Your tears fall on my tongue

 

Empathy Dreams

When you weep for all you have lost
I listen with my mouth open;
your tears fall on my tongue
and I taste your pain.

 

When you were in the river of tiny fish
I splashed with you.
When you hug your swelling belly
I breathe love songs in your ear
to welcome the spirit who is coming
into this world through you.

 

When they broke the child in you
something broke in me.
When you fled from the johns to the jones
I tried to crack your crystal palace
so you could visit that beautiful boy
who found refuge with Peter Pan.

 

I was with you when they beat you
for sucking your thumb, and when they
beat you harder because you couldn't kill
the lovely soft bandit cornered by coon dogs.
I am with you at the white table
of the one who has shared his cup with you.

 

I laugh with you when you cartwheel through life
as a circus acrobat, and when you
walk the high wire without fear
because your second self goes ahead of you
making footholds so you cannot fall.

 

At the border camp. I share your terror
of returning to a country you can't remember
where killers still haunt the killing fields.
I am with the scary man with brick dust
on his skin and a claw hammer in his belt.
I whisper to him, "Don't tread on wildflowers."

 

I am with then hunter and the hunted.
I am Cossack and Jew, slave and slave owner.
I am the man in iron from the dragon boat.
I am the priestess whose weapons
are a mirror and the sickle moon,
who can give blood to the earth without cutting.

 

I am in the blade of grass that bends
under the tremendous gray hoof, and springs back.
I am with the elephant mother who grieves
for her calf as metal rain from the poachers' gunship
turns her dreams to blood ivory.

 

I am no bodhisattva, able to remember
all lives, past and present, without being overwhelmed.
I must spit out the tears I have tasted
and not go stooped under grief and pain of others.

 

But I can do this: I can go to the one
with a hole in the heart, and show you
the precious child who fled from your body
when they tried to kill your dreams,
and you lost the dreamer in you.

 

I can promise your child of wonder
that, despite everything, you are safe and can be fun.
I can hold you together until you know each other.
Growing beyond myself, I can go on holding you
in the fierce embrace of Great Mother Bear
until you cannot be apart, because you are one.

The most gifted dreamers may be, like the most gifted seers and healers, highly sensitive people who will be challenged, across a lifetime, to set and maintain healthy boundaries. Gardens require walls. This poem is a gift; it emerged from images shared in a wonderful community of active dreamers in one of my pre-pandemic workshops in a red cedar grove at Mosswood Hollow, where the Great Stump always reminds me of the possibility of  regeneration.

"Empathy Dreams" is included in Here, Everything Is Dreaming: Poems and Stories by Robert Moss. Published by Excelsior Editions.

Photo by RM

Empathy Dreams

 

Empathy Dreams

When you weep for all you have lost
I listen with my mouth open;
your tears fall on my tongue
and I taste your pain. 

When you were in the river of tiny fish
I splashed with you.
When you hug your swelling belly
I breathe love songs in your ear
to welcome the spirit who is coming
into this world through you. 

When they broke the child in you
something broke in me.
When you fled from the johns to the jones
I tried to crack your crystal palace
so you could visit that beautiful boy
who found refuge with Peter Pan. 

I was with you when they beat you
for sucking your thumb, and when they
beat you harder because you couldn't kill
the lovely soft bandit cornered by coon dogs.
I am with you at the white table
of the one who has shared his cup with you. 

I laugh with you when you cartwheel through life
as a circus acrobat, and when you
walk the high wire without fear
because your second self goes ahead of you
making footholds so you cannot fall. 

At the border camp. I share your terror
of returning to a country you can't remember
where killers still haunt the killing fields.
I am with the scary man with brick dust
on his skin and a claw hammer in his belt
I whisper to him, "Don't tread on wildflowers." 

I am with then hunter and the hunted.
I am Cossack and Jew, slave and slave owner.
I am the man in iron from the dragon boat.
I am the priestess whose weapons
are a mirror and the sickle moon,
who can give blood to the earth without cutting. 

I am in the blade of grass that bends
under the tremendous gray hoof, and springs back.
I am with the elephant mother who grieves
for her calf as metal rain from the poachers' gunship
turns her dreams to blood ivory. 

I am no bodhisattva, able to remember
all lives, past and present, without being overwhelmed.
I must spit out the tears I have tasted
and not go stooped under grief and pain of others. 

But I can do this: I can go to the one
with a hole in the heart, and show you
the precious child who fled from your body
when they tried to kill your dreams,
and you lost the dreamer in you. 

I can promise your child of wonder
that, despite everything, you are safe and can be fun.
I can hold you together until you know each other.
Growing beyond myself, I can go on holding you
in the fierce embrace of Great Mother Bear
until you cannot be apart, because you are one.

- Poem from Here, Everything Is Dreaming: Poems and Stories by Robert Moss. Published by Excelsior Editions/State University of New York Press.

Drawing by RM

The unexpected guest at the door

The best-loved of the Sufi poets, Jalaluddin Rumi, helped inspire a game I have improvised for my workshops, and I want to share the game here. The purpose is to take a close look at some of the moods and feelings that turn up at our door, like unwanted guests and distract us from what we are trying to do and can even crush the joy and the juice out of us. "Negative" feelings that surprise us may range from impatience or anxiety to rage or fear or guilt. Yet we can also be diverted or swamped by feelings that have a better reputation - like empathy or pity - if we can't contain or channel them.
-    Rumi gave the general idea in a poem titled "The Guest House". Here I am borrowing from the fluid version rendered by Coleman Barks. In Rumi's poem, each of us is like a guest house where visitors are turning up at all hours, and we need to be ready to receive them in appropriate ways. These visitors are moods and feelings.

-

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness
comes as an unexpected visitor.

-

Rumi's counsel is to "treat each guest honorably. He or she may be clearing you out for some new delight."
-    So, the game goes like this: Imagine yourself at the door of your house - your actual house, or the house you would like to live in. Either way, this is also a guest house where visitors can appear at any time. Now picture that a feeling that challenges you is at your door. You are going to open the door, and NAME that feeling, and inspect it in the animate or personified form in which it presents itself.

-   Next and most important, you are going to figure out what you want to do with this visitor. Just sending it away is unlikely to work; the feelings you deny will find ways to haunt you and steal your energy. On the other hand, with certain feelings - especially certain forms of fear, the mind-killer - the best strategy (contrary to Rumi) may not be to bring them right inside the house, but rather to set them in a kind of "holding area" and call in help to deal with them.

-    The first time I played this game, in one of my circles, I met Impatience as the visitor at the door. He looked like a young, overstuffed, pompous version of myself in a power suit, so full of himself he really thought the world should make way for him every time he wanted something. I didn't care for him at all, but I made it my game to show him into a comfortable den, get him to take off his coat and loosen his collar, and loaded him up with good books and good movies on DVD and encouraged him to enjoy everything that was available to him while he relaxed and allowed the events he was waiting upon to unfold naturally.

-   A woman in that group met Empathy at the door. Empathy looked like Kwan Yin, but her form was entirely composed of water. The challenge was to engage with her without being swamped with emotion to the point of drowning. During our journey (aided by drumming) the woman succeeded in finding effective containment and channels for all that water of emotion.

-   Other players have met and named a host of personal demons, including the "noonday demons" of Depression and Despair. Among the host: Anxiety, Guilt, Remorse, Anger, Self-Pity, Sorrow, Self-Importance, Resentment, and The Dominator (note the dominant definite article). In handling such unwanted guests, the guest house managers have followed various strategies. One player filled her house with music to soothe and cheer Remorse. Another met a strung-out Anxiety at the door and got him washed and cleaned under the shower and comfy in a fluffy robe. Sometimes other residents of the guest house came forward to help, Joy overwhelming Fear or Grief.

-    In the games so far, I have not yet heard anyone, except myself, name one of the trickiest demons, the one the desert fathers called Acedia ("ah-SEE-dee-yah"). This is the most deadly of the tribe of noonday demons, a dry dementor that sucks the juice and joy out of everything. Acedia is the demon of Not-Caring. He is so tricky that at one point he succeeded in getting the learned editors of the Oxford English Dictionary to declare him "obsolete" while sniggering behind his cupped hand, "I'll be baaaack." Next time he shows up at my door, I'll see how he needs to be handled and will report back - assuming I succeed and therefore still care :-)

-

Want to play this game? Picture the feeling that is your unwanted visitor at the door. Name it and visualize it. Then write up your report and decide how you need to handle this visitor in your life.

-

When Owl gave Jeffery Eugenides the breath of creation

Jeffery Eugenides' novel Middlesex is a triumph of creative empathy. It accomplishes what the best novels do, which is to expand our humanity by transporting us inside the lives and perspectives of others. It also shows us how we can do this for ourselves, by using active imagination to enter the lives of ancestors or the body of a person of a different gender, even a gender not commonly recognized.
     So I was delighted, though not surprised, to read Eugenides' revelation in a recent article that it was a dream, simple but shockingly direct and numinous, that gave him the power to finish Middlesex. He was living in Berlin at the time, struggling to keep food on the table through a modest fellowship, often sleep-deprived because of an infant child, drinking a good deal of German beer in an effort to loosen up.
     He was seized by a dream. His entire dream report reads as follows:

An owl, descended out of nowhere, seized me in its talons and blew into my mouth a single breath tasting of blood. 

The one-sentence report describes a dream that lasted (he says) all of four or five seconds. Yet he sensed that the owl's visitation "originated not from my mind at all but from a source outside of me". The owl was gigantic, "and not particularly realistic". Its plumage reminded him of paintings by Klimt, with lozenges of color running up and down the wings and over the  breast, and "a large helmeted ceremonial head". The owl's eyes were fierce and bright yellow. When the owl dipped its beak to Eugenides' lips, he opened his mouth, unresisting. The owl exhaled one long forceful breath. With a whoosh, his lungs inflated. This inspiration had a taste: "the mineral, meaty flavor of a predatory diet". 
    The writer awakened with the deep knowing that a power had been conveyed to him from a greater source: "the great Owl in the Sky had taken a personal interest in me and my book. The owl had come to give me the power to write."

Graphic: René Magritte, "The Companions of Fear" (1926)