The Beauty and the Horrors

On holding joy, grief, and stranger's hands. How the heart can make space for things the mind cannot handle.

I buy The Big Issue magazine from a guy outside the Unley shopping centre. It’s got my favourite cryptic crossword at the back (including quick clues for noobs) and is, of course, one of the best social enterprise mags of all time.

The man who sells it cannot see. He has a condition whereby his eyes are glued shut. He opens them a sliver, all inflamed along the edges. When I announce my presence, he always reaches out for my arm, asks about my day and what I’m up to. As we speak, he clumsily traces the shape of my fingers and wrist, as if he can see me better this way. I flinched at first. But now, I get it. The feel of my hand, alongside the timbre of my voice, seems to help create a sensory imprint for him. We connect now.

This brief interaction is one of the most tender and intimate of my month. I walk away with both grief for this kind man experiencing homelessness, guilt at my acute sense of privilege (as I go straight into Tony and Mark’s to spend 50 bucks on bougie groceries), and also a heightened awareness that something beautiful just happened. All of these things, at the same time.

Reminding myself to notice The Beauty has become a necessary practice for existential buoyancy.

Tippi Hedren having her cigarette lit by a crow on the set of Hitchcock’s ‘The Birds’.

Let me explain The Beauty. It’s when we rescued a stray cat, and the vet nurse called every day to check on him. It’s Triton planting seeds every weekend at Myponga, not knowing whether or not they’ll survive. It’s the person’s kindness that makes you cry. It’s the dash of sweetness in your bitter, the affirming and heady blend of hope, heartfulness, and awe at life itself.

Turning towards the Beauty is crucial, because the horrors abound as well. The news cycle right now, all war crimes and screaming children. The trajectory of mass extinction, dolphins washed up on our local shore for goodness sake - a debris of seahorses, unblinking eyes wide. I am overcome with rage. Then helplessness.

But then, the moon rises. I cook soup. Our no-longer-stray cat curls up in the curve of my thighs.

This is the paradox of our world today. The instagram feed that alternates social collapse memes beside facemasks for self-care. Bellylaughs with a friend one minute, mental health crises the next. Both things are happening at once.

Do you ever feel like your life is overwhelmingly beautiful and overwhelmingly sad at the same time?

It’s confusing for us to feel such contradictory emotions. Guilt might arise on the heels of joy, or grief in the aftermath of witnessing great suffering. The mind cannot fathom how all of these things can be true at once. But the heart can hold the paradox.

In Buddhist psychology, the concept of the awakened heart is one that can embrace these ‘both/and’ perspectives. Our minds cannot always make sense of things, but the heart can still expand wide enough to hold it all. We can learn to make space for the beauty and the horror. Stay poised on the tightrope of gratitude and sorrow. Not needing to make it ok, but to stay willing to face and feel it all. Otherwise, we turn away and disengage. In fact, indifference is the greatest danger of them all.

This is why I practice. To keep some kind of hope alive. To build a shelf for my grief inside the messy tupperware drawer of my dreams.

A fave from Micro Dose Poetry, Volume 1.

This is also why I’m going on a mettā meditation retreat tomorrow. I’ll be entering silence for 10 days to practice the Brahmavihara. That’s the Buddhist heart training of lovingkindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity (the original inspo behind Big Love). This trip is a special kind of pilgrimage for me as it’s at Spirit Rock in northern California. A mecca for the past 40 years in the modern insight meditation lineage. It’s founded by one of my original spiritual teachers on this path, Jack Kornfield.

I landed in San Francisco this afternoon.

Currently writing this from a desk in my derelict hotel room, in a part of town that clearly limps behind the memory of its glory days. There are folks sleeping rough all over, not selling mags like at home, but cradling paper-bagged bottles on filthy corners beneath mist shrouded skyrises and glints of Silicon Valley in the distance. I was nervous about travelling to the U.S. To be honest, if I hadn’t booked it so long ago, before everything spiralled into madness, I’m not sure if I’d still have come.

But here is the paradox. Everyone has been so kind here. And Spirit Rock is a beacon of justice and peace, full of folks working to spread wisdom and love in the midst of the shitstorm they find themselves in. It’s a resource of strength for those taking a stand against the rising horrors.

From Averno, by Louise Glück.

I’ll be offline for a while. Training my heart to stay open. A meditation retreat is a privilege, for sure. It’s also the most efficient way to deepen practice and embed the dharma into the marrow. As a teacher, I hope to continue sharing this wisdom from a place of full embodiment and spiritual maturity.

I encourage you to keep turning towards The Beauty too, even if just in a remedial way. Let yourself feel it all. Open to awe. Touch someone's hand while they talk, maybe you can see them more clearly that way.

Titbits:

• A stunning segment from On Being just released, Joanna Macy explains all this so beautifully: Listen here

• And this except from a poem by Rilke:

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.