Soul Bonsai

"The Little White Plum Blossom Tree"
(n.d., shikishiban )

Healing. It’s something I keep thinking about. How much of it we all need to do. And how important it is that we participate in our own (not just by seeking treatment or solutions but with our hearts and with our faith). The way we are so hurt in so many ways, broken and trembling and prostrate in our grieving. We have lost loved ones, and we have become estranged from people we care about. We have sustained injury and disease and sundry ailments that come and then go and then arrive again when we least expect them. We have done things and said things injurious to others and to ourselves, and we have been bruised by the words and actions of the many others in (and barely brushing up against) our own lives.

I have pulled my car off the road and wept, no sobbed (ugly-crying-face-sobbing) after someone flexed on me in their road rage (this was a few weeks ago). I have done the same when someone flexed on someone else in their road rage (when I was 17). The sentiment behind these two moments, over 20 years apart, was identical. It wasn’t about me in either case. It was about being witness to one human wanting to be unkind to another…with great vigour. And for no clear or legitimate reason. I hate that shit, man. It makes me feel so sad. It’s something I can’t understand. Even the people who make me angriest (people who hurt their own children, for example, or who espouse racists or sexist views, or—you get the idea)—I can’t wish them ill. I have realised in my life that I could seriously wreck someone’s day with my words. I can wield language in a way that exposes faults and castigates—a way that seethes and scalds and shames. But I vowed long ago, maybe 12 years, that I wouldn’t do it.

When Don Miguel Ruiz said to “be impeccable with [my] word,” I took it to heart. Kind of the way I took it to heart, at 12 years old, when I was told by leaders of my church youth group that I should “be like Mary.” I was actually a virgin when I became engaged to my husband a decade later. Yeah, mull that one around for a bit. And the way that, when my first baby was crowning during my labour, I asked my midwife if I pushed really hard, would he come out on the next contraction. When she answered, “That’s up to you,” I blasted him out with the next contraction and then required a twenty-seven-stitch repair job… Really, lady? How about, “Well, you could, you’re strong enough, but if you do you’ll explode your perineum.” Yeah, that would have been good. Instead I heard a challenge and, knowing my physical body at 27 years of age as weirdly strong, I wrecked myself trying (and succeeding, I suppose). I wouldn’t say I’m a literal thinker, but a challenge that is worthwhile is one worth meeting.

So yeah, I don’t write tirades or rants about people. I don’t write exposēs or shame people with angry censure and blaming. I just try to write as thoughtfully and objectively about what I see and hear and invite people to think with me—about the hard stuff. I’m not saying I’m perfect at this (I did make a joke in one recent post about Trump’s “flaccid [metaphoric] pole,” but it was in good fun, I thought). Mostly though, I just internalise this stuff. Let it ache inside for a long time until it bubbles upward and leaves me in a puddle of tears. Not super effective, really…in healing my wounds or righting the capsized ship of my sense of humanity and its goodness. So there’s some healing that I need to do. Maybe it’s that I need to be less sensitive (my family of origin have always said so). Or maybe it’s that I need to pay less attention to the way people care (or don’t) about each other; what do these things have to do with me anyway? But if I guage it by how I feel when I move through a place crowded with people, the question inverts itself: what do they not have to do with me? It is all within me as well as without.

But it’s not just that. I feel broken inside for so many reasons, and to describe some of them would be to break the hearts of people I love and who find their way to these blog posts each week (but maybe not to me). I feel alive and happy and vibrant, too, but it’s all part of the whole…I can’t deny the darkness. I feel I have failed in some ways…professionally and as a writer. Even academically. And I feel that there are people I have let down. In ways I never meant to or would have wanted. I feel small at times. And in the words of Bon Iver, “not magnificent.” These are the wounds. They’re not the truths. The truth is that I am full of love and can honestly say I’ve done the best that I could…my whole life. I have raised two beautiful young men whose kindness and love and intelligence humble me daily. I am the partner of a wonderful man whom I seem to make happy despite my flaws. And I have educated thousands of youth, given them my heart and my mind and helped them to cultivate the best versions of themselves…and to heal themselves through their creativity.

So there it is. My greatest worth, it seems, is in my ability to help people heal. I have fostered profound healing in my students through the written word and even through choreographed dance. I’ve taken on healing energy work (most recently Reiki), and I have learned (unbelievably) to speak with the dead (yes, I did just write that). All of these things lay a thick salve on the wounds of my imperfection, my faults, and they show me that I am powerful beyond words. That in my ability to help other people find their strength, I myself am strong. Never mind the crying jag on the corner of 17th Avenue and Capitola Road. There is strength in that too. In allowing myself to grieve what is egregious and full of despair for me. I know what those things are, and they are real. To me, you know? And I am also healing myself. By continuing to care for myself, even when things at work or in my general life get hectic. Prioritising my wellbeing is the beginning of that kind of healing.

So there it is. There’s a lot of talk out there about forgiveness and lessons and even spiritual growth, but the bottom line is healing. I read a satirical excerpt the other day from an author named Jeff Brown. It started with this: “The next time you have a terrible thing happen to you and someone says, ‘You choose your every experience,’ knock them unconscious. When they wake up again, ask them to thank you for actualising their dream.” It was funny, for sure. I definitely laughed. And the passage goes on for a long while satirising the most common of aphorisms in modern (and ancient) spiritual teachings, and it gives us an opportunity to laugh at our own tendency to attempt to reduce vast truths to short, pithy maxims. But that’s just it; it’s only the reduction that is reprovable here, not the actual sentiment of “choos[ing] your every experience.”

I actually do believe that in spirit we choose our challenges for this lifetime, however horrific and far from what we might cognitively elect to undergo. I believe the suffering and struggle we experience in this lifetime are a direct result of how we want to grow in spirit. The more extreme the challenge, the braver the choice and the more powerful the growth. But I wouldn’t say that to someone in the moment of crisis. I wouldn’t say it to someone tangled in their own trauma after, say, a lifetime of abuse. I would say, “Let’s figure out how you can heal.” That is all. Healing is all. It doesn’t make that bigger picture untrue; it just means that speaking of those “lessons” is insensitive and not helpful in the heat of the healing. I do believe that discerning the choice, not to suffer but to grow, which might ultimately involve some suffering, can empower an individual and can even constitute some part of the healing, but it’s not where you start, you know?

I don’t even think I’m disagreeing with Mr. Brown…just feeling a need to clarify, because taken out of context, the quote seems to negate the idea that we have great autonomy as spiritual beings and, indeed, do agree to ways this life will challenge us (before we even take bodies and enter a lifetime on this earth), and I don’t think that’s what he’s trying to do. Perhaps, and this is an educated guess based on some other excerpts that appear on his Facebook page, Mr. Brown wants to make the distinction between the idea that “traumas were caused by mistakes that require a lesson to avoid repeating them” and the concept of shaping and nurturing one’s own spiritual path, like a beautiful bonsai tree. The former, I agree, is rubbish, but the latter…it’s at the core of my belief system.

Of course, we can’t begin to see the beauty or even the shape of that soul bonsai until we can begin to heal, and healing is a lot easier said than done. It requires love and attentiveness and faith…in the power of our own thoughts. Of prayer. Of connection to others. And it requires corrective emotional experiences. Ones of beauty and divinity and peace…to replace the ones that have razed us and filled us with fear. Fear, it seems, must be replaced with love. These are, in many ways, opposites. And all this takes time. So we begin with our intention. To see ourselves and allow ourselves to be seen, and to embrace what we see (and allow others to do the same). It’s by stopping resisting what we are and how we hurt that we can begin to heal.

We have to stop being so shocked at our brokenness and instead let our selves be broken. It’s not easy. Please don’t misunderstand me. But know that we are powerful beyond measure. And there is beauty in our brokenness. My favourite Leonard Cohen lyric says this: “Ring the bells that still can ring / Forget your perfect offering / There is a crack…in everything / That's how the light gets in.” The wisdom here breaks my heart open afresh. It’s so good. So I’m going to keep ringing the bells. I show up each day to teach kids that society has all but forgotten. Kids in whose lives a small handful of people are working day and night to help heal after their wounds have manifest in criminal activities. I keep writing this little blog with its 10 readers (man, I love you guys) and engaging in other creative projects. And I keep loving up and supporting and showing up for my little family and for the people who need me.

That is the best I can do, and I know that it is enough. It’s more than enough. It’s beautiful. “We are amazed how hurt we are,” said the brilliant poet Tony Hoagland, “We would give anything for what we have.” And we do.