Touching Heaven
Don’t abandon yourself.
These quiet words echo in my mind. I feel dreadful. My husband is quietly eating his dinner unaware of my distress. I want to get up from the table, and do anything but sit here with my feelings. Anything. Even eating which is normally an activity that I greatly relish seems awful. The food, a fragrant steak and grilled asparagus tastes like nothing to me. Feeling a lump form in my stomach, I notice as a matching lump fills my throat. Hot tears prick my eyes. The soft voice becomes slightly more insistent the more I try to swallow. I can’t make any sense of my feelings. And then the feelings start to form into words: I feel like I’ve disappointed you, I say to my husband. He looks at me, astonished. Why, he asks. Because I dropped the ghee. I’m not disappointed, he says, accidents happen.
A few hours earlier, I dropped a jar of ghee on the tile floor—the dull thump of a pound of clarified butter hitting the floor was accompanied by the sound of glass shattering. I was startled and then horrified. Free range cows had given organic milk which had been churned into butter which had then been clarified to remove the milk fat making it into a nourishing, golden substance. Something precious had been lost. I studied it and failed to see any way to salvage the ghee. The glass stuck into it like a deranged, alien hedgehog—there was no hope of saving any of this ghee. I threw out the glass-encrusted lump and began sweeping, but really what I wanted to do was sit on the floor and cry. Ignoring my urge to stop and sit, I carried on cleaning—vacuuming into other rooms and on a nearby chair as I noticed sparkling shards radiating out from the mini detonation site.
Accidents characterized my time living in New Mexico. And here I was, visiting New Mexico 8 years later, with an, albeit small, accident on my hands. A part of me felt shattered and unsalvageable. A gaping maw of hopelessness opened up in front of me: ready to suck me in and blame me for everything that had gone wrong in my past. The failures from my time living in New Mexico ranged from large to small, but mostly felt huge, culminating in being desperately ill and having to leave the state, and our lives—including a business and home that my husband had lovingly created. Heavy and immense—the sense of disappointing him pressed on my torso.
My mistakes were made innocently, from inexperience and unconsciousness, fear and worry. But they were painful and accompanying the pain of loss was the pain of loneliness. Living in New Mexico, my family was 3000 miles away. My neighbors were extremely anti-social and generally hermits. The friends surrounding me in school had all moved away. I lived 25 minutes from the nearest grocery store, 35 minutes from a coffee shop, library or post office.
My husband and I had never talked about these things once we left New Mexico. Years had gone by without either one of us bringing up the devastating disappointments or the desolating loneliness. Yet here they were—ready for an accounting. I apologized for the mistakes I had made. He forgave me quickly and easily—sharing his own sense of failure and ways in which he felt that he had disappointed me. I forgave him just as quickly and, then, I forgave myself.
The next day we went hiking—something unimaginable for me during my years living with a severe heart condition and chronic Lyme disease. We knew from reading the description that our climb would be intense and were slightly nervous—although we walk every day with our dogs we don’t encounter that many vertical climbs.
We walked into a pale yellow canyon, Ponderosa pines dwarfing us, and rippling mountains towering over the pines. A quiet hush surrounded us as a desert hare scampered into the sage. The walls quickly tapered inward—from 10 feet apart to 6 then 2. Long lines running parallel to the ground rippled along the walls, and the walls themselves looked like waves—gently undulating rock carved by centuries of water pouring through them. The slot canyon sometimes tightened further—into crevices where we inched through sideways or ducked under fallen boulders. And then, as if we had stumbled into a meeting uninvited, rock people surrounded us in a massive conclave. Enormous pitted pillars hundreds of feet tall reminded me of Tolkein-esque wizards—pointy caps, somber majesty, and eroded holes that looked like dark eyes.
The last mile was practically a stairway. Fellow hikers sat in the scant shade drinking water. Two people just in front of us stopped climbing upward and turned around, heading down. As we slowly ascended we came level with the towering rock druids catching glimpses of mountains in the distance and the shadows of clouds creating dark shapes on the mesa. And then we were standing amidst a vast, wide expanse. The trailhead was a speck beneath us, cars in the parking lot—a flash of reflected light. The mesa stretched out for miles to mountains whose snow-dusted summits blended into the puffy underbellies of clouds hanging motionless in the sky—creating an illusion that made mountains look like clouds and clouds like mountains. To the south, a line of deep blue peaks appeared to be arcing away from me—like waves cresting from behind. I could see to every horizon, my breath taken away by the vista and the climb and the radiant beauty of life.
We began the descent slowly, and there was a moment of piercing sadness beneath my ribs at leaving such divine beauty, each step was a step closer to earth further away from heaven, closer to a narrow and winding path amidst cliffs soaring hundreds of feet high.
Encompassed by the blue sky, at one with the clouds and with a perspective to see above and beyond mountains, a broken jar of ghee seems terribly insignificant. For me it was a doorway into some of the deepest loneliness and most shattering disappointments of my adult life. Mindfulness rescued me from falling into the constricting pit of despair—from abandoning myself, from feeling overcome by claustrophobia. I had spent the last few months vigorously devoted to practicing presence—staying with uncomfortable feelings, calling in support in the form of friends and loved ones and my own inner strength. And I was able to heal my past in a way that had been inconceivable even a year before. I had been able to navigate a tricky and steep path, I had fortitude and courage for something I had never done before.
I marveled at all that I had accomplished and the hike seemed to symbolize that.
We’re all familiar with the old adage “Don’t cry over spilled milk.” But what if spilled milk offers up a path to healing pain? Wouldn’t the tears make sense? And if we do spill milk in the present, can we call on a friend or simply befriend our own suffering? What would I do if my best friend had dropped the jar of ghee and wanted to cry on the floor instead of cleaning it up immediately? Maybe I would hold her hand. Treat her with the utmost love and consideration—remind her that she was jet-lagged, jittery from caffeine that she drank trying to counteract the jet lag, saturated with memories of loss, and feelings of grief and fear. That coming from sea level to 6,000 feet is challenging—the abrasiveness of a cold, dry, windy climate like sandpaper to her body and mind. Maybe I would share my understanding that she wasn’t crying over broken glass and spoiled ghee but the ways in which she blamed herself for feeling shattered.
My broken jar of ghee opened a portal to another world—the world in which I blame myself, the world in which I can’t see my way clear of distress, where I am unable to befriend myself or see any support in the outer world. Yet I stick with it, doing my best to be mindful of my present moment experience and how it relates to my past. As I become aware, I hold myself with more compassion, allow myself to open up to my husband, friends or inner awareness, sharing and exploring my deepest feelings in the moment. Through that I am able to release my grip on the past and allow it’s fragmentation to be seen for what it is—abandonment, unconsciousness, fear. And the realization that it isn’t the present that causes my suffering but old wounds that emerge for resolution and integration—so that each moment, even a moment of shattered glass, can be a way to touch heaven and infuse it into daily life.
