Category: anxiety

A Painful Wuthering

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Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away;
Lengthen night and shorten day;
Every leaf speaks bliss to me
Fluttering from the autumn tree.
I shall smile when wreaths of snow
Blossom where the rose should grow;
I shall sing when night’s decay
Ushers in a drearier day.
~Emily Brontë “Fall, Leaves, Fall”

It was not the thorn bending to the honeysuckles, but the honeysuckles embracing the thorn.
~Emily Brontë from Wuthering Heights

The loudest crows
cawing over the tops of the oaks
call me to autumn already,
and though my back is to the window,

I know the sky must be a gray wuthering,
and the curlews are crying. The wind
must be moaning as it goes sweeping
across heath and moors and the spikes
of purple heather thousands of miles away
from where my body sits; yet

I feel the gorse
grazing my ankles as I go.
~Andrea Potos “Brontean Morning” from Her Joy Becomes

I avoid watching sad movies and will close a book that is clearly heading for a weepy ending.

I don’t need to wrap myself around things that hurt when there is enough sadness and pain in the world already. Deep emotion sticks to me like velcro, even when I know the tragedy is not my own. I take it on as if it is.

As a result, the Brontë novel Wuthering Heights is not my cup of tea. I suffered through the book as well as the movie versions. It is grim with wild, destructive passions that only lead to more sorrow. I become immersed in those desperately gray “wuthering” scenes feeling the sharp thorns of the words I read that end up drawing blood from me.

But most suffering is not at all fictional. When I become aware of tragedy happening far away, when the hurricane leaves behind terrible devastation or bombs and bullets rip communities to shreds, even though there is little I can physically do to help, I can’t turn away and not look. I can’t close the book that makes me sad and uncomfortable.

I too must feel the hurt, embracing the thorns rather than avoiding them.

Jesus did just that, taking it all upon Himself. He never turned away and still, now, today, He is pierced, bloodied for our sake.

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The Oldest Tree

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Lately, when I awake desolate
feeling half-swamped
by runaway currents I name—
dread, for my children, and theirs,
and this planet—I backstroke
through time to rest my palms
against the delicate skin
of the gingko tree, the one
and only, in my home town.
Rooted in siltish sand,
come autumn, it flaunted
10,000 golden fans:
a waving descendant my uncle said,
of the oldest tree
to inhabit the earth. Memory
replays three fluting sighs
of a mourning dove, high in the canopy,
that vast fretwork alive again
with rustling endearments—yet
ghostly, too, as his unseen hand
almost rocks my skiff of a self.
~Laurie Klein “Lately, when I awake desolate”

So many reasons to awake in the night,
eyes wide open, searching the dark seas of trouble
for some sign of hope
for calm and peace in this stormy world.

Rocked to sleep again, I float among abundant
golden gingko leaves, each waving like a sail in the breeze,
before it tumbles, swirling, to the ground, forming
deeply cushioned and comforting pools of yellow.

Navigating these brutal times, desperate to
anchor within some safer harbor – I treasure
the old ginkgo as it reaches over each cherished child
with its golden cloak of love and protection.

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Throwing Away the Key

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When we look long at one another,
we soften, we relent, listen,

might forgive. We allow for silence
—and when we see each other,

are known, and in that moment
might change

though nothing has moved
or been spoken.

There are some who say
the walls cannot be broken,

but suddenly we are in a free place,
and the fields

that extend from its center
stretch for miles

as if out of the pupil and the iris
of that momentary kingdom.
~Annie Lighthart “When We Look” from Pax

The weasel was stunned into stillness as he was emerging from beneath an enormous shaggy wild rose bush four feet away. I was stunned into stillness twisted backward on the tree trunk. Our eyes locked, and someone threw away the key.

Our look was as if two lovers, or deadly enemies, met unexpectedly on an overgrown path when each had been thinking of something else: a clearing blow to the gut.

It was also a bright blow to the brain, or a sudden beating of brains, with all the charge and intimate grate of rubbed balloons. It emptied our lungs. It felled the forest, moved the fields, and drained the pond; the world dismantled and tumbled into that black hole of eyes.

If you and I looked at each other that way, our skulls would split and drop to our shoulders. But we don’t. We keep our skulls. So.
~Annie Dillard from “Living Like Weasels”

The pupil and iris are a portal to our thoughts, our dreams, our passions and our fears. They are simultaneously window and mirror, revealing feelings we try to keep to ourselves.

Locking eyes can be one of the most thrilling, stomach-butterflies, ecstatic moments of connection. It can be tender, loving, reassuring and encouraging.

Or it can be intimidating and terrifying. I tend to avoid eye contact when passing a stranger on a dark street, or when engaged in a very stressful public interaction. I don’t want to reveal my insecurity, vulnerability, or worry through direct eye contact. While studying primates in Africa, I learned never to look a baboon in the eye as it can communicate aggression and instigate an attack.

So instead, I learned to look at my feet.

I’d much rather lock eyes and learn everything I can about you. I want to dive deep into who you are, breaking down the walls and dismantle the barriers that keep us apart from one another. Then I’m letting you in too. The black holes of our inner universe.

After all, this is preparation when we see the face of God and allow Him to lock into our eyes, knowing our truth.

No keys needed forevermore.

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Hiding Nothing

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You can hide nothing from God.
The mask you wear before men will do you no good before Him.
He wants to see you as you are,
He wants to be gracious to you.
You do not have to go on lying to yourself and your brothers,
as if you were without sin;
you can dare to be a sinner.
~Dietrich Bonhoeffer from Life Together

In your hands

The dog, the donkey, surely they know
They are alive.
Who would argue otherwise?

But now, after years of consideration,
I am getting beyond that.
What about the sunflowers? What about
The tulips, and the pines?

Listen, all you have to do is start and
There’ll be no stopping.
What about mountains? What about water
Slipping over rocks?

And speaking of stones, what about
The little ones you can
Hold in your hands, their heartbeats
So secret, so hidden it may take years

Before, finally, you hear them?
~Mary Oliver “in your hands” from Swan: Prose and Poems

When I take myself to the doctor, I trust I’m seeing someone who tries to know me thoroughly enough that he or she can help me move out of illness into better health.

This is how acceptance feels: trusting someone enough to come out of hiding, allowing them to see the parts of me I prefer to keep hidden.

As a physician myself, I am reminded by the amount of “noticing” I did in the course of my work. Each patient, and there were so many,  deserved my full attention for the few minutes we were together.  I started my clinical evaluation the minute I entered the room and I began taking in all the complex verbal and non-verbal clues offered up, sometimes unwittingly, by another human being.

During the COVID pandemic, my interactions with patients became all “virtual” so I didn’t have the ability to observe as thoroughly as I usually did. Instead, I needed them to tell me outright what was going on in their lives, their minds and their hearts in both spoken or written words. I couldn’t ‘see’ them, even on a screen, in the same way as face to face in the same room.

How can someone call out their worries to me when they are hidden behind a camera lens?

I can’t witness first hand the trembling hands, their sweatiness, their scars of self injury.  Still, I am their audience and a witness to their struggle; even more, I must understand their fears to best help them. My brain must rise to the occasion of taking in another person, accepting them for who they are, with every wart and blemish, offering them the gift of compassion and simply be there for them at that moment.

God isn’t blinded in His Holy work as I am in my clinical duties. He knows us thoroughly because He made us; He knows our thoughts before we put them into words. There is no point in trying to stay hidden from Him.

He holds us, little pebbles that we are, in His Hand, and He listens to our secret heartbeats.

Those of us who believe we can remain effectively hidden will never be invisible to God.

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A Mind Blurred

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For all
the pain

passed down
the genes

or latent
in the very grain

of being;
for the lordless

mornings,
the smear

of spirit
words intuit

and inter;
for all

the nightfall
neverness

inking
into me

even now,
my prayer

is that a mind
blurred

by anxiety
or despair

might find
here

a trace
of peace.
~Christian Wiman “Prayer” from Once in the West

We all have times when nothing makes sense. The mind blurs with stress or fear or a sense of unreality – all focus is lost and the world becomes simultaneously fuzzy and prickly.

If that happens here in these pages, through these words and photos I share, it is because I need reminding: things often don’t make sense to me when tragedy, pain and suffering happen to people on the other side of the earth, or just down the road from here, or to those I love.

Or to me.

It still makes sense to God. He has clear vision I will never have.

He doesn’t make bad things happen; He grieves it too.
He is the focus when all else is blurry.

God calls to us out of the haze that obscures. Only then peace begins.

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A Morning Promise Unfurls

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I know this sound, first birds of morning.
As a child, I waited for hours for the drape
of night to roll up again. Leaning into the first
hint of the fresh day, the fragile lace of hesitant
light, the receding darkness dappled with bird song,
able at last to close my eyes.

I know this sound, some kind of redemption,
waking me from scattered sleep, a healing fragment
even as the work of the previous day marks my bones
in notches. Night leaves its small fur as the dawn
pushes, as the birds persist, and morning unfurls
like a promise you hoped someone would keep.
~Susan Moorhead “First Light” from Carry Darkness, Carry Light

The grace of God means something like:

“Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are, because the party wouldn’t have been complete without you.
Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever separate us. It’s for you I created the universe. I love you.”

There’s only one catch. Like any other gift, the gift of grace can be yours only if you’ll reach out and take it.

Maybe being able to reach out and take it is a gift too.
~Frederick Buechner from Wishful Thinking

Do not be afraid, for I have redeemed you.
I have called you by your name;
you are mine.

When you walk through the waters,
I’ll be with you;
you will never sink beneath the waves.
When the fire is burning all around you,
you will never be consumed by the flames.
When the fear of loneliness is looming,
then remember I am at your side.
When you dwell in the exile of a stranger,
remember you are precious in my eyes.
You are mine, O my child,
I am your Father,
and I love you with a perfect love.
~Gerard Markland “Do Not Be Afraid”

When I open my eyes in the morning
I depend on the promise of a new day
reminding me of hope and grace.

But if the unexpected terrible thing happens–
when beauty seems to hide its face,
I fear it is gone forever.

Yet, promises are kept:

in Words written
again and again and again,
-365 times in total-
once for every day of the year:

if only I can truly believe them,
if only I can reassure others so
they reach out and take them to heart

He is here, with us,
in this broken, too often terrible, world-
do not be afraid
do not be afraid
do not be afraid

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Just Checking…

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Heavy dreams—my hand
on your back to feel you breathe.
Night a blood orange.
~Emily Patterson “haiku at 4:11 AM“

At times I need to check if you are still with me –
breathing so quietly in your dreaming.

I have to lay a hand on your back to be sure.

Then I can fall to sleep, easing back
into the suspended dream I left, now sighing
lulled and lambent…

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The Air Charged With Blessings

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I thought of happiness, how it is woven
Out of the silence in the empty house each day
And how it is not sudden and it is not given
But is creation itself like the growth of a tree.
No one has seen it happen, but inside the bark
Another circle is growing in the expanding ring.
No one has heard the root go deeper in the dark,
But the tree is lifted by this inward work
And its plumes shine, and its leaves are glittering.

For what is happiness but growth in peace,
And as the air moves, so the old dreams stir
The shining leaves of present happiness?
No one has heard thought or listened to a mind,
But where people have lived in inwardness
The air is charged with blessing and does bless;
Windows look out on mountains and the walls are kind.
~ May Sarton, from “The Work of Happiness”  in  Collected Poems, 1930-1993

The settled happiness and security which we all desire,
God withholds from us by the very nature of the world:
but joy, pleasure, and merriment, he has scattered broadcast.
We are never safe, but we have plenty of fun, and some ecstasy.
It is not hard to see why.

The security we crave would teach us
to rest our hearts in this world
and oppose an obstacle to our return to God:
a few moments of happy love, a landscape, a symphony,
a merry meeting with our friends, a bath
or a football match, have no such tendency.

Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns,
but will not encourage us to mistake them for home.
~C.S. Lewis from The Problem of Pain

I am reminded every day, as headlines proclaim bad news:
this is not our home. I am only a wayfarer, not a settler.

Just like the distress of my four year old grandson, staying overnight and waking with a bad dream, appearing at my bedside at 3 AM, saying simply “I need a hug!”

We need reassurance that all this scary stuff is not forever.

Sometimes I lose focus on the “why” of my journey
on this troubled earth:
so much of my time and energy is understandably spent
seeking safety and security, striving on a journey
I hope will be filled with happiness, joy and contentment,
as if that is my ultimate destination and purpose.

Yet the nature of a fallen world filled with faltering souls such as myself leads me down boulder-strewn paths filled with potholes and sheer cliffs and yes, bad dreams.

At times nowhere feels safe or secure and I overthink my next step.

God hears my fear of the unknown destination, as only He can know what lies ahead on my or anyone’s journey. God in His mercy does not leave us homeless, without hope and unable to wake from the bad dream.

We breathe air charged with His blessing. He gifts Himself; I can breathe because of Him.

I need a hug…

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Whatever Happens Now…

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Getting older:

The first surprise: I like it.
Whatever happens now, some things
that used to terrify have not:

I didn’t die young, for instance. Or lose
my only love. My three children
never had to run away from anyone.

Don’t tell me this gratitude is complacent.
We all approach the edge of the same blackness
which for me is silent.

Knowing as much sharpens
my delight in January freesia,
hot coffee, winter sunlight. So we say

as we lie close on some gentle occasion:
every day won from such
darkness is a celebration.
~ Elaine Feinstein, “Getting Older” from The Clinic, Memory

It is a privilege and a gift to turn 70 years old today. I’m pleased to make it this far relatively unscathed.

When I was an early grade school kid, I worried about everything: whatever could happen would happen – in my imagination. My parents would perish in an accident while I was at school. My dog would get lost and never come home. I would get sick with a dread disease that only afflicts one in a million children, but I would be that one.

The worries went on and on, often keeping me awake in the night and certainly ensuring that I had stomachaches every morning so my mother would keep me home from school where life felt safer. Our pediatrician, who saw me much more regularly than was actually necessary, would look at me over his glasses with a gentle perceptive gaze, put his hands on my shoulders as I squirmed about on the noisy paper on his exam table, and tell me for the umpteenth time I was 110% healthy. He affirmed there was nothing I needed to worry about.

Decades later, I tried to emulate this reassurance and instill this confidence in my own patients, thanks to the wisdom of that good man.

But I knew I needed to worry; somehow the worry was a talisman that kept the awful darkness of bad stuff away, things like nuclear missiles and polio outbreaks and earthquakes. That is a heavy load for a little kid to carry, making sure everything stays right with the universe.

None of it ever happened in my sheltered little life so I must have been doing something right!

Thankfully, by the time I turned nine, I finally learned to coexist with the inherent risks of daily life, as I realized I, in fact, wasn’t in control of the universe. We survived a rumbling 6.3 earthquake. We lived through a 114 mph windstorm that took out the power for a week. We coped with my grandpa dying. Later on I made it through some hard stuff that is too painful to even recall so I’d rather not.

Growing older means realizing that bad stuff will happen, and it is usually survivable yet the reality is: life on earth itself isn’t survivable. I’ve seen and experienced a few traumatic things over my 70 years, and have seen how some people, maybe even me, can be amazingly heroic in the worst possible situations

But I’ve learned my confidence can’t be in myself or anyone else. It rests solely in Someone who really is in charge of everything that moves and breathes in the universe and Who knows all that was, is and will be.

I really am not responsible for the universe — thank goodness.

Oh, I still worry. It is hard to stop when it is deeply engrained in my DNA, having been descended from a long line of worriers. My children are not grateful for that genetic gift to them. It is already evident my grandchildren won’t thank me either.

Yet, every day I snatch back from that darkness is reason for celebration, and today is no different.

Over 25,500 days under my belt of celebrating being here.
Hoping for more gentle occasions like this one is.

It’s a great day to be alive. Soli Deo Gloria.

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What I Learned

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The older children pedal past
Stable as little gyros, spinning hard
To supper, bath, and bed, until at last
We also quit, silent and tired
Beside the darkening yard where trees
Now shadow up instead of down.
Their predictable lengths can only tease
Her as, head lowered, she walks her bike alone
Somewhere between her wanting to ride
And her certainty she will always fall.

Tomorrow, though I will run behind,
Arms out to catch her, she’ll tilt then balance wide
Of my reach, till distance makes her small,
Smaller, beyond the place I stop and know
That to teach her I had to follow
And when she learned I had to let her go.
~Wyatt Prunty, “Learning the Bicycle” from Unarmed and Dangerous.

                       

—For Lea

The summer you learned to swim
was the summer I learned to be at peace with myself.
In May you were afraid to put your face in the water
but by August, I was standing in the pool once more
when you dove in, then retreated to the wall saying
You forgot to say Sugar! So I said Come on Sugar, you can do it
and you pushed off and swam to me and held on
laughing, your hair stuck to your cheeks—
you hiccupped with joy and swam off again.
And I dove in too, trying new things.
I tried not giving advice. I tried waking early to pray. I tried
not rising in anger. Watching you I grew stronger—
your courage washed away my fear.
All day I worked hard thinking of you.
In the evening I walked the long hill home.
You were at the top, waving your small arms,
pittering down the slope to me and I lifted you high
so high to the moon. That summer all the world
was soul and water, light glancing off peaks.
You learned the turtle, the cannonball, the froggy, and the flutter
and I learned to stand and wait for you to swim to me.
~Michael Simms “The Summer You Learned to Swim” from American Ash

Learning to swim, balancing on a bike, riding a horse – these are skills that require an adult to let go of a child.

Terrifying for everyone. But eventually necessary.

This summer, our two grandkids are taking their first swimming lessons and I’m learning as they learn.

There are some things I can’t do for them. With good teaching and guidance and encouragement, they learn to do it themselves and be stronger for it, even when there are bruises and sputters and tears.

Lord, help me learn to just stand and watch and follow their journey to independence.

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