It is an unwellness that is troubling me. I am having anxiety symptoms lying in bed at night. Is my heart racing because I’m having a tachardic episode or is this anxiety triggering my racing heart? The question itself causes anxiety. It makes for challenging nights. And I am tired.
I’ve known that anxiety was a foreign feeling to my wife for quite some time. I remember the incredulity I felt when she first told me. It was as if hearing that some people can hold their breath without dying or that there are people that never feel sad during the holidays. When the pandemic changed her experience with anxiety, my response was a confusing mixture of sadness that she was going through it, concern about how she would learn to cope with it, and the slightest bit of relief that perhaps now she would be more understanding of what I live with. I’m not proud of that last bit but who doesn’t want to be understood better?
Awe and wonder. The way that hearing birds chirping first thing in the morning feels like a thread connecting me to every ancestor I’ve never known but whose DNA is in my body. They knew birds, I’m certain of it.
And leaves. And rain and sunshine. Some of them knew love and what it was like to give life and to keep that life going long enough to grow into their own being with the next generation of us.
When I want to know the quiet of time before too much technology and too many people, nature lets me tap into that deep history.
In the book God in All Worlds, Lucinda Vardey writes “I believe we begin our search for meaning with doubt, pain, and a lot of questions” (3). In Buddhism, many of the teachings are about how to move beyond suffering. The people I grew up with turn to the Christian God when they are in pain, scared, confused. For myself, the least authentic approach to Spirit is the path of pain and suffering. Prayer becomes…
As I was reading last night, I had my television on and tuned to my Chromecast. I wasn’t streaming anything through the Chromecast, just enjoying the slideshow that it displays by default. I looked up from my book at one point, and had to stop reading so that I could spend as much time with the photograph on the screen as the slide show would allow. A pier beckoning the viewer out onto a serene lake, the photograph was…
Other than adversity, where else is there a third path? Not only in ways of responding to situations around us and within us but to seeing the world in general. How often do I get stuck in this or that, either/or thinking?
I should tell you now that I’m self-diagnosed. After taking a self-assessment test online, attending online seminars, and living with this hell for over a year and a half, I feel qualified to make that assessment. At its worst, I had close to 200 wounds at once, across both arms, both shoulders, my upper legs, my chest, and my lower back. I know. I counted them.
This year – 2021 – is the year of big milestones for me. In 20 days, I turn 50. And at the end of the year, if I’m fortunate enough to still be here, I’ll be honoring 20 years since my breakdown. 20 years of borrowed time that I never would have experienced had it not been for a suicide plan interrupted. Twenty years of life on a level I could never have imagined. I…
In his inauguration speech, President Biden spoke of our “cascading crises.” He mentions the pandemic, financial inequity, systemic racism, climate change, and the tenuous role of the US in the world in the post-Trump era. He also spoke of “an attack on our democracy and untruth.”
While he never mentions Trump by name, I would argue that we should add “recovering from Trump and his administration” to the list of traumas we have been juggling for far too long at this point.
It’s complicated. This family. This photo taken during the first family reunion, a celebration of Dad’s birthday. One of the very rare times most of his children were in the same room together. His son Gary is missing, having died from complications due to AIDS decades before. And now Junior, the one in the very center of the photo, has passed due to COVID. I hadn’t spoken with Junior since Dad’s funeral 13 years ago…