Asking For Spaciousness
Happy Samhain, my friends!
Today is a day when the veil between the living and the dead is thinner than on other days. It’s a time when we can more easily communicate with our beloved dead, expressing our love and longing and asking for guidance and protection.
At least that’s what pagan tradition says, and I don’t know for sure if it’s true, but I know this. I gathered with old friends of mine last night. We laid an altar for our dead, covering it with pictures and mementos. Then we talked about them— who they were, what they meant to us. We told stories, cried, and laughed. We reflected on the inevitability of death— the unavoidable grief, and the gifts we receive when we can let things die in their time without resistance. Maybe our dead were listening and maybe they weren’t, but we were listening deeply to each other and it made my heart feel enormous. Big enough to hold everything.
You may or may not be someone who believes in prayer. But I hope we can all agree that whoever you’re entreating, asking for the right thing is critical to getting what you really want and need. A friend shared a Hebrew prayer that was a gift to her in the weeks immediately preceding her beloved father’s death two years ago of pancreatic cancer. She knew she couldn’t ask for him to be miraculously well, but she couldn’t pray for him to be released either. She wanted him to stay too badly. Trapped between love, longing, and grief, unable to breathe, and not knowing which way to turn she was reminded of these words:
Min HaMetzar karati Yah, Anani va’merchav Yah
(From the Narrow Place I called out to God, who answered me with the Divine Expanse)
or if you prefer,
(From the Narrow Place I called out, and am answered with Spaciousness)
Spaciousness, y’all. Is there anything better to ask for? Not to be released from the pain, discomfort, difficulties, and challenges— the mucky, messy bits of ourselves and our lives— but simply the expansiveness to hold it all along with our light, our joy, our tenderness, and love.
Another dear friend is working hard right now to finally stop drinking, and we agreed this morning that this prayer speaks to her condition, too. Her task is not to make her life somehow so idyllic that she never wants to drink but to figure out how to hold everything that happens, good and bad, without running away from the intensity of it all into the narrow bottom of a wine glass. To be courageous and spacious enough of a container for her whole, messy, human life.
The choir I’m in was invited recently to perform in honor of Harriet Tubman’s 200th birthday, sponsored by the new Harriet Tubman National Historical Park in Auburn, NY. To drive there I had to drive a route that I used to travel frequently between the farm I shared with my ex-husband and his parents’ house. As the miles spooled out I found myself meditating on my integrity. Could I say I acted with integrity throughout my marriage? Or was I out of my integrity and that’s why it all fell apart in the end?
The honest answer is, I think, yes and yes. I always behaved with integrity toward my husband while we were together. I never lied or cheated. I did my best to honor the commitment I had made. But I was also often desperately unhappy, and unwilling to confront what that meant about the nature of our relationship. It wasn’t that any parts of myself that I put forward in our relationship were untrue. They were simply incomplete. I was tragically partial and our relationship was never going to be expansive enough for me to be any different.
I may never have been out of my integrity with him, but I was out of integrity with myself. I had trapped myself in a narrow place, hemmed in between ideas of who I was supposed to be and unwillingness (or, to be fair to myself at that point, inability) to be who I actually was. Who I am now, and who I would like to be someday.
That’s the tricky bit of integrity for me. That I can be acting with integrity day-by-day with other people and yet still not be in integrity in my relationship with myself. Pulling apart the layers of that takes time and, at least in my case, a whole host of mistakes. Somehow (and maybe this is true for you as well) I seem to learn the most about who I am by picking paths that show me clearly who I am not. Or sometimes just who I am also, both/and and and and and. I contain, as I suspect we all do, multitudes.
Slowly but surely, though, I am becoming spacious and courageous enough to be in my integrity with other people and with myself at the same time. To contain all of my mess and contradictions, my dreams and avoidance, my grief and passion, my near-feral desire for autonomy, and my desperate desire to be held. Some days it still feels a little crowded in here, but I’m learning to weather those days. I don’t turn away from myself anymore. I don’t pretend all of me isn’t happening. I just try to breathe more, be patient, and ask for a little more wiggle room to be myself.
I don’t know if God is listening, or my beloved dead, or if I’m just talking to myself but it seems to be working. I’m getting bigger on the inside every day.
Maybe next year I’ll be a Tardis for Halloween. That would be appropriate.
On the subject of reckonings with spaciousness, I did an ayahuasca ceremony recently seeking some release and expansiveness in the wake of my brother's death. I wrote about it here a couple of weeks ago for my paying subscribers.
If you’d be curious to know more, use the button below for a 14-day free trial, which will allow you access to this newsletter and the full archive.
so much I can relate to in this reflection ~ thank you
i'm also thinking to the Jewish prayer "yehi zichra baruch" translated (loosely) as may their memory be your blessing. not your misery, but something we can reflect upon with spaciousness and integrity ~ for we all do the best we can, until we can do better.
Samhain, spaciousness, and integrity. All beautifully addressed. A prayer to be spacious and MORE spacious (the analogy to grief, I believe, is true). To grow in space, into space. To hold space. For our loved ones, past and present, and for ourselves.
Space can be uncomfortable. Space is the unknowable. We want to fill the space. Fill the space with what we know. Space is also the possibility. If we fill the space, we lose the possibility. Sitting in space is both a challenge and a gift.
A blessed Samhain to you, Asha!