It came to me one night a year or so ago. I was trying to fall asleep, but was distracted by a free-floating mood of dread and heaviness. It's a familiar energy that has shadowed me for much of my life. Instead of trying to analyze why it had descended yet again, I tried a new technique much like the "pain creature" exercise described in the October 19th post mentioned above. The technique entails friendly, feeling-oriented inquiry, as opposed to the rather hostile "what are you doing here?" approach.
Let me preface by saying that I don't truly know what a vision is "supposed" to be like, any more than I know what any extraordinary or transpersonal event should feel like. I do know that it feels different and important enough to grab my attention and elicit awe and respect for the mysteries of spirit and psyche. It's evidence that there is a coherence and meaning alive within all of us – within the world - that is intelligent beyond our comprehension. To me, that's awfully exciting and comforting.
The vision was a triptych, a three part series of mental images that arose spontaneously and flowed seamlessly from one to the next:
I am inside an unglazed terra cotta pot shaped like a slightly squashed ball. Its texture was ribbed like this one inside and out, but the shape was more like the one below. The opening in the top is smaller than the circumference of the vessel. Raised edges made by a clay scraping tool (a texture you often see on the outside) line the interior walls. I run my hands over their rawness. The pot is very clean and yet feels old and unused, like a cave that rarely sees life or the light of day. It feels like I have been in there for a long time.
The pot sits on the lap of an old Latin or Native American woman who is clearly an elder and keeper of wisdom. A quiet, calm confidence emanates from her. She has time, she has patience, and she has knowledge. I am still inside the pot she holds on her lap.
I am at a potter's wheel, working with wet clay to form my own pot. It is taller and has a much wider opening than the one I'd been inside, more like a vase than a pot. The vision ends with a sense of promise and purpose, a message that there are natural forces at work (or play) which require a timeline and perspective very different than mine.
(I should mention that though I'm an artist, the pot making process is foreign to me. But these vessels seem to have symbolism in the collective unconscious as profound as the universe.)
When the images stopped, I felt as if I had been given a gift. I recall the experience often, and it helps me to understand that time and meaning as humans know it is irrelevant.
Never stand in front of a mirror at the gym next to women half your age. As I soaped up my hands at the sink, a dozen fresh young things (I typed "thins" by Freudian accident) were emerging from yoga class. A few came to preen in the mirror. Flushed with apparent health, their smooth, open faces next to my middle aged one made such a contrast that I looked away in shame and shock. Next to theirs, my face seemed almost death-like, with dark circles under the eyes, yellowish pallor, and an overall droopy look that I didn't quite realize was there.
And it was just this morning that I thought to myself, "You, my dear, are a beautiful woman." (This said with a peripheral awareness of flaws, but valuing the package as a whole.)
To make matters worse, a half hour into my aerobic workout the pit of my stomach got cold, and I began to shake. What had I eaten for dinner? A small bowl of soup and tiny piece of cheese. Uh oh, no real protein to speak of, I thought. Low blood sugar. Dashing to my locker, I grabbed my jacket, extracted money and hastily purchased an energy bar at the front desk. The trembling was getting worse, and a cold sweat began to chill me. This was a deeper reaction than usual, and I was a bit worried. "Sit, sit," advised the trainer, bringing me my change.
We chatted about hypoglycemia and exercise, and also diabetes. The latter had been on my mind for some time, considering I've put on 40 pounds in twenty years. Though I had no diagnosis of diabetes, my maternal uncles lost limbs to the disease. My mother's blood glucose has been on the borderline a number of times. So my genetic potential is semi-loaded, and my perimenopausal sluggishness probably has increased the risk. The American Diabetes Association says 57 million adults in the U.S. have pre-diabetes and don't even know it!
When I vent about feeling old, my parents, who both turned 80 this year, just laugh . "You have no idea how young you are," they say. I believe them, I really do. But they've had more time to adjust to the losses. My mom is long past the age of caring that young men will never see her as anything but an old lady. And though my friend Barb, when ogling a handsome twenty-five year old, insists that "women like us" are miles outside his radar screen, I bristle. I am not so ready to feel invisible.
It's the classic midlife dilemma: what to do with the well of vitality that our aging bodies belie. Stumbling around for answers, awkward or pathetic as it may look to others, is about all anyone can do. It's a good time to remember what Rilke said to the young poet:
"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue... 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."
If we learn any anything in this lifetime, let it be respect and awe for the fact that everybody's different. Especially on the inside. Many of us think that because people are all of the same species, we should respond to things in roughly the same way. Western thought, with its emphasis on rationality and logic, has drilled this into our heads, whether that was its original intention or not. If something's true for the majority, it argues, then it must be true period. The anomalies are relatively meaningless in comparison with the larger whole.
As information generated by our Western culture gets passed around, whether by word of mouth, media or meme, it takes on a life of its own, like a game of telephone. Pretty soon all of us are in a panic because we think we don't exercise enough, eat well enough, play well enough, and sleep well enough. Bombarded daily with this stuff, we are stunned into forgetting that much of what passes for information is flawed, incomplete, biased, or funded by those with ulterior motives. Wait long enough, and what was "true" yesterday will turn 180 degrees (eggs are bad, eggs are good; hormone therapy is safe, no it isn't, etc.) Economics drive our "truths" to an abysmal degree, as Upton Sinclair pointed out. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something," he said, "when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
So when it comes to analyzing the emotional or spiritual aspects of personhood, there's no shortage of books, articles, workshops and well meaning others to tell us what's going on. Some of it can be helpful and even life or sanity saving, for sure. But what happens if your experience doesn't match up with "information" you find in the outside world? What do you do if you're an anomaly, or in a minority for whom there is little or no validation in the form of resources?
If you're like me, you make it your mission to find the exceptions, to find your truth somewhere else out there in the world. Whether this is in the form of another person who has had similar experiences, or some article in a magazine read by few, or in a piece of art, music or whatever – you seek out these needle-in-haystack, precious kindred souls and thank god for the grace of the finding. (This is one of the fabulous things about the internet; our access to potentially helpful resources increases tenfold.)
All of this is a long way of saying that after an extensive search, I finally found an answer to a question I've had for ages: why do some transitions - periods of liminality and limbo - last for so long? In the case of my own midlife psycho-spiritual experience, the only helpful piece of information I recall is from William Bridge's first book, Transitions – a fleeting comment about one client of his who felt in the dark and out of sorts for ten years. That's not much for me to hang onto!
But here's something I can hold onto, and even chew on. It's from a little book called In Midlife, by Jungian analyst Murray Stein. This book gets quoted a lot if you dig past the surface of midlife literature. I've had it for years, and probably even read this passage a couple of times without remembering it. Maybe these graceful "findings" are all about timing – about how things pop out at you when you are really ready to know:
"At certain critical moments in life, the psychological effects of losses or of defeats are greater than they are at other times; they signify more, and they have the effect of 'splitting the block' in a fashion and to a depth that they would not have done at other times. This is not altogether a function of the magnitude of the loss. Sometimes the term of liminality that results from loss … is only short-lived, relatively a mere flash of altered consciousness; at other times it takes hold and dominates consciousness for years. Why is this the case? …
"To this point I have discussed liminality only diachronically, as a [linear] segment within a span of time, preceded by the segment separation and followed by the segment reintegration. Here liminality is viewed as time-bound and clearly limited in duration. But a full discussion of liminality must also see it synchronically, as a permanent dimension or depth of the psyche, a 'layer' that threads through all time and occupies a space in every period of life. At a certain psychological level of things, we are always in liminality, floating and unfixed to identfications, betwixt and between (p. 47) …
"At midlife a person runs into a period when the liminality that is produced by external facts such as aging, loss of loved ones, or the failure to attain a dream of youthful ambition combines with the liminality that is generated internally by independently shifting intrapsychic structures, and the result is an intense and prolonged experience of liminality, one that often endures for years. At this point, diachronic and synchronic liminality come together synchronistically. "Synchronism" is defined in Webster's Third International Dictionary with an image that aptly portrays this kind of cooperation of forces: it is 'the condition of excessive rolling obtained when a ship's rolling period is equal to the wave period, or to one-half the wave period.'
"When these two motions coincide … the ship's natural roll becomes excessive. This is midlife liminality. Always the ship is rolling, and always some liminality is present within the psyche. Always, too, the sea is rolling: life throws up crises and failures that prove our limitations all the time. But when these two motions get together, and the force of each is great enough, they produce a degree of rolling than can reach excessive proportions…
"We do liminality … an injustice if not outright violence by limiting discussion … to the perspective of chronos, if we understand time only in the linear sense, diachronically. [Victor] Turner observes that the experience of liminality includes an altered sense of time, 'in and out of time,' as he puts it… Liminality, so frequently and classically imaged as wanderings in the desert, contains a different experience of time from that of ordinary diurnal ego-consciousness. (p. 50)"
Doesn't solve the problem, does it? But it sure goes a long way toward making me feel less confused and alone. I'll take it!
top is smaller than the circumference of the vessel. Raised edges made by a clay scraping tool (a texture you often see on the outside) line the interior walls. I run my hands over their rawness. The pot is very clean and yet feels old and unused, like a cave that rarely sees life or the light of day. It feels like I have been in there for a long time.
I am at a potter's wheel, working with wet clay to form my own pot. It is taller and has a much wider opening than the one I'd been inside, more like a vase than a pot. The vision ends with a sense of promise and purpose, a message that there are natural forces at work (or play) which require a timeline and perspective very different than mine.
