illuminates for me the priceless gift of writing. She allows me to watch her negotiate this most traumatic of experiences, thought by thought, event by event, response by response, along with her written exploration of it and journey into healing. I am so grateful.

Pollux kissed my hair and closed the bedroom door. He knew that sometimes I needed to retreat. I crawled naked into our king-size bed with the foam topper and the mattress pad pulled down over the foam. With carefully chosen pillows from the discount pillow store. With cheap white, but ever so white, sheets and pillowcases. When I creep into our bed, there is the joy and relief of a person entering a secret dimension. Here I shall be useless. The world can go on without me. Here I shall be held by love.

Who hasn’t, at one point or another, responded to the seemingly relentless pandemic in this way? I know I have. Let me repeat it….Here I shall be useless. The world can go on without me. Here I shall be held by love. In The Sentence, Louise Erdrich captured a host of pandemic moments which both reflected and expanded my own experience. My first thought, on reading the book summary was ‘too soon! too soon!” Aren’t writers supposed to wait a time after the event, to absorb, process and find meaning? Aren’t they supposed to take months, even years of reflection and craft it into a story that invokes memories?

The miracle of Erdrich’s latest novel is that she did all of that in the midst of the crisis. She tracked not only the pandemic but also the Minneapolis-based events of George Floyd’s death, it seemed, in real time. It was a weird experience watching the slow unfolding, in a handful of lives, of something that I also, had recently experienced, and yet in a completely different way. I kept saying to myself “I wonder when this is going to happen. Or that?”

Erdrich brought me into the setting of her own small bookstore, rendered herself the owner, and played out the pandemic in the lives of her employees. I was invited into one experience of Indigenous people, one experience of a person of color and even the bizarre experience of a ghostly presence. What happened to these people was indeed a microcosm of what happened to us all. An inability to believe in the encroaching threat. The uncertainty of it’s potential. The adjustment of even the smallest details of life (What is safety? Who should live where? What will we eat? How long?) that reverberated around the world.

Erdrich wove throughout, the suffering of the disenfranchised, the quantum weight of that suffering in times of extreme distress, and the hope of finding healing in connection.

This story has its mysteries and its loves. Comfortable love shaken, and confusing love sorted out. But it seems the greatest love is the protagonist (Tookie’s) love of books.

Threaded throughout the story is a “survival” list of her favorites. Now that alone is worth the price of the book. Because, while there are many coping tools available, in any crisis, I know for me books are always at the top of the list. Here’s a summary of the categories:

Ghost-Managing Books

Short Perfect Novels

Sailboat Table (you’ll have to read the book to get it)

Books for Banned Love

Indigenous Lives

Indigenous Poetry

Indigenous History and Nonfiction

Sublime Books

Tookie’s Pandemic Reading

Incarceration (Yes, there’s a reason. Again, you’ll have to read it)

As I move into my own transition to “post-pandemic” life, I also am experiencing and affirming for myself that the healing will be in human connection.

Love is the most wonderful discovery in the pantheon of human existence.

This is a book of delicately and intricately interwoven themes. Winman has used words to create a still life painting with objects representing love. Surely scores of artists have attempted such a thing using oils, pastels, acrylics. But Winman attempts to accomplish the unlikely task by painting with word images which evoke the imagination.

She would say, I guess, that she has filled the story with particular, well wraught, moments. A character describes them for us: “There are moments in life so monumental and still that the memory can never be retrieved without a catch to the throat or an interruption to the beat of the heart. Can never be retrieved without the rumbling disquiet of how close that moment came to not having happened at all.

Some activities are exalted, she says, others dismissed as lowly or humble or trivial, she thought. So who is it who decides?

The power of still life lies precisely in this triviality. Because it is a world of reliability. Of mutuality between objects that are there and people who are not. Paused time in ghostly absence….

Objects representing ordinary life reside in this space—plates, bowls, jars, pitchers, oyster knives. The shape of these objects has remained unchanged, as has their function. They have become fixed and unremarkable in this world of habit and we have taken them for granted. Yet within these forms something powerful is retained: Continuity. Memory. Family.

How did she do it? By introducing us, first to the mundane. The chance meeting of a soldier and an art historian in wartime Florence, Italy. A chance sexual encounter under a bridge in London resulting in an unwanted pregnancy. The meeting of two lovers, the pensione guest, and the laundry girl. A parrot and an old rusted out ambulance. A cherry tree and enough cigarettes to burn Rome. All of these mundane encounters and objects set beside renaissance treasures rescued during wartime, the sensual experience of eating and drinking in Florence, the poetic explorations of the heart.

Winman is saying, and I agree with her, that the most sublime aspects of life live right alongside and within the most mundane. When we can be present enough within that mundane space, and allow the continuity its place, we can engage with the infinite flow of love and beauty. Because every great work of art is really just stopping long enough to be present with the mundane and find it’s sublime expression.

And there are themes. Themes as old as humanity, but revived once again in this magic of her story.

Theme: Love

In the time it took for them to return to the pensione, the most extraordinary shift had taken place within those tired, judgmental walls: that of love preceding them. It had crept ahead, scattering benevolence and joy. The heavy mahogany furniture acquired an Italian flair, and the cockney signora’s aitches, as rare as a Marian apparition, made an unexpected appearance. Stew had been taken off the evening menu once again, and even Reverend Hyndesight practiced compassion by including Mr. Collins in an upcoming visit to the opera. And Miss Everly? Simply put, she wrote her best poem in years. The weather, too, was affected by the tenderness of that sweet embrace. The sun was reenergized, and the warmth of its long arm encroached upon autumn’s flimsy grasp; stars shone brighter, and even a full moon declared itself a honey

Love was resplendent that day. And when the light was angled right across Piazza Santa Croce, one could almost believe that Dante smiled when he heard a young woman called Evelyn whisper to one called Livia, You are my teacher and my author.

Theme: Elusive beginnings and endings.

It’s always been quite hard to know—to pinpoint, let’s say—where one’s unique story really begins. Does it really start at the moment of birth, or with those who came before? Instilling, distilling, in one’s veins the lived life, the unlived life, the regrets, the joys, as effortlessly, as dubiously one might say, as they hand down a certain walk (you to me) or a frown (you to me) or limp, mousy hair (Mother to me). If this is so, then my story starts with you. What I want to say is, you have handed me your affliction and its accompanying power.

Theme: Florence the city. Florence the character. Florence the impression and imprint.

Arnolfo di Cambio’s final communal circuit of walls to enclose the city. Follow my finger, Miss Skinner. Over there, over there, down…An enclosed city was his dream. His insieme. What the Italians call a togetherness. Of course, it was a masterpiece of defense, and yet, so much more. It shaped the city. Made it a direct descendant of Rome, and that made people believe its destiny was golden. He created a knowable city, Miss Skinner. And knowable it remains. It’s how the city becomes part of us forever. Never lets us go. Pulls us back time after time.

Theme: The historical denial of the feminine.

You said Suor Plautilla was prolific.

Oh she was. Fell into oblivion because of gender. It’s a tired old story, that one, I’m afraid, my dear. I am one of the few who have ever seen her painting of the Last Supper, which was a first. For a woman, I mean. Largest painting in the world by an early female artist. Nearly as big as Leonardo’s. Top left-hand corner her signature and also the words: Orate pro pictora—”pray for the paintress.” A simple acknowledgement of who she was.

Theme: Good men inhabiting the feminine space. In this quote from an interview at theflorentine.net, Winman talks about another theme she wanted to bring into her story:

I feel strongly about women having the right not to be mothers, a space that Peg would inhabit. What was important was that the men would walk into that space, something else I feel strongly about: good men inhabiting the feminine space, which is what this book also focuses on. The men bring up the kids, the men are in the kitchen. This isn’t an issues book, by any means. It’s organic, but these characters reflect the things that I want to say at that moment.

Theme: What Is Art.

And the ultimate question, never explicitly expressed, but invoked by every word-painted image in this book - what is art? And who gets to decide?

Though I knew I’d lost weight and was a bit pale, I never considered myself all that sick. I thought of myself as separate from them because of what I’d gone through, but it didn’t occur to me until then that people might actually pity me. The idea appalled me. ~Lucy Grealy

In Autobiography of a Face , Lucy Grealy chronicles her experience with a rare cancer in her jaw which changed and ultimately defined the trajectory of her life. She begins with an innocent schoolyard collision with a fourth grade classmate which led to uncovering the threatening tumor which would eventually reshape her face.

My only experience with significant childhood illness was a bout of pneumonia when I was eleven that put me in the hospital for week. This story invited me to reflect on that experience and realize how rare it is to hear from a child the fleeting collection of details which make up their experience during prolonged suffering. It’s so painful for adults too see children suffer that too often we turn away. So I was struck with the wisdom in Grealy’s story and the gentle forthrightness with which she, as an adult, invites us into her childhood crisis.

I was especially struck by how, early in her life, she recognized the expression of pity as it came from others. And she recognized her abhorrence of the experience. Pity is such a disempowering emotion. And feeling pity from others just opens one to the temptation toward self-pity.

The first time I recognized the experience of pity directed toward me was after Roy died. It was tricky to identify it, to distinguish it from compassion. I just felt it and new it wasn’t something I welcomed.

Here’s how the dictionary defines pity: sympathetic or kindly sorrow evoked by the suffering, distress, or misfortune of another, often leading one to give relief or aid or to show mercy.

Is pity the same thing as compassion? Here’s how the dictionary defines compassion: a feeling of deep sympathy and sorrow for another who is stricken by misfortune, accompanied by a strong desire to alleviate the suffering.

It sounds the same in theory. But it felt really different to me in practice. In practice pity has an extremely strong sense of separation and power dynamic. Pity is the unscathed, the unscarred, looking down at the suffering from a place of power, and exercising their superiority in a way that appears generous. Pity is a knee jerk response to fear. The fear evoked when another’s suffering touches on our own vulnerability. Pity is a way of ignoring the very real possibility that this could also happen to me. Pity thwarts the vulnerability of the viewer and places it on the suffering with a strong denial of their dignity and personal power. Pity does not comfort. Pity stands apart.

Compassion, on the other hand, is the act of bringing the experience of my own suffering into my experience of the suffering of others. Compassion comforts in shared experience. It is being with. Pity is “doing for.” Compassion is doing alongside. When Roy died I needed comfort, gentleness and support. Friends and family offered it in spades. I didn’t want to be pitied, though. I wanted to experience the empowerment of shared experience in compassion.

I remember clearly the day when a friend who had lost her husband ten years earlier came to my house, saw a stack of mail scattered on the table, pulled out her phone, asked for my credit card, and took each bill, one by one and paid it. I began the walk down the “self-pity” aisle, claiming how I used to be able to do that task with my eyes shut … what’s happened to me. She dismissed me with a wave of her hand. “I know, I know, and you’ll be doing it again soon.”

That was empowering compassion. She sent the message “I know there are times when we can’t be in our normal place of self-sufficiency, and I’m going to help you get back there.”

My story isn’t nearly as pervasive and chronic as Lucy Grealy’s was. But her reflections on living through cancer, disfigurement, 30 surgeries and more hospitalizations, gave me a strong sense of the internal strength she developed in her life. It was not heroic. It was complicated. She did much on her own which she shouldn’t have had to. In writing her story, she reminded me that as children, whatever is going on in our family feels like it’s our fault. But her struggle, so generously shared, evoked echoes of my own childhood experience and the ways I navigated that uncharted adult world to find my way. As I connected with Grealy’s story I was able to feel a shared experience of suffering, empathy for her, and for my young self.

In real life, unlike in history books, stories come to us not in their entirety but in bits and pieces, broken segments and partial echoes, a full sentence here, a fragment there, a clue hidden in between. In life, unlike in books, we have to weave our stories out of threads as fine as the gossamer veins that run through a butterfly’s wings.

Which choice offers the best chance of healing from trauma for individuals and societies? To “let the past be the past” and continue moving forward, or to rebuild our stories one gossamer vein at a time? To explore the past, unearth the trauma, recognize it in our personal and collective consciousness with an intent to heal? To welcome the memories which can be as elusive and wispy as tufts of wool dispersed in the wind?

That’s the question Elif Shafak explores in her latest book The Island of Missing Trees.

Talking about the book during an interview at the Hay Literary Festival, Shafak said:

I am always fascinated by this dilemma between memory and collective amnesia. But I think memories are important if we want to repair what has been broken.

In this book Shafak crafts a universal dilemma recognized by anyone who chooses love in the face of trauma. Shall I just carry on? Or would there be sweet mercy in tending to the wound, bringing it into the light, cleansing it with the hope of healing?

The setting for this novel is the idyllic island of Cypress during the tragic conflict between the Greek and Turkish people living there in the 1970’s. It’s a bit of a Romeo and Juliet story as the two main characters, one Greek, one Turkish, fall in love. But that’s where the similarities end as Shafak invites the reader to move back and forth between the present-day (2010’s) family of this union, and the disturbing history that, as survivors, they were invited to negotiate.

In the same way that trauma can have a person flipping back and forth between the present moment, and reliving the traumatic story, Shafak takes us back and forth from the generation beyond the trauma, living in the present, to the generation who experienced it. She invites questions about the pain of past generations, and whether it is passed down through their children, like some type of emotional DNA. She is also willing to entertain the question What’s the use of talking about the past when the past is so complex and hurtful?

These are the questions, she seems to be telling us through this story, that surviving generations are invited to explore. She goes on to say:

Even though she [her main character] doesn’t know the stories of her ancestors, she has a feeling that there are things she hasn’t been told. She does feel the absences — the silences, and those silences actually shape us. They shape our psychology.

Even though we might not know exactly what lies behind them, we still feel their weight on our shoulders.

Shafak’s character says it this way:

It doesn’t go away, Kostas. Once it’s inside your head, whether it’s your own memory or your parents’, or your grandparents’, this fucking pain becomes part of your flesh. It stays with you and marks you permanently. It messes up your psychology and shapes how you think of yourself and others.”

In her interview, Shafak reminds us:

We all contain multitudes. But society does not want us to be that, wants to put us in a box.

She says of the results for both survivors and refugees:

Those who stay behind are the ones who deal with the wounds, the scars. But maybe those who leave are never really healed. Those of us who left, maybe our wounds are always open. A sense of absence, sense of melancholy, is something immigrants will always carry.

And I realize that I am only three generations away from the immigrants in my family. And I know very little about why they came to the United States, what burdens they were fleeing which I am still carrying somewhere in my psychological being. I don’t think Shafak is suggesting that we take on some kind of emotional archaeology project to unearth every story. But I do think she is encouraging us to allow the stories to surface when they want to.

And I believe we get to decide how much pain we are willing to lean into, and how much pain we must turn away from in order to survive.

This is the way of life: the many things we do not know until it is too late.

Elizabeth Strout’s gift as a writer, is her ability to show us the profound within the mundane. She has a keen ability to take a magnifying glass to the subtleties and intricacies of experience. In Oh, William! she focuses her lens on marriage and divorce. I have no personal experience of divorce. But I think that hidden in this story of a divorce is a larger dance with the experience of relationships ending. Strout takes us into the lives of a divorced couple, brought back together out of their continued doubt and confusion. And Strout invited me to ponder some interesting questions:

Can we truly pinpoint a moment in time when we have chosen to end a marriage? Or, instead, do we find ourselves in a continuum of relationship that changes but never really ends? Lucy, the protagonist in Strout’s story and her ex-husband, while road-tripping together, stumble into discussions that trigger more questions about their relationship status.

William says:

Once every so often—at the very most—I think someone actually chooses something. Otherwise we’re following something—we don’t even know what it is but we follow it, Lucy. So, no. I don’t think you chose to leave.

You know, I knew a guy who worked in the Obama administration, and he was there to help make choices. And he told me that very very few times did they actually have to make a choice. And I always found that so interesting. Because it’s true. We just do—we just do, Lucy.

And Lucy ponders:

I was thinking about the year before I left William how almost every night when he was asleep I would go out and. stand in our tiny back garden and I would think: What do I do? Do I leave or do I stay? It had felt like a choice to me then. But remembering this now, I realized that also during that whole year I made no motion to put myself back inside the marriage; I kept myself separate is what I mean. Even as I thought I was deciding.

A friend had said to me once, “Whenever I don’t know what to do, I watch what I am doing.” And what I was doing that year was leaving, even though I had not yet left.

Which made me think about my own marriage, an ending so different and abrupt. At first I was waiting for the “completeness” of it. Waiting to wake up one day and mark the end of our marriage. Because I certainly didn’t experience the marriage had ended the moment Roy died, “til death do us part” not withstanding. Emotions ebb and flow and change all throughout a relationship, and also after the physical and legal togetherness ends. The spiritual separation is never as tidy and complete as the physical and legal one. How on earth could I imagine myself in this world without the 30-year relationship which had shaped much of who I am?

So I flip Lucy’s comment 180 degrees. She says, “And what I was doing that year was leaving, even though I had not yet left.” And the mirror for me is realizing that what I have been doing for the past six years is leaving, even though he had left years ago. Was there a point when I actually made a choice to leave? When I could draw a circle on the calendar and say “this is the day I accepted that Roy had died and I am moving forward without him?”

I have lots of dreams about packing things up to prepare for a trip. I am sorting through the moments of our relationship and subconsciously deciding what I will take with me and what I will leave behind. What I know, now that it is too late. And how to make meaning of that. Learning how it all makes up the fabric of who I’ve become. That’s how I am choosing. Because that is what I am doing.

I don’t read many books that fall in the ‘self-help’ genre, being a ‘novel geek.’ But my daughter introduced me to Dr. Neff’s beautiful work about self-compassion and I found her insights, stories and exercises spot on.

My first question, of course, was ‘what exactly is self-compassion? Here’s a few words of description from Dr. Neff’s introduction:

Women still live in a male-dominated society, and we need all the tools we can get our hands on to emerge triumphant but also healthy and whole. One of the most powerful weapons in our arsenal is caring force. Tender self-compassion harnesses the energy of nurturing to alleviate suffering, while fierce self-compassion harnesses the energy of action to alleviate suffering—when these are fully inegrated, they manifest as caring force. Our force is more effective when it’s caring because it combines strength with love.

And Dr. Neff doesn’t just talk about and describe self-compassion. She leads the reader through a process of personal exploration, guided exercises, and meditations designed to cultivate self-compassion. She deals with the tough stuff. Here’s a few of the chapter titles:

Balance and Equality at Work

Caring for Others Without Losing Ourselves

What We Do For Love

Becoming a Compassionate Mess

In this book I found help for some knotty relationships issues I have been dealing with, along with affirmation of my recently strengthened “No” muscle. (Side note, a friend introduced me to the idea of “50 Shades of No”). I found journal prompts and guided meditations, which I plan to continue using long after turning the final page of the book.

Dr. Neff teaches Mindful Self-Compassion workshops around the world, and offers her guided meditations at www.self-compassion.org.

As I said, you won’t find many self-help books in my blog posts. But this work is so valuable I wanted to share it. Fierce self-compassion needs to take root - in our hearts and minds, in our collective consciousness and all of our relationships.