Make of Me a Canyon

Breaking versus Broken

Thank you for being here. It’s literally a dream of mine since childhood that anyone would read my writing.

Don’t forget to vote, and remember that no matter what happens you can stay committed to peace, non-harm, to truly seeing the goodness in others, and to your own integrity. We got this.

XO - A

Audio for you…don’t mind the tears.

When my brother and I were little it was a really special treat to go to an NBA basketball game. The ticket holder my dad knew, who sometimes passed off tickets to us, had seats at the very top of the stadium on the aisle, so there was nothing in front of us, only an expanse of stairs. It was dizzying and added to the excitement of the moment. My favorite player was Kiki Vandaway because I loved the poetic sound of his name—a tragedy in two words. At half time, my dad would buy my brother and I ice cream, and as we walked the wide perimeter of the Coliseum, we would stop and say hello to what seemed like every other person. My father was the unofficial mayor of the nose bleeds.

As a child I found this fascinating, that my dad had such a huge life, that he was known and loved by so many people. This gregarious social generosity was something my mom spoke of without affection. She is a self described introvert, and would—in her words—prefer to stay home, and often does. My dad’s social needs contrast with her need to be alone. As I have aged, I have become my father’s daughter, an echo of his impulse to connect. I know tons of people. I love being out. I love saying hello. I love knowing and being known. While my dad was able to accomplish this high level of connection as a carpenter at the local newspaper, and rugby coach at Reed College, I have made a career out of tending to connection through service work, teaching yoga and meditation, and ultimately landing here as a psychotherapist.

Photo by jaikishan patel on Unsplash

Ursa, my 16 year old son—like Cinderella and most teenage boys it turns out—prefers to connect as close to midnight as possible. He lays in my bed breathing his weird creatine breath in my face, and tells me about his internal world. If I go to sleep early I miss this. I won’t know him, his insides, his magic, so it has become my habit, as he has gotten older, to stay up, ready for the sound of his footsteps scaling the stairs. As he enters, he asks for my journal, where we write out gratitudes together, and then he draws while he talks, just like his dad used to.

When we were in couples therapy, towards the end of our marriage, Ursa’s dad would draw in his notebook while I spoke, and the lack of attention and focus on what felt like a dying thing—on me—drove me absolutely mad. In one particularly memorable session, the therapist asked me to communicate my desire, my longing really, for him to put his pen down and look at me while I was speaking. And, she wanted me to do it in a kind and regulated way. I failed. I literally could not ask him to please look at me and stay regulated. The bar seemed so low. Too low. See me. Understand me. Put the pen down for just a second. In my marriage I failed. I lost.

Reflecting on not living with his dad anymore, one night, Ursa said, “It feels horrible, Dad makes me feel so sad.” He asked me,“What would it be like Mom, if I just didn’t come back after a night where you was so drunk you wouldn’t even remember why I left?”

I told him, for the thousandth time that I would never let that happen. That he could run, like the Runaway Bunny (a children’s book he used to love), and I would always run after him. I said, “You know it’s not your fault, right?” He nodded. And, knowing that it truly isn’t his fault doesn’t really change the pain of what he is having to hold—this breaking. At 16 he is beyond the age where protecting him from self-blame is the primary objective, and I cannot be the one to help him make meaning out of his loss. I have lost a partner and a co-parent, and he has lost his father. Our meanings are different. I have to trust that his meaning will become, like a poem that has been written just for him. For so long I have been the captain of our ship, navigating our way through the necessary chaos of a life.

This is the place I keep getting stuck on recently. How do I make something beautiful out of a pain that cannot be reconciled? Rilke wrote that “What is here and now, is, after all what has been given and is expected of us, and we must attempt to transform everything that happens to us into a new familiarity and friendliness with it.” Kintsugi, then. Stitching together what needs to be mended with seams of gold. Familiar and friendly. Made more beautiful because it has been broken.

When I was young and suffering quite deeply from abuse I would not face for decades, I often walked by this particularly spiralic bush near the Safeway a few blocks from our house and think, “This is a fractal.” Each of the branches a tiny echo of the one before, soothing something in me I couldn’t name. Knowing that there is repetition. Knowing that what was happening outside was also mirrored inside. Connection made manifest. Evidence that each small part is a reflection of the whole. A tree branch a mirror of the whole tree. A capillary a small version of the arterial system it stems from. Fractals, the word itself, comes from the latin fract, meaning to break. Not broken, but to break, which feels different, and somehow hopeful. As if the splitting apart will in time reveal something connected to the numinous—seams someday woven of gold. Yet there is poison in that promise. It makes me want to lay my body over my own children so that they will not have to break. And, I know well enough to know that the breaking is what makes us whole. We go away to come back.

Ursa will be different. He will not be the same after this year. He is not the same. His cracks, I can only hope, are being mended with my love. With the love of his sibling and his dearest friends. And, maybe this is the point. Maybe accepting that the grief, the great risk that is love, will change him, has changed him, and that this transformation is the beautiful task of living, an existential reckoning with the groundlessness of what’s here. The poet John Keats called it “Negative Capability,” the willingness to embrace the paradox and live with uncertainty: “I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” It is the irritable reaching that I find most keeps me from the joy, and the friendliness that will inevitably soften me.

Know that growth
more often looks like
letting go
than adding more;
having all the extra stripped away
until all that's left 
is love.
~Drew Jackson

Lately, I imagine my life as water running deep within a red rock canyon. I want the great love I have experienced in this life to carve out my insides, to grow the canyon deeper. I want the flood of love, joy, grief, and loss to sweep away the sturdy edges of the river, washing them downstream to where the sand will inevitably form something new. I want life to change me, to form me, to gut me, to make ridges and viewpoints of my body. Proof that I have lived. Proof that I have loved as big and wide as I possibly can.

When I gave birth to Veda at 22, the midwife asked me if they could sew up my torn labia, and I said no, for two reason: one, because I wanted my body to reflect my lived experience, and two because I could not bear the thought of anyone touching me after what I had just accomplished—birthing a human, no drugs, in the water. After giving birth to Ursa, my second child, my midwife—the same midwife— tried to sew up the seven year old tear from Veda’s birth, “I can’t leave you like this,” she said. It didn’t work. Even stitches could not undo what life had made of my body.

So leave me like this. Make of me a canyon. Let the tears and breaking become a map, a story to be told later. But to wish this for my child? To see his canyon grow deeper. To know what it was like to look in his eyes before he knew pain, and then to look in his eyes now, without rushing to fix it, to make him, and mold him into what he was before. The craving to go back feels like the irritable reaching for facts and reason that Keats refers to, the opposite of being in the mystery, the doubts, the not knowing. Someone once said that failure isn’t fatal, but failure to change might be.

The canyon, from space, looks like the river that made it. My child, drawing in my bed, looks like the father that made him.

“Real isn't how you are made…it's a thing that happens to you.” 
― Margery Williams Bianco, The Velveteen Rabbit

Love,

Audra