Love in a Wounded World

My property manager walks his hoarse little Shitsu past my door twice a day. His wife died last year. He shuffles on bad knees and mumbles because he can’t hear very well anymore. I can’t bring myself to contemplate the depths of his loneliness. His smile to see me reminds me of the smile I sometimes find myself giving to others; half genuine joy to see another person, half subtle enticement to keep them engaged as long as possible.

“How are you?” he asks. “Ok,” I reply, wanting to be at least vaguely honest. “No worries that haunt you?” he presses. “We all have worries that haunt us,” I respond. We both laugh. Why do we laugh when as hard as I work to stay self-sufficient and grounded, despite the fear a part of me still just wants to curl up in a lover’s arms and cry? It has grown difficult to feel depths of pain alone, as if in the space now spreading across my days the sadness could unravel in a chain back to my earliest memories and across the face of the world and wash me away with it. It all seems too much to endure alone, and too much to lay at the feet of someone else, compressing their own strands stretching back and outward.

At the root of every deeply personal sadness, anger, or fear I carry is a little girl on the playground being teased. The adults never see and she never tells them. She invents her own games to play and when she fights back, she is the one punished. No one asks her what happened. No one protects her. No one teaches her how to make friends. And the love she tries to give often backfires as misunderstanding turns to mutual confusion and hurt. I have slowly come to believe that my experience was one of an innately sensitive and relational nature traumatized by lack of nurturing protection and consistent guidance. I still use my wit as a shield, I still long for comfort and mentorship with a sometimes blinding loyalty, and I still literally tremble to voice my feelings and needs to anyone in authority or who I believe can take their love away. When my anger bursts, ripe and pointed, it is cloaked in blame and cynicism about the coarseness and dissonance of our world. But now that I am an adult, it is no longer the world’s responsibility to care for me.

The purest, most mutual love I have felt as a grown woman was for my boy tabby Ping, who lived with Andy and I when we were married. From the moment we met at the Humane Society, he clung to me physically and emotionally. The first night home with us, he climbed into my lap and wrapped himself around my legs to keep me from leaving him alone. He would only emerge from his hiding space wedged behind the dryer when I called to him, and he would leave his food dish when I came home to cry until I sat down. Then he would climb onto my chest to lick my nose and purr himself to sleep with his face tucked into my neck, melting across my shoulder. I would bounce him gently, patting his haunches and kissing the top of his little head, inhaling the musty sweet scent of his fur and feeling flooded with blissful warmth.

The only thing harder to accept than the sincerity of Ping’s sweetness was the depth of his vulnerability: his need for my love and protection, and my inability to shield him from every hurt. Despite my commitment to letting him roam free, I lived in fear every day that I would come home to find him hit by a car. My deepest pain during my marriage was when he was hospitalized, his vitality dimming beyond the reach of my comfort. During my divorce, I chose to leave him behind in the home he knew with Andy and his lady tabby companion, Ida, but I still carry guilt. And I still double over sobbing from time to time recalling the sound and look and feel of him, consumed by a desperate longing to be near him and comfort him, followed by a deep sorrow that he is alive in this world and we cannot be together. My love for Ping is the closest thing I have to what I imagine it might feel like to have a child, and that sense of helpless vulnerability that comes whenever I open my heart to the well-being of another is what terrifies me most about loving again.

I catch my breath sometimes when an insightful movie, an inspiring book, or an intimate conversation comes to a close and I look at the faces around me and realize we are all walking wounded, brushing up against each other’s rawness as we do our best to keep our grief from flooding our lives, flooding our worlds. At a recent lecture, I heard the speaker reference our “collective trauma.” That is how it feels to me. I have come to believe that my identification with loss is not unique – it is born of a time and place that passes suspicion, resentment, and guarded apathy like a contagion between coworkers, neighbors, loved ones, and children because it is so hard for us to witness our own fear and grief. We prefer the distraction of survival-based comforts of elaborate homes, food, sex, and adventure, shackled with a persistent meaninglessness rooted in our disconnection from what wounded us, but can also heal – the depth of our love.

And if we were to really look at ourselves, we would come to see not just our own pain, but how the entire system our lives are embedded in made our collective trauma possible. Chellis Glendinning identifies our initial wound as the transition from being an integral part of the world around us through hunting and gathering to the deep sense of separation begun by controlling plants and animals through domestication. The resulting fear of physical, social, and spiritual starvation has led, over centuries of technological development, to a time in which our competition with nature and each other threatens the survival of our entire planet and everything that lives alongside us.

My white culture adds to this initial wound the burden of responsibility for the painful legacy of slavery and racism. We do not see how it affects our daily lives because the denial we used to justify our initial brutality still serves to justify the inequities that persist. So long as we rationalize the fact that not all human beings today have equal access to food, health, shelter, love, and the freedom to express their spirits – soothing ourselves with stories that the real issue is one of motivation, education, geography, genetics, preference, or anything outside our responsibility or control – we will be unable to fully witness or heal our shared trauma. Our systems of controlling natural resources and people cannot withstand the growing environmental crisis or the outrage in the hearts of millions of people waking up to the ways their bodies and spirits have been oppressed. All of our lives are becoming increasingly locked in tension between those who are longing to wake up, whether through love or through suffering, and those who are terrified to see themselves and our world as they truly are. When I succumb to fear for my own livelihood, clinging with desperate ferocity to the comforting old paradigm of linear simplicity and rational control, I become rigid in my world view, stingy in my exchanges, and timid with my dreams. This way of life must die in order for what is most beautiful and precious in our world – a life lived from love – to survive.

Last week, I encountered for the first time in over a year an older man who lives in my apartment complex. When I first moved in, he was generous with his flattery and eager to share stories and pictures of his garden. He had asked me to be a contact for him in times of need, and I had hesitated, anxious not to be seen merely for what I could give or to find myself suffocated by obligation to someone I did not know well. This past summer, I noticed that his beds were seeded with grass and his shades drawn and now I saw he change in him. His new heart condition had been followed by a diagnosis of neuropathy, and he looked years older, puffy, and hunched. As he described the dizziness and disorientation that were narrowing his life, his voice broke in a small sob and tears rose. I reached out tentatively to touch his arm and he seemed taken by an impulse to wrap himself around me before hesitating and making a quick escape. It pains me to think of him alone with his failing body while I sit a few yards away with my rich dreams and vital heart, both of us longing to share our grief and lose ourselves in someone’s comfort. But my initial hesitation persists and I remain barred from him. I simply do not know what or how to give in a genuine way free from fear or guilt.

I carry my own throbbing trauma. We all do. I do my best to heal mine little by little every day, balancing nourishment and safety as she looks up at me across the years, still red-eyed, pitiful, and hungry. Having ventured out into the world together, I know my fear still keeps her thin and she requires the lion’s share of my gifts to stay warm. Is this how I am to live out my life? I am impatient to make the most of all I have been given and to have the courage to risk and love with a full, free heart. In the meantime, I find some solace in knowing that the thin skin that made her ache also enables her to ache for others. There is a reason we were born without scales or feathers or fur – so we can feel each other and the world around us.

I may not be able to save my property manager, my neighbor, my Ping, or all the oppressed, exploited, and frightened beings in our world from their suffering, but I can keep my heart warm by feeling for them. I know of no other way to remain open and ready for a more honorable calling than to ensure I will be able to recognize it, treat it with care, and remember why we suffer – not to rage against what causes the greatest pain but to burrow down towards the deepest love. I do this not in hope that our world can soften or heal, or to be rewarded in any way, but simply so that I can live today with something lighter than despair. My kindred spirits and I recognize each other and our world as inherently wounded and frail and chaotic, and choose to manifest its strength by keeping the light we hold warm and bright against all odds, waiting to be called.

Nancy

“In the end, only three things matter: how much you loved, how gently you lived, and how gracefully you let go of things not meant for you.” – Buddha

Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W Loewen and Waking Up White by Debby Irving were painful, yet gentle companions on my journey to understanding white privilege and how my own trauma is interconnected with those who are oppressed. Hello My Name is Chellis and I’m in Recovery from Western Civilization by Chellis Glendinning is a soulful introduction to the field of ecopsychology, which explores the ways our physical, mental, and spiritual well-being is rooted in the natural world around us.