When the world makes you cry, but you know that you are called to it
The title for this post comes as my best attempt at giving words to a feeling I was struck with earlier today. I was in Green Joe's a coffee shop off battlground ave, and I was reading the beginnings of Rupi Kaur's book "Milk and Honey" (as an aside, many of my future posts may contain themes of this premordial work as I process the goings on in my brain about it). Anyway, I was reading the beginnings of this work, which the author so pointedly labels "The Hurting," and I felt the rushing of wind that I often feel when I'm in the counseling room and my client has stumbled across salient material: the tears are coming.
I often feel this sensation (I will call it a "flurry" because it is an experience of "a small swirling mass of something, often moved suddenly") when another human being is experiencing pain, grief, and loss; especially if this experience is accompanied by tears. The sensation is akin to autumn's transition to winter:
the leaves holding desperately to their branches are suddenly stripped from their resting places, thrust strongly yet beautifully to the ground where they wither and are forgotten. The branches left behind are left exposed to the elements of the impending winter season.
The sensation is like falling in the dream world: an upward rush of both panic and apprehension, you feel no hint of danger or insecurity until all at once and you awake, startled and out of sorts.
I have this sensation when I feel the first waves of sorrow or brokenness near me, whether in the actions around me, the people around me, or the energy around me.
It is worth pausing here to note that "sorrow" and "brokenness" used here is not the more soft, pining, or meek side of the coin of sorrow. By this I mean that the kind of sorrow and brokenness that triggers my flurry sensation is the kind of sorrow and brokenness that instills fear and the instinct to run: run far away from the bomb before it detonates. There is a type of sorrow that compels the human spirit to approach, and there is another type of sorrow that compels the human spirit to recede. I'm talking about the latter.
It is a sorrow and a pain so intimately personal, so dark, and so deep; it is a bleeding wound, infected from exposure and the compounding dirt poured on it by a world that has not a balm for it, nor a stomach for it.
This sorrow, this flurry, rushed through my unprepared being as I was taking a selfie at Green Joe's having just read a few pages of Rupi Kaur's "Milk and Honey." This flurry, I believe, is a delayed response to the horrors that have hit our planet in the past several days. I see and feel and sense the sorrow and brokenness in the spaces and faces around me. I do not wish to approach this sorrow, I want to run from it. It is nearly as frightening as the tragedies themselves: it is seeing the living as the dying. We are ruining ourselves.
In this season of "The Hurting," to borrow Kaur's label, I find myself taking shifts where I gaze unwaveringly at the sorrow and brokenness with the intent of feeling it fully, or where I desperately try and create white noise to drown out the pain as if it were the noisy neighbors above my apartment ceiling. In that coffee shop, I gazed deeply into the pain, though I didn't know I was even opening the door. Once the door was opened, I felt it. The Flurry. Not the entirety of the pain, I'm not comfortable enough with pain to allow that. But I felt the touches.
It makes me want to cry. But I'm called to it.
To approach.
When I want to run.
I will not.
I must not.
I often feel this sensation (I will call it a "flurry" because it is an experience of "a small swirling mass of something, often moved suddenly") when another human being is experiencing pain, grief, and loss; especially if this experience is accompanied by tears. The sensation is akin to autumn's transition to winter:
the leaves holding desperately to their branches are suddenly stripped from their resting places, thrust strongly yet beautifully to the ground where they wither and are forgotten. The branches left behind are left exposed to the elements of the impending winter season.
The sensation is like falling in the dream world: an upward rush of both panic and apprehension, you feel no hint of danger or insecurity until all at once and you awake, startled and out of sorts.
I have this sensation when I feel the first waves of sorrow or brokenness near me, whether in the actions around me, the people around me, or the energy around me.
It is worth pausing here to note that "sorrow" and "brokenness" used here is not the more soft, pining, or meek side of the coin of sorrow. By this I mean that the kind of sorrow and brokenness that triggers my flurry sensation is the kind of sorrow and brokenness that instills fear and the instinct to run: run far away from the bomb before it detonates. There is a type of sorrow that compels the human spirit to approach, and there is another type of sorrow that compels the human spirit to recede. I'm talking about the latter.
It is a sorrow and a pain so intimately personal, so dark, and so deep; it is a bleeding wound, infected from exposure and the compounding dirt poured on it by a world that has not a balm for it, nor a stomach for it.
This sorrow, this flurry, rushed through my unprepared being as I was taking a selfie at Green Joe's having just read a few pages of Rupi Kaur's "Milk and Honey." This flurry, I believe, is a delayed response to the horrors that have hit our planet in the past several days. I see and feel and sense the sorrow and brokenness in the spaces and faces around me. I do not wish to approach this sorrow, I want to run from it. It is nearly as frightening as the tragedies themselves: it is seeing the living as the dying. We are ruining ourselves.
In this season of "The Hurting," to borrow Kaur's label, I find myself taking shifts where I gaze unwaveringly at the sorrow and brokenness with the intent of feeling it fully, or where I desperately try and create white noise to drown out the pain as if it were the noisy neighbors above my apartment ceiling. In that coffee shop, I gazed deeply into the pain, though I didn't know I was even opening the door. Once the door was opened, I felt it. The Flurry. Not the entirety of the pain, I'm not comfortable enough with pain to allow that. But I felt the touches.
It makes me want to cry. But I'm called to it.
To approach.
When I want to run.
I will not.
I must not.
Comments
Post a Comment