Despair-Work: part three
Tao Te Ching
by LAO TSU
Translation by Gia Fu Feng
and Jane English
Twenty
Give up learning, and put an end to your troubles.
Is there a difference between yes and no?
Is there a difference between good and evil?
Must I fear what others fear? What nonsense!
Other people are contented, enjoying the sacrificial feast of the ox.
In spring some go to the park, and climb the terrace,
But I alone am drifting, not knowing where I am.
Like a newborn babe before it learns to smile,
I am alone, without a place to go.
Others have more than they need, but I alone have nothing.
I am a fool. Oh, yes! I am confused.
Others are clear and bright,
But I alone am dim and weak.
Others are sharp and clever,
But I alone am dull and stupid.
Oh, I drift like the waves of the sea,
Without direction, like the restless wind.
Everyone else is busy,
But I alone am aimless and depressed.
I am different.
I am nourished by the great mother.
Despair-Work: Feeling
The second requirement in despair-work is to permit ourselves to feel. We can allow the griefs and apprehensions that are within us to surface to consciousness. No matter how safe and comfortable our personal lives or how engrossing our private concerns, grief for those who suffer now, and may suffer in the future, is present in us on some level. Given the flows of information circling our globe, our psyches, however inattentive or callous they may appear, have registered the signals of distress. We do not need to be exhorted or scolded into feelings of compassion, for they inhere in us already by virtue of our nature as open systems, interdependent with the rest of life. We need only to be encouraged and empowered to open our consciousness to them. We cannot experience them without pain, but it is a healthy pain- like the kind we feel when we walk on a leg that has gone asleep and the circulation starts to move again. It gives evidence that the tissue is still alive.
As with a cramped limb, exercises can help. I have found meditational exercises useful, particularly ones from the Buddhist tradition. Practices like those called the abodes of the Buddha, or the Bramaviharas, designed to enhance the capacity to experience such feelings as loving-kindness and compassion, are effective in getting us in touch with those concerns in us that extend beyond ego-and in doing so, with our social despair.
An a example of what can happen is Marianna, a participant in a workshop I led, entitled “Being Bodhisattvas.” After two initial exercises which involved quieting down and centering on the breath, I introduced a meditation on compassion, adapted from a Tibetan bodhicitta practice. I explained that Buddhists believe that to win through to enlightenment, the hope for personal salvation is not enough; only compassion for all beings can provide the necessary motivation or fuel. The exercise involved, first of all, giving oneself permission to imaginatively experience the sufferings of others, and then taking these sufferings in with the breath, visualizing them as a dark stream drawn in with each inhalation, into and through the heart.
Afterward Marianna described to me her experience in this meditation. She had been resistant to the first two exercises and her resistance, which she expected to continue, had localized as a pain in her back. In encouraging the participants to open themselves to their inner awareness of the suffering of others, I primed the pump with some brief verbal cues, mentioned our fellow-beings in hospitals and prisons, mentioned a mother with dried breasts holding a hungry infant…. That awoke in Marianna an episode she had buried. Three years earlier she had listened to a record by Harry Chapin with a song about a starving child; she had had, as she put it, “trouble” with it. She put the record away never to play it again, and the “trouble” remained undigested. With her recollection of the song, the pain in her back moved into her chest. It intensified and hardened, piercing her heart. It seemed for a moment excruciating, but as she continued the exercise, accepting and breathing in the pain, it suddenly, inexplicably, felt right, felt even good. It turned into a golden cone or funnel, aimed point downwards into the depths of her heart. Through it poured the despair she had refused, griefs reconnecting her with the rest of humanity.
Marianna emerged from this with a sense of release and empowerment. She felt empowered, she said, not to do so much as to be-- open, attentive, poised for action. She also said that she believed she had permitted this to happen because I had not asked her to “do” something about the griefs of others, or to come up with any answers, but only to experience them.
Sometimes the blocked emotions of despair become accessible through dreams. The most vivid in my experience occurred after a dull job of perusing statistics on nuclear pollution. Before going to bed I had leafed through baby pictures of our three children to find a snapshot for my daughter’s high school yearbook.
In my dream I behold the three of them as they appeared in the old photos, and am struck mostly by the sweet wholesomeness of their flesh. My husband and I are journeying with them across an unfamiliar landscape. The land is becoming dreary, treeless and strewn with rocks; Peggy, the youngest, can barely clamber over the boulders in the path. Just as the going is getting very difficult, even frightening, I suddenly realize that, by some thoughtless but unalterable pre-arrangement, their father and I must leave them. I can see the grimness of the way that lies ahead for them, bleak and craggy as a red moonscape and with a flesh-burning sickness in the air. I am maddened with sorry that my children must face this without me. I kiss them each and tell them that we will meet again but I know of no place to name where we will meet. Innocent of terror they try to reassure me, ready to be off. Removed and from a height in the sky, I watch them go-three small solitary figures trudging across that angry wasteland, holding each other by the hand and not stopping to look back. In spite of the widening distance, I see with a surrealist’s precision the ulcerating of their flesh. I see how the skin bubbles and curls back to expose raw tissue, as they doggedly go forward, the boys helping their little sister across the rocks.
I woke up, brushed my teeth, showered, had an early breakfast meeting, took notes for a research proposal. Still the dream did not let me go. As I roused Peggy for school, I sank beside her bed. “Hold me,” I said. “I had a bad dream.” With my face in her warm nightie, inhaling her fragrance, I found myself sobbing. I sobbed against her body, against her 17-year-old womb, as the knowledge of all that assails it surfaced in me. Statistical studies of the effects of ionizing radiation, columns of figures on cancers and genetic damage, their import beyond utterance, turned now into tears, speechless, wracking.
One can wonder what good it does to allow ourselves to feel the possibilities we dread. But for all the discomfort there is healing in such openness, for ourselves and perhaps for our world. Our pain is a response to present facts, and to accept it reconnects us with our fellow-beings as well as with our own deep energies. How whole-making such pain can be is conveyed in Edward Wallant’s story of the Pawnbroker.
His family lost in the death camps, Sol, the pawnbroker, lives in a state of bitter and dogged numbness, before his feelings are jolted awake again. Tasting for the first time in 15 years the gift of tears, he thinks he is going mad. “I hear all of them screaming again…I am weeping for all of them now! Who asked for it? So maybe I love all of them, does it do any good? Doesn’t that make it worse?” He rushes out into the crowded streets, blinded by his tears and bumping against bodies. Finally clearing his eyes, Sol looks at the people there, the poor and the pimps, the dealers and drunks, and beholds “the ineffable marvel of their eyes and skins.” Hopeless and wretched as he was, he felt “strangely proud” and a great calm came over him.
To drop the defenses and let grief surface brings relief. We experience that with personal sorrow and it holds true for our despairing as well. With that letting-go comes not only release but connection. Sol saw the street people as he never had before. Opening to our despair opens us also to the love that is within us, for it is in deep caring that our anguish is rooted. The caring and connection are real, but we cut ourselves off from their power when we hide ourselves from their grief.
Despair-Work: Imaging
To acknowledge such despair to ourselves and others, we need symbols and images fir its expression, and for the energy that sharing can bring. Images, more than arguments, tap the springs of consciousness, the creative powers by which we make meaning of experience. In the challenge to survival we face now, exercise of the imagination is especially necessary because existing verbal constructs seem inadequate to what many of us are sensing.
During the civil rights movement of the early 60s, we could see the actions we rallied to oppose--- the blocking of schools and ballot-boxes, the police dogs and cattle prods. In the Vietnam war the sight on our television screens of napalmed villagers catalyzed our refusal to continue. But now the evils we would oppose, that is the forms that human greed and stupidity have taken, are harder to picture. Tables on levels of radioactivity or on lowering water resources require interpretation, lack visceral impact to trigger feelings and behaviors.
In a workshop on planetary survival I explored means by which we could share our apprehensions on an affective level as well as cognitive level. I asked the participants to offer, as they introduced themselves, a personal experience of how in the past year the global crisis had impinged on their consciousness. Thos brief introductions were potent. Some offered a vignette from work on world hunger or arms. A young physicist simply said, very quietly, “My child was born.” A social worker recalled a day her small daughter talked about growing up and having babies; with dull shock she encountered her own doubt that the world would last that long. Some offered images: fishkill washed up at a summer cottage, strip mines leaching like open wounds. Most encompassing in its simplicity was John’s image: the view from space of planet earth, so small as it glittered there that It could be covered by the astronaut’s raised thumb. That vision of our home, so finite it can be blotted out by a single human gesture, functioned as a symbol in our week’s work. It helped us cut through the verbiage of reports, and the temptations of academic one-up-manship, to the raw nerve in us all-desperate concern.
In the sharing of despair, that our imagery had permitted, energy was released that vitalized our scheduled sessions and extended them into meal-times and night. The non-stop talk around cafeteria tables and under trees was laced with laughter as pent-up feelings of despair were aired and compared. With our despairs recognized and validated in each other, came resurgence of commitment to our common human project.
Recognizing the creative powers of imagery, many call us today to come up with visions of a benign future-visions which can summon and inspire. Images of hope are potent, necessary: they shape our goals and provide the fuel for reaching them. They can, however, be asked of us too soon. Like the demand for instant solutions, such expectations can stultify-providing us an escape from the despair we may feel, while burdening us with the task of aridly designing a new Eden. Genuine visioning happens from the roots up, and these roots for many of us are shriveled by unacknowledged despair. Many of us are in an in-between time, groping in the dark with shattered beliefs and faltering hopes, and we need images that work for in-between time if we are going to work through it.
The first despair-work I can recognize as such occurred on a spring weekend toward the end of our military actions in Vietnam. Although I had active in anti-war protests and arrested at the Pentagon with attendant news coverage, I was sapped by a deep sense of futility. To give form to feeling, and tired of words, I worked with clay. As I descended into the sorrow within me, I shaped that descent in the block of clay-cliffs and escarpments plunging into abysses, dropping off into downward twisting gullies, down, down. Though I wept as I pushed at the clay with fingers and fists, it felt good to have my sense of hopelessness become palpable, visible. The twisted plummeting clay landscape was like a silent scream, and also like a dare accepted in bitter defiance, the dare to descend into empty nothingness.
Feeling spent and empty, the work done, my mind turned to go, but then took note of what my fingers had, of themselves, begun to explore. Snaking and pushing up the clay cliffs were roots. As they came into focus, I saw how they joined, tough and tenacious, feeding each other in an upsurge of ascent. The very journey downward into my despair had shaped these roots, which now thrust upward, unbidden and resilient. For long moments I traced them, wonderingly, with eyes and fingers.
Working together in groups can find images powerful to express the process of despair-work. Because in this time one cannot see the way ahead, many feature darkness or fog-and by doing so, own it. “Hello, darkness, my old friend.” In the workshop on planetary survival, John showed pictures of a trek up Mount Katahdin with some of his Yale students. Between peaks a narrow, knife-edge trail had to be crossed. It was scary and dangerous because the fog had rolled up, blanketing out the destination and everything but the foot-wide path itself. That picture of he knife-edge trail, cutting through the clouds into the unknown, became another useful symbol in our workshop, expressing the existential situation in which we find ourselves, and helping us proceed with dogged patience although unable to see more than a step at a time.
Quaker-style meetings, where a group sits and shares out of an open silence, can let images appear and interact. In one I remember Humpty Dumpty was evoked. Poor ole Humpty Dumpty, falling and breaking and all the king’s men cannot put him together again. So it is with our outmoded paradigms, our egos and self-concepts: it felt good to give imaginal form to the sense of fragmentation in our time. As we ruminated on that a voice among us slowly spoke, adding what she saw: from the shattered shell, a bird rose into the air. Eggshells break to reveal new life, I had forgotten that. The very imagery that expressed our pain pointed to the possibility of hope.
Here, as in the clay-work, the experience of hope succeeds that of despair. The cliffs had to fall away to reveal the roots, the shell had to break to release the bird. We cannot hurry that process any more than we can hasten a rose’s blooming by prying at the petals. Sometimes it takes a while, in the slow alchemy of the soul, for hope to signal, and longer for it to take forms in concrete plans and projects. That is all right.
I said to my soul, be still, and wait
without hope,
For hope would be hope of the
wrong thing.
T. S. Eliot
Despair-Work: Waiting
So we wait: even in our work, we wait. Only out of that open expectancy can images and visions arise that strike deep enough to summon our faith in them. “The ability to wait,” wrote William Lynch, “is central to hope.”
In my own feelings of despair, I was haunted by the question, “What do you substitute for hope?” I had always assumed that a sanguine confidence in the future was as essential as oxygen. Without it, I assumed, one would collapse into apathy and nihilism. It puzzled me that, in owning my own despair, I found the hours I spent working for peace and environmental causes did not lessen, but rather increased. I also seemed to detect, among some of the most active, committed leaders of these movements, signs of the same hope loss I experienced. What fuel were we running on? The question was not academic; I wanted another hope in place of the hope I lost.
I asked Jim Douglass, the theologian and writer who had left his university position to resist nuclear weapons; jailed repeatedly for civil disobedience in this effort, he leads the citizens’ campaign against the Trident submarine base. We were sitting on the steps of a shabby house in West Vancouver, catching sun between meetings of the Pacific Life Community. He had said he believed we had five years left before it was too late-too late to avert the use of our nuclear arsenal in a first strike strategy. I reflected on the implications of that remark and watched his face, as he squinted in the sun with an air of presence and serenity I could not fathom. “What do you substitute for hope?” I asked. He looked at me and smiled. “Possibilities,” he said. “Possibilities… you can’t predict, just make space for them. There are so many.” That, too, is waiting, active waiting-moving out on the fog-bound trail, though you cannot see the way ahead.
The future, of course, is not out “ahead,” but in us. Like the moth in the caterpillar’s cocoon, it is hidden in us; that is why it cannot be seen. If you poke open the cocoon prematurely, all you see is an undifferentiated glue; but the structure of the new creature is there already, present in the “imaginal cells.” When the time has come, these cells will constellate, take form. Until then, as in the magic of most transformations, a period of gestation is required. Perhaps despair-work is our cocooning-time, when we wait with patient expectancy for structures to appear that are latent in us.
Waiting does not mean inaction, but staying in touch with our pain and confusion as we act, not banishing them to grab for sedatives, ideologies, or final solutions. It is, as a student of my quoted, “staying in the dark until the darkness becomes full and clear.” The butterfly, I am told, eats its way out of the cocoon. In despair, if we digest it, is authenticity and energy to fuel our dreams.
Jacob Needleman suggests that part of the great danger in this time of crisis is that we may short-circuit despair, and thereby lose the revelations which can open to us.
For there is nothing to guarantee that we will be able to remain long enough or deeply enough in front of the unknown, a psychological state which the traditional paths have always recognized as sacred. In that fleeting state between dreams, which is called “despair” in some Western teachings, and “self-questioning” in Eastern traditions, a man is said to be able to receive the truth, both about nature and his own possible role in the universal order.
[ part one, part two , part four, references and citations, Table of Contents]
by LAO TSU
Translation by Gia Fu Feng
and Jane English
Twenty
Give up learning, and put an end to your troubles.
Is there a difference between yes and no?
Is there a difference between good and evil?
Must I fear what others fear? What nonsense!
Other people are contented, enjoying the sacrificial feast of the ox.
In spring some go to the park, and climb the terrace,
But I alone am drifting, not knowing where I am.
Like a newborn babe before it learns to smile,
I am alone, without a place to go.
Others have more than they need, but I alone have nothing.
I am a fool. Oh, yes! I am confused.
Others are clear and bright,
But I alone am dim and weak.
Others are sharp and clever,
But I alone am dull and stupid.
Oh, I drift like the waves of the sea,
Without direction, like the restless wind.
Everyone else is busy,
But I alone am aimless and depressed.
I am different.
I am nourished by the great mother.
Despair-Work: Feeling
The second requirement in despair-work is to permit ourselves to feel. We can allow the griefs and apprehensions that are within us to surface to consciousness. No matter how safe and comfortable our personal lives or how engrossing our private concerns, grief for those who suffer now, and may suffer in the future, is present in us on some level. Given the flows of information circling our globe, our psyches, however inattentive or callous they may appear, have registered the signals of distress. We do not need to be exhorted or scolded into feelings of compassion, for they inhere in us already by virtue of our nature as open systems, interdependent with the rest of life. We need only to be encouraged and empowered to open our consciousness to them. We cannot experience them without pain, but it is a healthy pain- like the kind we feel when we walk on a leg that has gone asleep and the circulation starts to move again. It gives evidence that the tissue is still alive.
As with a cramped limb, exercises can help. I have found meditational exercises useful, particularly ones from the Buddhist tradition. Practices like those called the abodes of the Buddha, or the Bramaviharas, designed to enhance the capacity to experience such feelings as loving-kindness and compassion, are effective in getting us in touch with those concerns in us that extend beyond ego-and in doing so, with our social despair.
An a example of what can happen is Marianna, a participant in a workshop I led, entitled “Being Bodhisattvas.” After two initial exercises which involved quieting down and centering on the breath, I introduced a meditation on compassion, adapted from a Tibetan bodhicitta practice. I explained that Buddhists believe that to win through to enlightenment, the hope for personal salvation is not enough; only compassion for all beings can provide the necessary motivation or fuel. The exercise involved, first of all, giving oneself permission to imaginatively experience the sufferings of others, and then taking these sufferings in with the breath, visualizing them as a dark stream drawn in with each inhalation, into and through the heart.
Afterward Marianna described to me her experience in this meditation. She had been resistant to the first two exercises and her resistance, which she expected to continue, had localized as a pain in her back. In encouraging the participants to open themselves to their inner awareness of the suffering of others, I primed the pump with some brief verbal cues, mentioned our fellow-beings in hospitals and prisons, mentioned a mother with dried breasts holding a hungry infant…. That awoke in Marianna an episode she had buried. Three years earlier she had listened to a record by Harry Chapin with a song about a starving child; she had had, as she put it, “trouble” with it. She put the record away never to play it again, and the “trouble” remained undigested. With her recollection of the song, the pain in her back moved into her chest. It intensified and hardened, piercing her heart. It seemed for a moment excruciating, but as she continued the exercise, accepting and breathing in the pain, it suddenly, inexplicably, felt right, felt even good. It turned into a golden cone or funnel, aimed point downwards into the depths of her heart. Through it poured the despair she had refused, griefs reconnecting her with the rest of humanity.
Marianna emerged from this with a sense of release and empowerment. She felt empowered, she said, not to do so much as to be-- open, attentive, poised for action. She also said that she believed she had permitted this to happen because I had not asked her to “do” something about the griefs of others, or to come up with any answers, but only to experience them.
Sometimes the blocked emotions of despair become accessible through dreams. The most vivid in my experience occurred after a dull job of perusing statistics on nuclear pollution. Before going to bed I had leafed through baby pictures of our three children to find a snapshot for my daughter’s high school yearbook.
In my dream I behold the three of them as they appeared in the old photos, and am struck mostly by the sweet wholesomeness of their flesh. My husband and I are journeying with them across an unfamiliar landscape. The land is becoming dreary, treeless and strewn with rocks; Peggy, the youngest, can barely clamber over the boulders in the path. Just as the going is getting very difficult, even frightening, I suddenly realize that, by some thoughtless but unalterable pre-arrangement, their father and I must leave them. I can see the grimness of the way that lies ahead for them, bleak and craggy as a red moonscape and with a flesh-burning sickness in the air. I am maddened with sorry that my children must face this without me. I kiss them each and tell them that we will meet again but I know of no place to name where we will meet. Innocent of terror they try to reassure me, ready to be off. Removed and from a height in the sky, I watch them go-three small solitary figures trudging across that angry wasteland, holding each other by the hand and not stopping to look back. In spite of the widening distance, I see with a surrealist’s precision the ulcerating of their flesh. I see how the skin bubbles and curls back to expose raw tissue, as they doggedly go forward, the boys helping their little sister across the rocks.
I woke up, brushed my teeth, showered, had an early breakfast meeting, took notes for a research proposal. Still the dream did not let me go. As I roused Peggy for school, I sank beside her bed. “Hold me,” I said. “I had a bad dream.” With my face in her warm nightie, inhaling her fragrance, I found myself sobbing. I sobbed against her body, against her 17-year-old womb, as the knowledge of all that assails it surfaced in me. Statistical studies of the effects of ionizing radiation, columns of figures on cancers and genetic damage, their import beyond utterance, turned now into tears, speechless, wracking.
One can wonder what good it does to allow ourselves to feel the possibilities we dread. But for all the discomfort there is healing in such openness, for ourselves and perhaps for our world. Our pain is a response to present facts, and to accept it reconnects us with our fellow-beings as well as with our own deep energies. How whole-making such pain can be is conveyed in Edward Wallant’s story of the Pawnbroker.
His family lost in the death camps, Sol, the pawnbroker, lives in a state of bitter and dogged numbness, before his feelings are jolted awake again. Tasting for the first time in 15 years the gift of tears, he thinks he is going mad. “I hear all of them screaming again…I am weeping for all of them now! Who asked for it? So maybe I love all of them, does it do any good? Doesn’t that make it worse?” He rushes out into the crowded streets, blinded by his tears and bumping against bodies. Finally clearing his eyes, Sol looks at the people there, the poor and the pimps, the dealers and drunks, and beholds “the ineffable marvel of their eyes and skins.” Hopeless and wretched as he was, he felt “strangely proud” and a great calm came over him.
To drop the defenses and let grief surface brings relief. We experience that with personal sorrow and it holds true for our despairing as well. With that letting-go comes not only release but connection. Sol saw the street people as he never had before. Opening to our despair opens us also to the love that is within us, for it is in deep caring that our anguish is rooted. The caring and connection are real, but we cut ourselves off from their power when we hide ourselves from their grief.
Despair-Work: Imaging
To acknowledge such despair to ourselves and others, we need symbols and images fir its expression, and for the energy that sharing can bring. Images, more than arguments, tap the springs of consciousness, the creative powers by which we make meaning of experience. In the challenge to survival we face now, exercise of the imagination is especially necessary because existing verbal constructs seem inadequate to what many of us are sensing.
During the civil rights movement of the early 60s, we could see the actions we rallied to oppose--- the blocking of schools and ballot-boxes, the police dogs and cattle prods. In the Vietnam war the sight on our television screens of napalmed villagers catalyzed our refusal to continue. But now the evils we would oppose, that is the forms that human greed and stupidity have taken, are harder to picture. Tables on levels of radioactivity or on lowering water resources require interpretation, lack visceral impact to trigger feelings and behaviors.
In a workshop on planetary survival I explored means by which we could share our apprehensions on an affective level as well as cognitive level. I asked the participants to offer, as they introduced themselves, a personal experience of how in the past year the global crisis had impinged on their consciousness. Thos brief introductions were potent. Some offered a vignette from work on world hunger or arms. A young physicist simply said, very quietly, “My child was born.” A social worker recalled a day her small daughter talked about growing up and having babies; with dull shock she encountered her own doubt that the world would last that long. Some offered images: fishkill washed up at a summer cottage, strip mines leaching like open wounds. Most encompassing in its simplicity was John’s image: the view from space of planet earth, so small as it glittered there that It could be covered by the astronaut’s raised thumb. That vision of our home, so finite it can be blotted out by a single human gesture, functioned as a symbol in our week’s work. It helped us cut through the verbiage of reports, and the temptations of academic one-up-manship, to the raw nerve in us all-desperate concern.
In the sharing of despair, that our imagery had permitted, energy was released that vitalized our scheduled sessions and extended them into meal-times and night. The non-stop talk around cafeteria tables and under trees was laced with laughter as pent-up feelings of despair were aired and compared. With our despairs recognized and validated in each other, came resurgence of commitment to our common human project.
Recognizing the creative powers of imagery, many call us today to come up with visions of a benign future-visions which can summon and inspire. Images of hope are potent, necessary: they shape our goals and provide the fuel for reaching them. They can, however, be asked of us too soon. Like the demand for instant solutions, such expectations can stultify-providing us an escape from the despair we may feel, while burdening us with the task of aridly designing a new Eden. Genuine visioning happens from the roots up, and these roots for many of us are shriveled by unacknowledged despair. Many of us are in an in-between time, groping in the dark with shattered beliefs and faltering hopes, and we need images that work for in-between time if we are going to work through it.
The first despair-work I can recognize as such occurred on a spring weekend toward the end of our military actions in Vietnam. Although I had active in anti-war protests and arrested at the Pentagon with attendant news coverage, I was sapped by a deep sense of futility. To give form to feeling, and tired of words, I worked with clay. As I descended into the sorrow within me, I shaped that descent in the block of clay-cliffs and escarpments plunging into abysses, dropping off into downward twisting gullies, down, down. Though I wept as I pushed at the clay with fingers and fists, it felt good to have my sense of hopelessness become palpable, visible. The twisted plummeting clay landscape was like a silent scream, and also like a dare accepted in bitter defiance, the dare to descend into empty nothingness.
Feeling spent and empty, the work done, my mind turned to go, but then took note of what my fingers had, of themselves, begun to explore. Snaking and pushing up the clay cliffs were roots. As they came into focus, I saw how they joined, tough and tenacious, feeding each other in an upsurge of ascent. The very journey downward into my despair had shaped these roots, which now thrust upward, unbidden and resilient. For long moments I traced them, wonderingly, with eyes and fingers.
Working together in groups can find images powerful to express the process of despair-work. Because in this time one cannot see the way ahead, many feature darkness or fog-and by doing so, own it. “Hello, darkness, my old friend.” In the workshop on planetary survival, John showed pictures of a trek up Mount Katahdin with some of his Yale students. Between peaks a narrow, knife-edge trail had to be crossed. It was scary and dangerous because the fog had rolled up, blanketing out the destination and everything but the foot-wide path itself. That picture of he knife-edge trail, cutting through the clouds into the unknown, became another useful symbol in our workshop, expressing the existential situation in which we find ourselves, and helping us proceed with dogged patience although unable to see more than a step at a time.
Quaker-style meetings, where a group sits and shares out of an open silence, can let images appear and interact. In one I remember Humpty Dumpty was evoked. Poor ole Humpty Dumpty, falling and breaking and all the king’s men cannot put him together again. So it is with our outmoded paradigms, our egos and self-concepts: it felt good to give imaginal form to the sense of fragmentation in our time. As we ruminated on that a voice among us slowly spoke, adding what she saw: from the shattered shell, a bird rose into the air. Eggshells break to reveal new life, I had forgotten that. The very imagery that expressed our pain pointed to the possibility of hope.
Here, as in the clay-work, the experience of hope succeeds that of despair. The cliffs had to fall away to reveal the roots, the shell had to break to release the bird. We cannot hurry that process any more than we can hasten a rose’s blooming by prying at the petals. Sometimes it takes a while, in the slow alchemy of the soul, for hope to signal, and longer for it to take forms in concrete plans and projects. That is all right.
I said to my soul, be still, and wait
without hope,
For hope would be hope of the
wrong thing.
T. S. Eliot
Despair-Work: Waiting
So we wait: even in our work, we wait. Only out of that open expectancy can images and visions arise that strike deep enough to summon our faith in them. “The ability to wait,” wrote William Lynch, “is central to hope.”
In my own feelings of despair, I was haunted by the question, “What do you substitute for hope?” I had always assumed that a sanguine confidence in the future was as essential as oxygen. Without it, I assumed, one would collapse into apathy and nihilism. It puzzled me that, in owning my own despair, I found the hours I spent working for peace and environmental causes did not lessen, but rather increased. I also seemed to detect, among some of the most active, committed leaders of these movements, signs of the same hope loss I experienced. What fuel were we running on? The question was not academic; I wanted another hope in place of the hope I lost.
I asked Jim Douglass, the theologian and writer who had left his university position to resist nuclear weapons; jailed repeatedly for civil disobedience in this effort, he leads the citizens’ campaign against the Trident submarine base. We were sitting on the steps of a shabby house in West Vancouver, catching sun between meetings of the Pacific Life Community. He had said he believed we had five years left before it was too late-too late to avert the use of our nuclear arsenal in a first strike strategy. I reflected on the implications of that remark and watched his face, as he squinted in the sun with an air of presence and serenity I could not fathom. “What do you substitute for hope?” I asked. He looked at me and smiled. “Possibilities,” he said. “Possibilities… you can’t predict, just make space for them. There are so many.” That, too, is waiting, active waiting-moving out on the fog-bound trail, though you cannot see the way ahead.
The future, of course, is not out “ahead,” but in us. Like the moth in the caterpillar’s cocoon, it is hidden in us; that is why it cannot be seen. If you poke open the cocoon prematurely, all you see is an undifferentiated glue; but the structure of the new creature is there already, present in the “imaginal cells.” When the time has come, these cells will constellate, take form. Until then, as in the magic of most transformations, a period of gestation is required. Perhaps despair-work is our cocooning-time, when we wait with patient expectancy for structures to appear that are latent in us.
Waiting does not mean inaction, but staying in touch with our pain and confusion as we act, not banishing them to grab for sedatives, ideologies, or final solutions. It is, as a student of my quoted, “staying in the dark until the darkness becomes full and clear.” The butterfly, I am told, eats its way out of the cocoon. In despair, if we digest it, is authenticity and energy to fuel our dreams.
Jacob Needleman suggests that part of the great danger in this time of crisis is that we may short-circuit despair, and thereby lose the revelations which can open to us.
For there is nothing to guarantee that we will be able to remain long enough or deeply enough in front of the unknown, a psychological state which the traditional paths have always recognized as sacred. In that fleeting state between dreams, which is called “despair” in some Western teachings, and “self-questioning” in Eastern traditions, a man is said to be able to receive the truth, both about nature and his own possible role in the universal order.
[ part one, part two , part four, references and citations, Table of Contents]