My Friend, Sadness

What if we weren't afraid of it? Art requires a touching into the heart of humanity — of which there is none without deep grief.

“Burst” (watercolour)

“It is spring again. The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke

I have ascended. I have been lifted out. Rescued. Redeemed. Whatever word most symbolizes the resurrection of my cells from deadbeat oblivion. Just as Easter approaches (sort of), I suddenly feel like myself.

But what does that mean? The Self is made up of so many selves that it seems impossible to pin it down to any singular concept. What I mean, of course, is that I now feel my place in the world again. I feel that endlessly sought after state of ‘belonging.' I do not feel deceived by my interior life, nor separated from the animation I see in others around me (though they could, of course, be in the very same Dark Night themselves). I feel the unitive heartbeat again. What a joy—to swell in rhythm once more with the circa diem. Ah yes, that heralded Being.

But what to say of sadness? The trustiest friend of them all. Old loyal sadness who crippled our self-belief yet stuck around when everyone else appeared to leave. The one who never failed to plant seeds. The one that ripped at the fraying seams of our fragile contentment and baptized our crimson eyes with tears pouring out one humiliating drop after another. She promised New Life, but knew it could only follow after a necessary death. The sadness is reliable, you see, but I pointed and shouted: “Wretched loneliness! Vain solitude! Get behind me, Satan!”

And so, I prepared for War. The great annihilation of my haunting isolation.

“The man who fears to be alone will never be anything but lonely, no matter how much he may surround himself with people. But the man who learns, in solitude and recollection, to be at peace with his own loneliness, and to prefer its reality to the illusion of merely natural companionship, comes to know the invisible companionship of God.”
—Thomas Merton

Sadness requests Solitude. Solitude withstands the insults and absorbs all things in silence. She is the invitation to depths unknown. She receives, retreats and returns, all in accordance with what each soul needs. Now she has released me back into the arms of people and living things that beckon me with prodigal celebration. She whispers, "Go forth into Spring. Feel the warm honey of blessing and the blossom of certitude, but know we are not done."

Sadness, too, has said her piece. She got your attention, and you gave it to her. You cried and released and convulsed and received and heaved and shook and when the emotions overtook, you sighed and let that blanket of breath consume all the fear with Love. Yes, you tended to that sadness. This time, you didn’t numb it and you didn’t push it down. I watched you walk straight into the line of fire and trust my hand. And now, my love, I have brought you out of the desert. The sea has parted and now you can walk through those obedient waters.

But do not forget, it is not in this season of Illumination that you belong most to the world. You feel as though you belong here because you are able to keep pace with the rushing world; to smile for it, to dress up for it and feel pretty (without treating everything you hang on your body like a foreign parasite), you can eat again and laugh genuinely, not with imitation or facade… you feel like you “fit”.

I wonder, if the times when you feel most vulnerable, most confused, most abandoned by that terrible, hovering Divine Presence that was supposed to be on your side, when you are most disillusioned, most afraid of your own skin, most appalled by your inner voice, most betrayed by your dreams, most revealed by your handwriting, and most embarrassed by your prayers—could it be, that in these moments you are, in fact, THE MOST ALIVE YOU’VE EVER BEEN?

My love, these are the times you belong so intrinsically to the nature of Reality—the chaos of organisms—and the absolutely miraculous process of organizing. Reorganizing. From within.

Salvador Dalì, The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory, 1952-54

How terrifying it is to change. What molecular resilience we must form to weather the shifts of evolution. What confusion arises when we realize that surrender is the spiritual muscle required to make the journey. The journey where? Into the Fullness of life, of course!

There are secret codes written through the DNA of generations before you—your name is scribbled on every incarnation it took to get here. The portal lied in every decision you made to arrive right here. But here’s the catch: while you’re holding this unique key, the door remains obscured. In fact, you can’t even see the key—you can only feel it in your hand. You don’t know where it goes, you don’t know what it’s for, and you don’t know what you want yet but you have an inkling of who you are and that hazy remnant of the future lingers at the rim of the entrance.

“Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

There’s a door in front of you and it cracks open so you can see the smooth lines echoed in sunlight, flirting with fullness of Life, ready to receive you. You put your key in that door as the light spills around the edges and voila, it is open, you see yourself once more, my hands! my arms! my feet! my legs! There I am!”
—Rainer Maria Rilke

The land you traversed when the world darkened and you walked through the valley of death… that is your home too. You were born there and it’s where all the work gets done. If you have fallen out of love with life, then perhaps you are right where you are meant to be. For life can only be loved once it is truly lived.

Let us leave behind the pithy, childish, romantic love of our youth and move into the love of experience, respect, and endurance. Those earthly tricks of small-mindedness are but the sediment that floats above a gigantic ocean of spiritual reality. The age of scientific certainty has told you to put your faith in what you see. The world of religious conformity has told you what to see but not how to see. We will have to turn to the Mystics to recover this intuition. We will have to ask Gautama about the Emptiness and ask Christ about the Fullness. We will need both of their answers. Because, as it turns out, the two are the same.

“Emptiness is the ground of everything. Thanks to emptiness, everything is possible.”
—Nagarjuna, 2nd century Buddhist philosopher

The void was never to be feared.

Let yourself belong to every season and thank the friendship of Sadness.