I am startled out of my own internal dialogue that I had not been aware of consciously until she speaks to me but it is almost as if she has interrupted a heated conversation. At first I don't want to admit that I was slamming anything because I don't think that I was but anyway I assure her that I am not feeling angry about getting up and getting her lunch ready. I feel deeply that I am lucky to be the man who gets to be the one who does this little thing for her in the morning so much so I often feel sorry for other guys. I tell her just realized that I was feeling angry about other perceived wrongs and was engaged in a heated internal dialogue about it feeling a little silly that I wouldn't have even consciously acknowledged it had she not said what she did. Really, I am foggy kind of half awake at this time of the morning.
I sit down on the edge of the bed with a cup of coffee as she blows dries her hair and sleepily check a late night text from a long distance friend that I hadn't read:
“The only thing I have left from (her) is a three string fiddle hanging on the wall … I find two hairbands in my room and wrap them around the fiddleneck and bow soon as I do it the lights blink on and off twice. I'm like a three string fiddle hanging on the wall. I scrape on the bow and can't play at all.”
When my wife comes out of the bathroom, I'm crying pretty hard. I feel for my friend whose fiance' died suddenly in his early twenties knowing that he is still dealing with it hard these so many years later but this unblocks something inside of myself as well. I see that in his way he is working through it now after nearly ten years. It all seems to come out as a “world of pain” to me. My wife asks what's wrong saying she knows I wasn't angry at her that everything is okay so I show her the text because I can't really even talk at that moment to show her that is not what I am upset about.
She reads it: Wow, the lights blinked twice?
His Love's spirit has given him a lot of signs over the years that she is always there with him, I tell my wife. But the thing is that this place here is just a horrible place why do we have to be here, I wonder putting my arms around her waist as she stands in front of me.
Do you mean this town? she asks knowing I mean more.
No, I mean THIS place. This world here.
It isn't all bad, is it? She kisses me on the head.
No, there is you, I agree. It's not all bad.
I think, I tell her before she leaves, that particularly men use anger to cover up our pain because the pain is vulnerable and weak which is a frightening feeling for us while the anger is more comfortable - it's like putting up your fists in physical defense, maybe?
We kiss and she goes off to work. Poor girl. It isn't even 6:30 in the morning yet. I know I'm not “normal” that it can't be easy to be married to me. She's used to me now and knows that all this simply a "day in the life" so not particularly a big deal.
I accept the fact that I'm not going to be going back to sleep and decide to delve into what is obviously a powerful emotion by employing what I call “the little engine "that is a simple technique for processing difficult feelings that I seldom have to use any longer: Awareness; Validation; Gratitude. I developed it back in the summer of 2012 as a way to connect with feelings that I found I wanted otherwise to reject or that were incomprehensible to me. In this case, first there is the anger now revealed to be acting as a hard shield protecting an underlying, vulnerable pain. So I say in my mind to the anger I had been feeling earlier that I am aware of you anger. I validate you, anger, as my own feeling that is important and trying to help me in some way. And finally, I thank you anger for helping me. In this way the little engine helps me to form an integrative instead of disintegrative relationship with my feelings which were often and are now still sometimes either incomprehensible to me or even perceived as hostile. When I first started using this, the feelings were almost confused by this new stance and it would sometimes take a couple days to process the feeling and have it come back to me in an integrative form. Now, it comes almost immediately as I sit with the feeling making a conscious effort to connect rather than to move away from it thinking that this is what I “do” - that this is the mushroom path which is not a path on the ground but a pathway leading through life. Others may well laugh at such a thing but to me it is the most important and meaningful “work” of my life.
I go back to I think the seventh grade when in a class we are shown a documentary about a German concentration camp during WWII. Immediately, that world of pain underlying that protective anger wells up. So much here. I had forgotten this but at that time I was a pacifist having vowed to never fight in a war. The Vietnam war was going on but no one expected it to be going on by the time I was old enough to be drafted (although it very nearly did!) but I had thought about it and vowed to be a conscientious objector. This morning, almost fifty years later, I think back how had I come to such conclusions at such a young age as that? I recall then failing second grade the shame of that failure because I could not read. Then that next year being half a day in a special reading class with an old battleax of a woman, Mrs. Wilson. By God, I surely knew how to read by the end of that second second grade! And I began then to read every single non fiction book in the elementary school library starting with A and progressing machine like alphabetically reading almost constantly obviously a reaction to that shame of failing second grade for not being able to read. But by the time I left that elementary school, I had read every non fiction book on its shelves. So I knew something of war already, of this WWII, of these concentration camps. But now before me was a reality it seemed and somehow it cracked open something inside me as I recall that feeling looking around the room of children, at the teacher in the front of the class, everyone watching that footage that I could not quite believe was real at first thinking well this is like other stuff on THE TV set, right – this is not “really” real? But no, this is real, obviously. Those skeletal bodies draped in skin are actually being pushed up into great piles by bull bulldozers as if so much trash in the town dump. It was one thing to read about it but to see it here for real these actual images it is literally almost too much to bare. I vow then that okay yes I must go to war if a war is to stop such a thing from happening – these many years later, of course, my feelings about war have gone through many iterations.
And this is the feeling under the anger of the pain which is inextricably bound with fear of this total destruction of any sense of reason, of safety in this world. Wanting to run out of that room or stand up and cry out what the hell is going on here, what is this, stop it explain this to this to me right now! But instead just sitting like all the rest staring at this horror not even crying myself wanting to crying forcing it back because no one else is nor is anyone else appearing to question it and I do not want to shame myself more after that shame from failing second grade and being held back like some dumb kid. I had always felt like an outcast but here, right here, in this room and at this moment that feeling explodes into me. I shrink inside and try to hide and began to feel as if I am surrounded by … by what? By some strange animals? By some kind of dangerous, unfathomable “things” that are not like me at all but are somehow alien - these other kids, this adult, this teacher – these humans? I thought I understood a lot about the world from reading so much but right here very much adding to my sense of utter disillusion, I come face to face with my own complete ignorance of this world so that suddenly I see things are actually far more insane and dangerous than I had yet imagined? I think that it shattered me to pieces and I don't really think I have ever put myself quite back together. I'm not even sure that I want to? I don't want to be a part of this place. I never could accept suffering no matter what Buddha said about it. I don't feel that I have suffered so much personally but my God what I have seen around me is daunting, indeed. How often I find myself thinking, "but for grace of God go I". Living with a deep and abiding terror of this world and after half a century this feeling has not changed into something else really only having been reinforced by what this world has shown me in so many ways and it feels much like in those many zombie movies that are so popular when the few people left who are not zombies are surrounded by zombies and that's it right there – you people, you “others”, you frighten me. Your planet here, your culture, your blind obedience to leaders who to me are obviously purely evil is terrifying. This is the isolation I feel at it's heart. That sense of separateness. I felt for quite a while when in teens that this world would get better over time that education and technology would lead to improvements but that is not what I have seen. It is really hard for me to believe that we are well into the 21st Century now. Those skeletal, skin draped corpses are still bulldozed into open graves to this day. The horror has only been sanitized and hidden behind a vast façade of decency and societal order so that it is not recognized as was Nazism for the obvious evil that it is instead it is praised as “good” which is no consolation for me . It is more even more insane and more dangerous to me in than I realized when in seventh grade – this is what I am thinking? It is what I am feeling, more to the point. It is not a good feeling and it is an immature feeling at some level and there is now no wonder to me at all why I would prefer anger and I thank anger more earnestly realizing how hard anger has been working to protect me. A thankless job if there ever were one, Anger. My own feelings I see are always in some way trying to protect me, to help me, even if the help is not particularly helpful in the largest sense of things.
My mind turns then back to my friends text that had been the trigger here - his three string violin. I have watched him struggle with this pain for a while now and I understand it I feel by understanding how it would be if I lost my own Love - not something that could be thrown off so easily. And it is as if his fiancé' speaks to me telling me that she loves him so much. She is with him always. Love never dies, she says. I feel the truth of this. You are right, she says, that he chooses women who could never be emotionally available to him because he cannot get over his love for me so he finds some reason to avoid any woman who might be capable of a deep and real love and to me I see that in a way that is a beautiful thing what he does. It is the way in which he honors that love he had for me. I only want him to be happy, though. I wish I could tell him that it is okay to love again and to be happy. And I see the truth of this and somehow I see how what appears so often to me to be one thing is actually overlying another thing just the way this anger overlays the pain? For the briefest instant the heavy curtains are pulled back and a shaft of brilliant white light blazes through. As my wife had said only a few minutes ago - it's not all bad. I feel as if I have some very tiny degree of understanding of this pain below the anger and then of this fear just below the pain that surely encompasses childhood trauma but obviously speaks to the depth of existential angst in just being human as well. But I still do not feel transformational acceptance or realization so I pray to God please help me to come to terms with this because I do not know what else to do? I think of the light switch going on and off twice and I know that was real because these things have happened to me and I give thanks now that God is real to me not simply some concept in my head. Love IS real, I think, but it is still with that painful feeling riding along with it so not in a neat and tidy conclusion at all. My work is never done.
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