The Comfort Jar

“If it’s true your life flashes past your eyes before you die, then it is also the truth that your life rushes forth when you are ready to start to truly be alive.”
― Amy Hempel, The Collected Stories

It is said, ‘Never meet your heroes, because they’re sure to disappoint you.’  But last weekend, I met the writer Amy Hempel and all my insides seemed to fit better than they did before.

Amy was facilitating a workshop at A Public Space in Brooklyn, NY. I couldn’t help gushing to her that I’d come all the way from Ireland to attend. This news sparked a look of slight concern from Ms Hempel, as did my sitting in the very front row, practically at her knee (there was an ever so subtle shift of her table back towards her and away from my big leaning in.) I couldn’t help it. But what a generous, kind, funny and insightful person she is. For the workshop, we all had to prepare a short piece which each person read (there were 15 of us) and which she responded to individually.

For those of you less familiar with her work, here are two little snippets: “I would like to go for a ride with you, have you take me to stand before a river in the dark where hundreds of lightning bugs blink this code in sequence: right here, nowhere else! Right now, never again!” Tumble Home: A Novella and Short Stories

And: “Since his mother died I have seen him steam a cucumber thinking it was zucchini. That’s the kind of thing that turns my heart right over.”

I sat in that front row all misty-eyed as Amy turned my heart right over. What a lady.

xx Beth

Hi Friends,

Our comfort quote for today:

I Go Down to the Shore

“I go down to the shore in the morning/ and depending on the hour the waves / are rolling in or moving out, / and I say, oh, I am miserable, / what shall — / what should I do? And the sea says / in its lovely voice: / Excuse me, I have work to do.”– Mary Oliver

As you know, Mary Oliver passed recently, but she has filled the hole she left with her words to comfort losses such as hers. ‘Look, the trees/ are turning/ their own bodies/ into pillars/ of light …’

I’ve been reading Michelle Obama’s ‘Becoming’ for the past few days and thinking a lot about the current US political climate and came across these lines today on the connective charge that the best words can have – “In an American age characterised by fragmentation and political division, it takes the passage of a literary icon like Mary Oliver to remind us how we have been bound together over the years by words and ideas masterfully crafted that have left an indelible mark on our cultural identity.” – World Literature Today

Any of you care to share other word wizards who have helped you ‘lift the veil’ as Oliver did so many times?

xx Beth

Hi Friends,

Today’s comfort quote:

“Faith is the bird that feels the light when the dawn is still dark.” – Rabindranath Tagore

I took this pic this morning while walking the dogs – the grass was covered in misty wet and the air was all low-lying fogginess so when the light struck, it splayed in all these hope-filled ribbons.

This time of year is very hard for lots (dare I say, most) of us, so I thought I’d use Tagore’s words for anyone in a sensitised state. We are now five days in to the light growing at either end of the day.

Behind where I stood to take the photo, there is a bench which has a dedication plaque for a young man who took his life just a few feet away. The young man was just 18. We share a birthday. His parents still live nearby and at every festive occasion, the bench and the hedge behind it become decorated – there were balloons for what would have been the boy’s 21st birthday. Today, there were baubles throughout the hedge. I’ve been told the boy’s mother often sits there, but I have never seen her.

I’m sure most of you have seen those Facebook posts of laminated, hand-drawn signs which a UK teenager named Paige Hunter has placed on a bridge where many others have taken their lives. Her signs say things like , ‘You are loved.’ ‘If you go, you will leave a terrible gap,’ ‘You will not always feel like this.’ ‘If you stay, there is still hope.’

Apparently, she has saved at least 6 lives. I suspect she has touched many more.

For those of you having a bright and lovely family and friends time, cheers! For those of you who might not be, I hope the idea that there are people like this teen rooting for our most despairing might give your heart a lift.

Roll on a fresh start in 2019!

xx Beth

Hi Friends,

Our comfort quote for today:

“All that is solid melts into air.” – Karl Marx

This week we see an ongoing crisis in Paris as the gilet jaunes protest the divisions in French society. Watching the news, I remembered a chat I had with one of my students when he told me he wrote a novel about the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and titled it All That is Solid Melts into Air. I told him how sad and poetic the title was (assuming he made it up) and then he told me it was a Karl Marx quote that has long been a summation of the divided experience that is modernity: the loss of the old world paired with the creation of the new, decay as the condition of construction. Oh.

The Buddhists (and the physicists) tell us this – that nothing is fixed for even a nanosecond. Zen master Dogen said, ‘Even the mountains are walking.’ Which can seem terrifying. I for one have spent most of my conscious life trying to find something solid – some plumb line of identity or personal connection or distraction to cling to when the daily life current changes direction too quickly. And when I haven’t found anything to cling to, I’ve just tensed up my insides until they felt solid.

But this idea that every single solid thing (including every disaster, every stressor, every heartache) will become nothing more than a vapour sooner or later – this is a comfort. And again as Western zen teacher Cheri Huber says, ‘Just give the discomfort one solid minute of your attention, and you will feel it lesson.’ Which sounds like a bona fide superpower to me.

Good luck with your week.

xx Beth

Hi Friends,

Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul – and sings the tunes without the words – and never stops at all. – Emily Dickinson

These images are from my trip to Maine and its Appalachian Trail. It was one big comfort jar. The walks, the talks, family catch-ups, the skies, birdsong, icy lake swims (all 30 seconds worth) = the thing with feathers. 

The things that give us hope … the darker days of winter often stir the pot and nudge us to look for whatever might provide a seam of light on the horizon. A few times on the trip, there were uncomfortable moments – brief times when I got lost or wet or very cold or just plain miserable. But having the net of nature and extreme quiet all around allowed for an interaction with those difficult moments which my city life often blurs. Time and time again, I was reminded of the words of Cheri Huber (the Zen teacher I often quote here). She says, ‘Our suffering comes with resistance to what is. If we can drop the trying not to feel/be uncomfortable with whatever physical or emotional challenge we might encounter, it is proven that the sensation of discomfort lasts, at most, about 90 seconds.’ I know that may sound far-fetched, especially for any of you grieving or in chronic pain, and but I must say it worked for me! Some awfulness came upon me, I took careful note of it while trying to loosen any resistance and within a minute … poof! I did have to repeat the process about a zillion times, but Sweet Lawdy, it felt good to have a super power in the midst of some passing misery. Which gives me hope. And feels like I have a pocket filled with Maine peace even back in Dirty Auld Dublin.

Thanks to all my Maine kin and friends. That was the best birthday ever!!

xx Beth

Hi Friends,

A comfort quote for today:

“If your Nerve, deny you – Go above your Nerve” – Emily Dickenson

It’s the night before I head off to Maine – itching to see family and friends I haven’t seen in decades. Plus, there will be a spell of deep quiet in a lakeside cottage, buried in the woods off the Appalachian Trail (a screenshot of it). I’ve been looking forward to this trip for the whole year. My dear friend Julie (who is going to shiver alongside me) has endured about 3000 phonecalls from me this past bear of a year, and she ended pretty much every one with, ‘The trail will sort that out.’ Here’s to that. Although, it might’ve been a good idea to have not bought my boots online and have them arrive today. Here’s a before trail shot:

It’s crazy late so I won’t wax on. Just two more lines to share with any of you who might also be on the cusp of a proverbial walk in a chilly woods. Cheryl Strayed pre-Pacific Crest Trail 1000 mile hike: ‘I’m going to walk myself back to the woman my mother thought I was.’ And her mother’s reminder to notice the sunrises and sunsets and to ‘Put myself in the way of beauty every day.’

See you on the other side xx Beth

 

Hi Friends,

Today’s comfort quote:

“Weigh carefully your hopes as well as your fears, and whenever all the elements are in doubt, decide in your own favour; believe what you prefer. And if fear wins a majority of the votes, incline in the other direction anyhow, and cease to harass your soul, reflecting continually that most mortals, even when no troubles are actually at hand or are certainly to be expected in the future, become excited and disquieted.” – Seneca

This is a good one for any of you fellow worry warts out there. I’ve just read that there is an actual mathematical formula that less than 8% of our fears come true. All the time we spend shoring ourselves against things which don’t come to pass. Yet it soothes me to think that the anxiety we often think of as a modern phenomenon was as much of a concern to Seneca’s peers over 2000 years ago. He reminds us that it’s our mind’s natural predisposition to fret – scientist tell us we are wired this way to keep us from following the lemmings off the cliff. And Seneca says to remember you get to decide whether to dwell in hope or fear and to also recall how often what we hoped for doesn’t come to pass, just as what we dread often doesn’t.

In her research on empathy,  psychologist/sociologist Brené Brown interviewed hundreds of people who had suffered tragic losses – many of them losing their young children. Brown said the grieving parents were often asked how they could be helped or comforted. She was struck by the consistent message – the only way you can help is by treasuring your own loved ones – ‘that honours what we lost’. Brown expanded with research which revealed that the emotion we are most frightened of isn’t melancholy – it’s joy. She described the feeling of tucking in her sleeping children last thing at night and feeling awash in happiness, only to have the feeling immediately chased by an image of her children being mowed down by a Mack Truck or some such. She said this is how we are hard-wired, thinking the dread might keep the bad thing from happening, but the parents who actually lived that worst nightmare said no amount of worry could’ve helped them prepare for their loss – all it would’ve succeeded in doing is snuff out the good stuff.

All old news, I know, but it helped me to think of this today.

(PS … If any of my Irish friends are up at crazy o’clock this week (6:15am and again at the midnight zone of 12:58am) I’ll be on RTE Radio 1’s A Living Word, reading 5 short pieces of writing – one each day from Monday the 17th to Friday the 21st (morning piece repeated at night).

xx Beth

Hi Friends,

Our comfort quote for today:

“There will be times when standing alone feels too hard, too scary and we will doubt our ability to make it through the uncertainty. Someone, somewhere will say, ‘Don’t do it. You don’t have what it takes to survive the wilderness.’ This is when you reach deep into your wild heart and remind yourself. ‘I am the wilderness.'” – Brené Brown

This is for any of you who are also struggling with that back-to-school-oh-no-what-am-I-doing-with-my-life feeling. I see it in my students’ eyes every September – the terror laced with a hunger to reach deep and open to a wider place.

The pic above was made by my neighbour’s kids. They’re 5 and 7 years old and spent a good hour working on very detailed chalk drawings – including some fantastic portraits of our two gigantic dogs. They toiled, tongues bitten and brows furrowed. Work done, they stood and glowed at the fruit of their labour. And the very next morning we got a deluge of rain we haven’t seen in many months. Which made the drawings into this swarm of aurora borealis loveliness.

I’m sharing this with you because of how stuck I get on making something and then needing it to be seen/read/heard and how it pains me for it to all feel like a waste when the work delivers none of those things. And words like Brené’s above come in ‘You don’t have what it takes …’ The rain of rejections can feel too miserable. But hearing this quote today made my throat go solid and my heart soften. I hope it might do the same for you.

Good luck with your making. Eventually, someone, somewhere will say, ‘I’m so glad you made this.’

xx Beth

Hi Friends,

A comfort quote for today:

“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” – Carl Jung

I’ve been reading Jenny Offill’s novel, ‘Dept. of Speculation’ and laughing out loud a lot. In one section, she lists some of the things that irritate her about others:

“I hate often and easily. I hate, for example, people who sit with their legs splayed. People who claim to give 110 percent. People who call themselves “comfortable” when what they mean is decadently rich.”

We all have a list (queue skipping weasels top mine). I will have to have a think about what my list might help me understand about myself – certainly too much fondness for fairness vs the unfair.

Jung, unsurprisingly, says a zillion wise things. Here’s another that made my insides ping –

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious.” A call to befriend our shadowy side – including those bits which get FURIOUS over another’s foibles. 

It’s been a long kiddie-filled summer so I’ve been posting less often than I’d like. More comfort quotes coming in the autumn months.

Hope all is well in your worlds,

xx Beth

Hi Friends,

A comfort quote for today:

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.” – Carl Sagan

I went to a new (to me, but very old to itself) bookshop today. It was swelteringly hot outside and the dusty cool of the place felt as soothing as a chapel. My mother once told me that you get three wishes whenever you visit a new church. I’ve decided that now works for bookshops. The space is all cubbyholes and corners and is hundreds of years old. I’m re-reading Jane Eyre at the moment and losing the run of myself in places that fit the era of the book, as the bookshop does.

After a long browse, I bought a book from the very man who set the place up 40 years ago. He wrapped it carefully in brown paper with s strip of sellotape. Imagine! I nearly floated home, and stumbled across this Sagan quote which sums up the whole Jane Eyre swoon perfectly.

I hope you are also mid-read of something that makes you a ‘citizen of a distant epoch’ too – contemporary or not.

xx Beth