A morning of great despondency after a siege of much rage/frustration releasing leads me to reflecting on the ritual-like process I/we go through as I/we approach thresholds of change in our lives.

The scent of gardenia arrives to weave with the honeysuckle and night-blooming jasmine–Ojai’s sweet summer intoxication peaking! So, too, the summer itself. Late in coming, it makes up for lost time with incredibly high (in the 100’s) temperatures for days on end. This year we have humidity, too. A far cry from what we East Coast transplants remember, but challenging to those of us now used to the dry, high desert heat that’s more usual here.

I respond to the zapping, energy sapping, prostrating temperatures by going dormant during daylight hours. That or driving 20 miles to the coast. There I wander for hours at the tide lines of any one of a series of beautiful favorite beaches. Always, I am so incredibly grateful that I have been able to tailor a life that allows me the time and room for such healing timelessness. And, always, I am grateful that the nights cool down to the livable 60-degree range.

The storms of emotional releasing that all but filled my days last month seem to have passed through for now. Just as they left, I had one morning of intense despondency. I woke feeling like I was ready to be done with this life. Feeling that I’d done enough, released, healed and shared enough, listened and witnessed enough. That I didn’t want to do anymore of any of it. That I was more than ready to let go of this life and this body.

I took my morning chai out to my little meditation garden. Settled into the beautiful, comfortable new rock-and-lichen colored pillows in my sweet bent willow chair. With my feet on the footstool, sipping my chai I watched the light and shadow play across the lovely, peaceful seated Quan Yin statue that rests amid the ferns. The despondency began melting, gone by the time I had moved into the rhythm of working.

In my breaks during that day I remembered how very often that sense of readiness to die has come at threshold places in my life. So often as I’ve stood at the doorway to a next layer/chapter/season, I have been overcome with a great tiredness, a despondency. A readiness to give up even life itself. Somehow this readiness to die seems part of the letting go of what has been in order to be able to move into what is coming in.

And, there is another part to it as well. Some “me” wants to cling to what has been, to the familiar, to the predictable, what has worked, been safe till now. That me would rather die than go forward. To her it feels like much too much “work” to stay on the planet and go through the changing, through all the lettings go that she fears will be asked of her by that process of transformation.

That there seems to be nothing in me that is afraid of dying (a blessed gift with which I seem to have come into this world) makes these ruminations neither painful nor scary when they come. Each time, I yield myself to the fullness of the feelings. Each time they gradually dissolve, at some point, into just being here and available for the shifting.

 As I write this I realize that the emotional flailing about, the irritability, the ranting/raging at minor frustrations that was so much a part of last month is also familiar as an at-a-threshold phenomenon for me. The agitation, the being so incredibly out of sorts, so hyper-sensitive to frustrations of the smallest kind–all this seems so much a part of the “ordeal” of the transforming time.

I see this so often as well in the women I work with and in my close friends. At the cusp times (times that can either be brief or go on for a long while) we go through a period of seeming to “fall apart.”  Nothing seems right. Everything seems to agitate, irritate or else to call forth tears and deep sorrowing. There are waves of overwhelming feelings of “not my ordinary self-ness.”  We feel unsettled. Not infrequently, in these threshold passages we become sort of foggy-brained: forgetful, clumsy, unable to stay focused.

And, as I write, I remember the most magical course I took in college: “Myth, Ritual and Literature.” I remember studying the patterns and cycles and rituals in Greek and Shakespearean drama, in myths, legends, folklore and folk ballads. And, in the creative process itself. Always there is the coming apart, the chaos, the dying that precedes the coming together, coming to clarity, the rebirth.

How disconnected we’ve grown from all the nature-centered, soul-centered knowings and tribal rituals that could support and sustain us as we move through these times of great vulnerability, great shifting. What a difference it makes when we can have such a container, such a knowing of what is expectable in these times of great shifting. How much less “crazy” we can feel.

I’ve learned, “re-membered” so much during so many years of growing myself, of being ferociously dedicated to letting myself unfold however I needed to. And, bearing intimate witness to the journeys of so many people that I’ve work with or been close friends with has brought even more gifts to the “re-membering.” 

Now, when I–or anyone I know closely or work with–start getting so “crazed” and “upheaved,” I know something big and deep is moving. I know that we need to slow way down, to move really care-fully, to ask as little of ourselves as possible, to make time for resting and nourishing our selves. I know that we need to keep making safe spaces in which to have the emotional storms, the rages, the tears, the fears, the griefs. I know that we need to keep reminding ourselves and each other that these are normal parts of the transformation process. That these are the predictable “ordeals” the hero must move through on the quest for her own wholeness.

So, here I am, for the moment seemingly out of the turmoil, the white water turbulence. Not yet at all clear of where/what it is that I’m moving toward. Yet, still knowing that some significant shifting is germinating, brewing, readying itself just below the surface of my ordinary life and ordinary awareness.

I am patient, curious. And, all the while, I know that there may be more turbulence yet to come before the birth, the actual manifesting of the shift that I know is brewing.

A poem by Ellen Bass (she who also wrote The Courage to Heal) and a quote from e.e.cummings came into my world this month. They both seem really connected to all of this:

Change

by Ellen Bass 

This is where I yank the old roots

from my chest, like the tomatoes

we let grow until December, stalks

thick as saplings.

This is the moment when ancient fears

race like thoroughbreds, asking for more
and more rein. And, I, the driver,

for some reason they know nothing of

strain to hold them back.

Terror grips me like a virus

and I sweat, fevered,

trying to burn it out.

This feat is so invisible. All you can see

is a woman going about her ordinary day,

drinking tea, taking herself to the movies,

reading in bed. If victorious

I will look exactly the same.

Yet, I am hoisting a car from mud ruts

half a century deep. I am hacking

a clearing through the fallen slash

of my heart. Without laser precision,

with only the primitive knife of need, I cut

and splice the circuitry of my brain.

I change.

"Being nobody but yourself–in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you like everybody else–means to fight the hardest battle any human being can fight, and never stop fighting."

 e.e. cummings

Originally published August 2003