originally posted November 29, 2016

“Be grateful to everyone. Others will always show you exactly where you are stuck. They say or do something and you automatically get hooked into a familiar way of reacting – shutting down, speeding up, or getting all worked up. When you react in the habitual way, with anger, greed, and so forth, it gives you a chance to see your patterns and work with them honestly and compassionately. Without others provoking you, you remain ignorant of your painful habits and cannot train in transforming them into the path of awakening.”

Pema Chodron

This election season has been a great challenge to many of us. How have you worked with gratitude regarding what has been revealed about your habitual reactions?

One story of Inquiry/Observation

I have always come to the beach, to the Atlantic, when my heart needs soothing, when I need to feel in my belly the constant rhythm of tide drawing away and coming back, to see infinite expanse stretching beyond my limited sight. I have come to the ocean and listened even when it’s too dark to see, when a divorce was imminent, when my father was dying and a cacophony of emotions and memories tumbled me, confused my orientation. I have walked the beach alone and with siblings, nieces and nephews, with my husband, whenever we have needed to divest ourselves of everyday burdens and open ourselves again to renewal. The ocean has been witness, bigger than individual story.

This week I make a painting of the ocean to express my still raw feelings of an election that stripped away my illusions of our country’s progress in civility and equality, inclusivity of differences in gender, ethnicity and faith. Over the deep blue of sky and ocean I place the tarot cards of tower and moon, symbols of an election that changed everything for me. That reversed what I thought I knew, even what I thought best for my wellbeing. That showed me the dual gift of moonlight, a tide pull of lunacy, primal fears, and invitation to deep wisdom. Paradox. I had thought myself, our country, secure in its grand tower, on its way to peace, to calm everlasting seas. Instead it has been the roar of hurricane, of pounding waves, of the rough scraping of wave pulling against sand, the beach reshaping by storm. I have tried to head Pema Chodron’s words, to be grateful to everyone, even someone like Trump. Without him provoking us we wouldn’t have seen through our illusions of progress, stayed blind to the people who were hurting and confused enough by change that the only way they believed they could express themselves was to deny their own standards of civility and take a charlatan’s promises. With his election I have witnessed my own reactivity, judging others, wanting to charge in righteousness with my opinions instead of listening for the kernel of truth in another. I reluctantly admit my complacency, seeing how I assumed others were enacting change and I didn’t need to participate fully. My own deep habit of silence is revealed. How habitually I moved to restoring harmony in relationships, wanting everyone to get along took precedence over the discomfort of truth, of letting a breakage stand long enough to be honestly healed. A crack of lightening tumbled us from the tower. Painful admissions of differences in the country and within our individual families have been illuminated and many of us feel our heart and skin rubbed raw, as if we are the ones scraped against the sand, a seashell tumbled against the ocean floor.

If I were able to walk the beach today I would tell the ocean I have accepted the wisdom of its destructive power, the kind that reshapes a landscape. I would beg for it to sing back into my body the rhythm of tides, to remind me of the everlasting, that we are all carried by its deep currents no matter surface appearance, sensing in my bones the union of infinite and singular. I would implore the ocean’s power to move through me, to make me a wave building a new shape onto the beach.