Friday Dispatch: "Are You Hopeful?"

On feeling grief – without drowning in it

“Hope is holy” stamps and photo by Aviva Lou Strong, aka my beautiful daughter. 🤩✨

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Friday greetings,

Maybe I just need to write it all down, like how angry I got this week over something that wasn’t about that thing at all. That dislodging feeling of being out of control, sudden and irrational, and how lightning fast it flashed through me, like a flood threatening to drown my car with me in it.

I flew downstairs and sat with M.J. for a few minutes, then went back to my office where I closed my eyes for five minutes to sit and return to my body. 

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Little by little, I’ve been typing up my notes from the Hartman Institute. Revisiting them is allowing me, slowly, to touch into a grief that is especially hard to access in a time when our circles are smaller and our sense of safety, literal and existential, is shaky. Uncertainty and volatility reign over our headlines and hearts, but this grief doesn’t speak the language of slogans or speeches, protests or policies. It just is.

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A client asked me this week, “Are you hopeful?” Such a direct question, so simple sounding. “I am alive, so I must be,” came my immediate response.

To lose hope is to lose sight of what is alive. The way the sunshower light glows up my houseplants’ shiny leaves. The way we went out to dinner with my parents, and ate ice cream afterward, then M.J. spotted a fawn and a doe in a yard across the street when we got home and we all squinted in the dusky light as they munched the bushes and eventually meandered across the street. 

My sisters, our spouses and kids, and I are all doing our best to hold and help my parents as they move through the process of preparing to sell their home of 40 years and begin a new chapter in a new community.

“I always thought it would be our forever home. I thought I would die in this house.” My mom’s voice sounded tearful over the phone. Then she added, “I think this process will help me face death.” I knew exactly what she meant even as I ached for her. The ultimate attachment is to life itself. Later in the week, we got pedicures, a delightful change of pace.

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What happens when we open our hands?

This too shall pass. This too, this too.

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I’m noticing how irritable I feel after scrolling on Instagram. It doesn’t even matter if I agree or disagree; it’s the whole thing, the very nature of it, the one-dimensionality, the way monumentally important things are presented in the smallest slivers that flit by in an instant, like if minnows had sharp teeth, allowing a person no time to take anything in, absorb it, digest it, notice its effect on your thinking or your nervous system. This is the antithesis of learning.

I close the app and look through a different kind of screen to see a dozen sparrows and finches flutter around the feeder. Rain drips from the recently cleaned gutters. Morning glories reveal their bright purple insides.

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Sometimes, my own insides feel distant to me, foreign, difficult to find. This happens if I get too in my head. Something feels out of place, and I set out on a futile inner quest to figure out what it is.

As you can imagine, this goes nowhere fast.

It’s no small part of why I have turned to mindfulness practices – writing being one of them – for the last 30-ish years. Watching the tiniest chickadee vie for its breakfast. Walking. Yoga. Immersing my body in water. Singing. Connection. Spotting the first surprising hints of color on the leaves of a nearby tree, heralding the start of August, a reminder that even when we are deep in the middle of one season, another is always somewhere around the curvature of time.

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What helps me return to presence is presence itself.

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The act of typing up my notes from nine days of intensive, immersive learning at Hartman is also an opportunity to slow down and take them in. During each talk and class, I was writing so fast and so intently that I didn’t necessarily process anything.

Now that I’m home, I’m aware of a paradox: If the combination of healthy psychological distance and intentional embodiment help me come back to myself when I’m getting lost in thought, there’s also something about how physical and geographic distance can create more emotional proximity. (If you starting to feel lost even reading this just now, don’t worry. I got a little lost writing it, which is ironically fitting and honestly kind of funny.)

So, let’s get an amen for simplicity and put all of this much more plainly: Revisiting and slowly sifting through these dense (and intense) notes is allowing me to feel.

And feeling? Well, feeling requires space and time, too. It’s something we often avoid, knowingly or unknowingly. It can be safer to react or just numb, neither of which is “bad,” by the way; these are intrinsically self-protective and shouldn’t be snubbed.

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But there is a time… there is a time when if we are going to find ways to be present to so many painful, tangled realities, we have to have room for this, too. It’s not the work of the head. It’s not the work of analysis. It’s not the work of debate. It’s not the work of discussion even, though all of these are part of our work.

It’s the realm of the spirit, the soul, the hard-to-name parts, the murky terrain we can’t see clearly, the scariest rooms, the things we abhor and fear that we too may carry and are so much easier to spot in others, the furrowed brow, the stomach pit, the angst and the anger that arose in me so suddenly, prompted by something that had absolutely nothing to do with anything, which of course is so often what happens. A misplaced item. A printer glitch. An internet outage. An annoying driver. Even an innocent question or comment.

If we aren’t careful, any of these things, inconsequential in the big picture, can unleash all of that inner “stuff,” taking us completely off-guard at the least expected or logical moment. And if we don’t cultivate awareness and care, if we don’t slow down to be with it, it can drown our car, with us in it.

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To hold myself with compassion is the call.

This in turn helps me hold others, which in turn helps me hold myself, and on and on in a cycle of interconnectedness, a forever spiral outside of time and space as we understand them, an unfurling where nothing is ever lost because everything is in it.

Open your hands. That small conch shell that fits so perfectly in your palm? It contains the whole universe. It’s always in you, always with you. Feel, breathe, hope. You are, we are, alive.

Shabbat Shalom and love,

Jena

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p.s. I’ll be out west next week, retreating with fellow Jewish Studio Fellows at the JSP headquarters in Berkeley. My copy of Rabbi Adina Allen’s gorgeous new book arrived just in time to read on the plane. Yay!

From her website:

“The Place of All Possibility is a paradigm-shifting work that reframes the whole of Torah as a contemporary guidebook for creativity. Drawing from the deep well of Jewish sacred texts, and the radical interpretive strategies of ancient rabbis, The Place of All Possibility provides teachings and tools for those who seek to employ creativity as a force of transformation. Putting spiritual wisdom in conversation with contemporary disciplines of art therapy, liberation theology, and creativity research, this essential book invites us all to rediscover our place in a world of mutual thriving. Packed with practical exercises to inspire your creative practice, The Place of All Possibility is for all people—from any tradition or none—who want to seed a world of imagination, abundance, and joy.”

Order your copy here.

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