Shared Suffering as a Path to Change
A few weeks ago, it rained for several days straight in my city. We experienced a brief reprieve of sunshine, but the rain continued off-and-on for weeks, unrelenting. I adored it. I love the quieting down that the rain creates. I love when Nature forces egocentric, inflated humanity to recognize how little control we really have over anything.
We are so reluctant to turn inward as an outwardly-focused culture. It’s good for us to be pushed inside by the storms — whether literal or metaphoric — to be reminded of our smallness and the peaceful undercurrent of our greater Being. Our lives would probably progress much more harmoniously if we would be willing to align with the limits nature places on us, rather than declaring ourselves to be exceptional and striving for immortality, separate from all other constituents of the natural world.
I’ve been making peace lately with the reality of loss and death inherent in the laws of our world. This might be the logical result of my own experiences of loss throughout the last year. It would seem that in our adulthood, we leave behind our adolescent illusions of invincibility and inevitably come face-to-face with the reality that we are, in fact, finite creatures and that loss and suffering are as organically a part of life as growth and newness and sunny days.
I remember last week, after hearing from a friend about two tragic deaths having recently occurred in our city, asking my dad if things are just getting worse on this planet or rather whether my awareness of painful events was merely increasing with my age. He confirmed that it was the latter. When I asked him if it ever gets easier, if we ever feel the sting of tragedy any less, he replied without hesitation, “No.”
The immense rains over the last weeks have not kept me completely restricted to the indoors. I still take time to walk around our little pond behind the house, even in a downpour, and I have the privilege there of observing several families of Canada geese. They hatch goslings and toddle around the neighborhood in fuzzy, downy rows, spending several hours a day at the pond where they munch on grass and paddle around on the rain-specked surface of the water.
One morning, as a gentler rain than had been wont to fall over the previous days dazzled the air and the tiny pond, my dad and I observed the hatchlings and their parents — about eight babes and six parents in total — again along the banks of the pond. They seemed to me to find great pleasure in the rain which most humans habitually avoid.
Only an hour before, we had stood at the edge of the deck looking out toward the pond, dismayed, because we could only spot a couple of the parents who, in that moment, were sounding an urgent alarm, the reason for which was as yet unbeknownst to us. We speculated as to where the others had gone. Were they all okay? Was this the couple who had had only one gosling in previous days? Had their only little one fallen into an ill fate? The sense of loss at this thought ignited neuro-pathways in my brain, and I felt the result in my body, a swell of grief and sadness.
Suddenly, out from the brush bordering our porch ambled a mangy-looking fox. His trajectory appeared resolute — across the back yard and toward the geese. Then, we knew the intent behind the watch-geese’s warnings. A predator was in their midst.
The rain fell harder around us, and my dad went back inside, leaving me to watch as the fox ran around the pond to the other side. Abruptly, as if afraid of something he’d seen, he turned tail and bolted quickly in the opposite direction, away from the pond and the geese. The geese were safe, and I felt a wave of relief.
The poor fox, though, looked haggard, frail with patchy tufts of mangled fur hanging around his tiny body. He must have felt confused, and I wondered how much of his surrounding environment — the raging traffic on the other side of the subdivision wall, the houses in every direction, the city din drowning out the quiet — were to blame. He was likely starving.
Again, I felt the welling up of grief, this time over the fox and his apparently wasting state.
I am a seven on the Enneagram, which means I’m particularly good at avoiding pain when it arises. Incongruously with my habitual flight method, the events of the last couple years of my life — failed relationships, job losses, loss of home and life-plans — have forced me to sit still and meet with pain, even when everything in my mind-body begs me to run from it.
So it was on this day when my observation of the fox and the possibility of the death of goslings caused old, unmet grief to rise up within me. This time, instead of running from it or numbing it with some distraction, I held that pain in my body. Streams of mourning rushing from my eyes, I stayed with it until I felt myself opening into greater compassion and love.
Often times, when we stay with our difficult emotions rather than glossing over or repressing them, space is made for greater wisdom to be revealed. In that moment, settling into the sadness I felt for the geese and the fox, it occurred to me that (as counter-intuitive to the Western-American sentiment as this may be) maybe the death of the gosling to feed the fox or the death of the fox itself were not “bad” things. It is a fact of everything in existence that life consumes life in order to continue.
I heard Brie Stoner say recently on an episode of the “Another Name for Every Thing” podcast how strange it was that we humans expect life to be devoid of pain. She referred to motherhood and the pain of bearing children. In the very act of creation of any thing — not just human children — there is pressure, alteration, destruction of one form in the emergence of another, and often (if not always) some sort of discomfort or pain.
There is always consumption of one shape of life toward the building of another. This is true of all things — plant, animal, mineral, and spiritual. Yet, we humans are so afraid of the pain of change that we often altogether avoid what could be our most exquisite transformation. Sometimes, in our fear, we even rob others of that privilege.
From my lookout point on the porch, I came back into the house and resumed writing, forgetting about the geese for a moment until about an hour later when Dad proclaimed from the window that the families were back. We counted them all and found everyone accounted for — the fox hadn’t made a lunch among them today. If he had, though, wouldn’t that have been okay? After all, life never ends, it only changes.
We are only human. In our finitude, we cannot comprehend the balance of our entire earth’s ecosystem. Certainly, there are injustices (imbalances) wrought by our interference that need to be rectified. There is pain inherent in the cycle of life, but there is also pain and suffering inflicted by our ignorance.
I wonder if the answer to all of it isn’t to do our best to hold what pain is already here, regardless of its source, and wait for the wisdom that might surface as to how our species can constructively move forward with our wounded planet. To hold each others’ pain and listen deeply for what steps to take next, allowing love and compassion to bubble up from beneath the suffering. Is it possible that if we make space for our own discomfort and that of all other life forms on earth, we could create the capacity within ourselves to bear the creative contractions of birthing a new world?
Maybe, it is a stretch to assume that the life cycles of foxes and geese can teach us something about how to deal with a suffering and dying planet. Yet, it is self-evident that the more we pause,observe, and listen, the more we step into Life as it is emerging before us, the more we understand all of it. In my case, I believe it is in and through our shared experiences of suffering with all that is that we will find the answers we seek.
