COVID-19, Threshholds, and Change

Thanks to Mel Toth, I am taking an on-line course with Catharine Clarke on Soul Journaling (https://mwoodmanfoundation.org/faculty-profile/catharine-clarke/). The first week was about grounding. Yesterday was about thresholds.

The classes are two hours long, and both times at the end I had that wonderful experience I get when I’ve flown a red-eye and I get to where I’m going and pass out from exhaustion. For someone who seems to lie in bed with her eyes closed instead of having deep sleep, these afternoon sleep sessions feel magical.

I still can’t figure out exactly what we do that makes me so cleanly tired. Catharine talks to us, reads a poem, plays us music to which we dance, listening to our body’s call for movement, and then we write for 25 minutes. We read our work; Catharine comments, reads us a poem, and we close for the day.

And then I go someplace pretty outside and pass out.

Yesterday, Catharine opened with a line from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets: Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

As a planet, we are standing on a threshold between the lives we had and the lives we will have. People are dying. People are losing their homes, their jobs. People are getting dogs. Restaurants are shuttering their doors forever. People are united in cheering for the doctors and nurses and staff who are working treacherously dangerous jobs in the effort of saving lives. People are home in ways they have not been, perhaps, ever.

In some ways it feels like we’re doing a massive Marie Kondo on our lives, cleaning out what does not serve us, what we can no longer afford, or what, now that the business of travel and errands has come to a screeching halt, we get to notice that we do not even like.

I can feel myself standing on a threshold—I’ve felt it over and over again in my life—but it’s been intensifying ever since I went to New York a few years ago to write. The doors keep appearing—inviting, frightening, confusing, exciting, and I have no idea how I’m going to get from where I am to wherever or whatever this new place is. It’s that moment where Indiana Jones begins to walk across the chasm, the bridge only appearing as he takes each step forward.

This also happens in The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles when the professor’s imagination fails him and he can not see the bridge to the castle he so wants to visit. He has to rely on a child, a child’s ability to see the imagined, to help him across the threshold.

I told Catharine that, while I feel I’m standing on some sort of threshold, I see nothing in front of me. It’s dark. Like the door’s closed, only it doesn’t feel closed. The space feels dark and thick. Not a place I could travel.

There are so many reasons not to step into new lives. One is that we don’t have a clue what it looks like. Why leave the familiar even if it bores you, even if you hate it, even if it hurts you, if you can’t see an alternative?

Catharine said this time is not about what we are going to do, but who we are going to be. She said we may not know what we want or love, but the all is within each of us. It’s all right there, but so many of us just have not been paying attention.

She said, We may be standing on the threshold in copious grief with no idea where awe are going, but we have to step forward. We have to allow.

I’m a big believer in hard work. In busting my ass. In putting blinders on and pushing through. I’m also tired almost all the time, too tired to rest because my mind and body spin.

When someone says something that hurts or bothers me, I try to do this thing I learned from Micheal Singer and his book The Untethered Soul. In my imagination, I open my body and let the barb enter and go through me. I feel the sting, but I work on letting the barb of the arrow travel through and out. And then it is gone and I am there, open, okay, myself without pain.

To allow. What is being allowed? What happens when we stop sweating, stop pushing, and allow life to come to us?

I am the person who goes to weddings and sits there while everyone else dances. I don’t dance, I say. I have a feeling this is part of my life’s work, dancing. One response to trauma is to freeze, and I feel it in my body. I have a frozen body. I’m stiff, and if you play a song and I try to move to the beat, it’s like watching a dubbed movie when the sound doesn’t match the movement of the lips.

I feel wrong when I try to dance.

But I think this is the thing: I think I’m standing above myself, judging. Who gives a shit if my hips move in concert with the beat? Watching a child dance is the best. The jerky movements, the falling down, the pure pleasure of movement.

So I’m a dancing child.

What if this threshold so many of us are standing on right now is an invitation back to a simpler time? Back when we had less, wanted less, traveled less? Created more? Loved more?

What if this threshold is the planet’s way of helping us back home? Come on, babies, the planet is saying. You have gotten so crazy. Remember to put your hands in the dirt. Remember to sit still. Remember to dance.