"When a man has learned within his heart what
fear and trembling mean, he is safeguarded against
any terror produced by outside influences."
"I
don't really understand that."
"You
will, one day. When the worst has happened,
and still you continue to breathe."
--
Gwyneth Cravens, "Love and Work"
Grief
can make you angry, and a little nuts.
From
about 1995, when my brother died, to 1997, when
my mother died -- a time frame which, incidentally,
coincided with transiting Pluto crossing my Ascendant
-- I felt like the angriest person in the world.
And since there was nobody to get angry at,
lots of people caught schrapnel from my periodic
explosions. Soon after my brother's
death, his widow -- a woman I'd regarded as a
sister for twenty years -- made a couple of tactical
errors and was vaporized from my life with a single
nuclear blast. Several long standing friendships
were destroyed in bloody, surgical battles.
Clients who transgressed my boundaries were unceremoniously
kicked to the curb. And one day when my
boss hollered at me I turned around, threw some
personal things in a box, and simply walked out.
Every day, it seemed, I grew angrier and angrier,
increasingly depressed, and more and more isolated.
Several people -- nice, interesting people --
made overtures of friendship during that time,
but I resisted getting too close. Suddenly
I could see other people only in terms of the
harm we were capable of inflicting on one another.
Six
months after my mother died I could literally
barely walk. My back, always my weak spot,
was constantly seizing up and putting me out of
commission for days at a time, and I was having
problems with my feet. I tried prosthetics
for my feet and saw my chiropractor regularly,
but these remedies were limited in their effectiveness.
The message was clear: I wasn't moving forward.
In fact, I was hardly moving at all.
Fortunately
I was pursuing a degree from my local community
college which required that I take two physical
education classes. In 1999 I signed up for
a yoga class, and after only two classes of breathing
and stretching I was able to get around almost
completely without pain. For an hour
and a half, two days a week, I devoted myself
completely to relaxing, giving in, softening.
The physical relief was enormous; I still practice
yoga regularly to keep myself getting around smoothly.
Along
with the physical pain, some of that white hot
anger gradually subsided too; but six years down
the road I find I'm still a lot more short tempered,
irritable, and judgmental than I used to be.
Every step of the way, it seems, I took the
wrong approach in handling my grief and consequently
hurt myself and other people. In hindsight,
it's easy to see where I went wrong, what I could
have done differently, how I might have allowed
those experiences to deepen me, to increase my
compassion, to teach me. Instead I fought back
at an ill defined enemy with everything in me,
with all my implacable hatred, and launched dozens
of powerful but unncessary battles. In
the end, nothing was accomplished except that
I was left physically and emotionally hobbled.
Two
deaths. That's all it took to transform
me, in two years, from a fairly open, emotionally
accessible, and forgiving person into someone
I barely recognized, someone a lot more bitter
and wary than I ever wanted to be. It
took only two deaths, two years apart, to upset
the balance in me between love and hate, to tip
the scales just a little further in the direction
of hate. Who knows what the deaths of
6,000 people in a single day will do to the character
of my country?
Like
most everyone else I have personal feelings about
what happened here on September 11, and strong
convictions as to why it happened and what my
country's response should be. But my feelings
and thoughts are not unique and are no more valid
than anyone else's, and I doubt I could express
them with any more eloquence than the dozens of
talented writers speaking out on the subject.
Since I have very strong feelings but few answers,
all I will offer a country currently experiencing
its own Pluto/Ascendant transit is what I
learned from my own walk through the heart of
darkness:
There
is no such thing as safety.
The
consequence of hardening ourselves against
possible threat is pain.
The
consequence of distancing ourselves from other
people is loneliness.
The
consequence of hatred is unhappiness.
My
own response to Pluto/Ascendant grief and loss
resulted in excessive pain and suffering for myself
and others. My hope is that my country can
find a way to transcend its collective suffering,
will choose its battles very, very carefully,
and will ultimately prove much greater, stronger,
and more compassionate than I did.
