Why Was Not This Ointment Sold? “All of humanity’s problems stem from a man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Blaise Pascal. (1623-1662) I woke up covered in a silicone mask, Throat and chin bulging like a frog song. Translucent bags of sap sagged beneath my eyes As if a team of artists Had prepared me through the night For a role As an older, Sicker version of myself. Throughout the day I moved as though walking Through gelatin With the weight of my lymph And swollenness of grief That had accumulated Below my skin. Diagnoses with no end in sight And prognoses with ends too soon. War, impossibly everywhere. Famine. Kidnapping. Terror. Occupation. Greed. Indictments that will almost surely Lead to nothing. And every other injustice That could crawl across The many screens of my attention. Those transgressions Had gathered there In my veins, In exhaustion, So that I knew what it was To be world-weary. In these days The weariness of humanity Finds its way into my outstretched palm As daily bread, And I have the instinct To take, eat, and remember. The body of suffering Becomes a communion of strangers Shedding their blood — Or more often, Having their blood shed. And I drink it all in Until my body is fat with it. Until I am so full Of the products of information That my care runneth over Into limbs of lead, My eyelids heavy, Laden like oxen Tilling the hard-packed soil Of knowing too much. “The poor will always be with you,” The prophet said. And two thousand years later They are. Was this a divination? An excuse? A cruel joke? Or was it possibly a reminder That God created rest And commanded us To take it too? That even Jesus Had to let others tend To his own tired and weary feet While the suffering waited Out of reach? The prophet spent weeks in the desert In sanctuaries of desolation To become what he was meant to be. Rising early in the morning While it was still dark, He departed to pray. To find a quiet place. Even in the storm, He slept. And yet, Like Judas Grasping at the expense of perfume, We believe all the oil Of our anointing Must be poured out Onto a world that cries out For our attention. For our care. For someone’s saving grace. Yet even the son of God Had to stop. Had to receive. Had to go away to a desolate place So that he could eat the bread Of solitude And become something more: To be the bread of heaven, Risen and whole, And not just the crumbs Left over From a single frenzied feast. Who am I, then, To think my oil will never run out In a sick facsimile Of the Festival of Lights? Who am I To think I can best God In the game of caring? Who am I When I find myself alone In a place of desolation With no one there To help or comfort Except my own body, Swollen From eating too much rich misery, And tired From trying to carry All of the world’s crooked bones?
I wrote this poem about a month ago in a writing group, and when I was done I figured this was another one of those poems that would stay scribbled in my journal, never seen by anyone else. I didn’t love the biblical language, and it felt like something I’d written for myself. I’ve got a bunch of these types of writings, things that were healing events in the moment, written as self-care, a journal entry, venting, or some other private free-writing ritual.
In high school I fell in love with Sylvia Plath. I’d read The Bell Jar and some of her poetry, and I saw her as a hero of hope and resilience after such a horrific experience of surviving a suicide attempt. And then I learned that not too long after she’d finished the book, she had attempted suicide again, and this time had been successful.
I was crestfallen, and in homage to her memory I started devouring her work — until I came across Daddy.
The poem utterly shocked and horrified me as she compared her deceased father to a Nazi, and herself to a Jew. Her rage, her brokenness, her sawtoothed bitterness…it was too much.
I have always been scared of you, With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo. And your neat mustache And your Aryan eye, bright blue. Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You—— Not God but a swastika So black no sky could squeak through. Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you. … There’s a stake in your fat black heart And the villagers never liked you. They are dancing and stamping on you. They always knew it was you. Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.
I felt dirty reading that, like I had stumbled across an intensely personal and hate-filled diary entry. And yet there it was in a book of poetry from the high school library.
More than thirty years later I still think about that poem, and I’ve often used it as a litmus test of whether or not something I write meets my own standards of being something I’d share. As one teacher told me years ago, “Nobody wants to read your therapy.”
At the time, I think I took that in, and it became an internal critical voice, and it made me afraid of being “one of those people.” You know…a person who writes bad teenage goth poetry to get attention or make people feel sorry for them.
What a judgmental way to look at someone else’s (and my own) written word!
And yet that was a relentless and powerful voice in my head. Over the past few years, however, especially as I’ve been sharing more and more of my writing, I’ve been examining those old judgments, beliefs, and biases.
I was reminded of these ugly voices again on my birthday.
Turning fifty was a mountaintop experience for me. My childhood doctors thought I would die by the time I was twenty-five due to some genetic conditions I have, yet here I was at fifty, healthier than I’ve ever been. I was surrounded by people who loved me with outrageous outpourings of generosity and thoughtfulness.
One of those gifts was a misonodana, a special lacquerware table made specifically to make the Japanese tea ceremony accessible to everyone. I’ve been passionate about accessibility ever since my friend broke his leg in middle school and couldn’t get around. (This was before the Americans with Disabilities Act mandated things like ramps and other accommodations for the disabled.) For several weeks I had to accompany my friend to all of his classes because he could not possibly get himself and all of his books to them on his own.
For the past several years I’ve been trying to figure out how to make tea accessible to people who just can’t sit on the floor of a tatami room on their knees for a couple of hours. I’ve tried numerous permutations, but they always interfered with movement, the atmosphere, or some other crucial part of the ceremony. And misonodana are big, heavy, and expensive — not something one would typically be able to get in the US.
Well, for my fiftieth birthday, everything came together for me to get one. And so I threw myself into the act of setting it all up in such a way that hit the sweet spot of authenticity and accessibility.
It felt like such a big deal, and I was so grateful for it, that I decided to devote one of my Everyday Divinas practices to the table, and as I sat there meditating on the table and what it represents, I realized that this combination of authenticity and accessibility is a much better internal voice to have than the internal critic comparing me to some tortured poet writing screeds about my injuries. (That’s the language that internal critic would use.) It felt like a genuine epiphany, and I vowed to continue thinking about it all week.
And then my dear friend with uterine cancer was taken off chemo, enrolled in hospice care, and sent home to die. Her prognosis was that she had a couple of weeks left to live.
The idea of authenticity and accessibility hit home in a way I never could have predicted. My friend, Hilary, is almost exactly my same age. I’ve known her for two decades, and we have been there together through marriages and divorces, childbirth, graduations, and just about every milestone, success, and loss one can have. She was one of the most vibrant, passionate, and energetic people I knew. And then, within two months of her first symptoms, she was sent home to die.
If ever there was a time to be authentic, this was it. If there was ever someone who needed access, it was Hilary. And so, plans changed, a team assembled to provide round-the-clock care, and we showed up.
After a particularly exhausting day, I remembered my poem — the one I’m sharing this week — scrawled in my journal from a month ago. Suddenly it seemed less like some free-writing exercise I’d needed when I wrote it, and more like prophecy. I went back and read it again, grappling with my helplessness to take away my friend’s cancer or pain, feeling utterly powerless to comfort her young daughter, whom I’ve known since she was born, as she watched her beautiful mother shrivel into a pain-filled and sallow shell.
The critic’s voice had been there whispering again, telling me that I hadn’t been doing enough, that I didn’t have the right to experience joy or pleasure when my friend was dying so painfully, that I should have taken more photos of us when we were together recently, that I didn’t deserve my birthday gifts when she was in government assistance for her care. I felt guilty and angry and all the other chaotic feelings of intense grief (and I rationally know that this is both normal and appropriate), and I think I really felt guilty for just not being able to make it all go away.
In other words, I felt guilty for not being God.
When I went back and read my poem, it felt like a type of healing, a permission, and also a pointed question. Who did I think I was? No one person should have to take all of this on, because we are all human, and part of the human condition is the need for rest, for care.
It was also a way to reclaim and reframe my old religious upbringing. For most of my life I followed the path of a codependent and puritanical American Christianity. I tried to be perfect, sacrifice my desires, deny myself, and take up the cross. I followed the commandments to turn the other cheek, go the extra mile, and give people the shirt off my back. And in true codependent fashion, I did it to the point of extremism, leading to exhaustion, burnout, and spiritual crisis after a lifetime of never saying “no.” Yet here were those same stories, those same scriptures, reminding me that rest and sabbath were also sacrosanct.
That gave me the answer I needed concerning a decision of whether or not I should cancel a hike I’d committed to earlier in the week, back when we thought Hilary would be continuing chemo. A group of us was going to drive up a mountain to hike in the cool alpine meadows about an hour from the Tucson desert. I’d been wrestling with whether or not I really ought to go, fearing that I’d just be too tired, or a burden to my friends, or that I’d be too worried about Hilary. But I knew I needed to get out in nature, so I decided to go. Sure enough, I saw evidence of love, care, kindness, and restoration all around. After a series of devastating fires, the mountain is coming back to life, full of ferns and grasses, and flowers.
The fields were dotted with huge piles of firewood, and a retired fire chief in our hiking group described how the fire department builds those for controlled burns during winter snows. It is one way they keep the community safe — and a way that they love the earth, tending to the forest, to the habitat, to the woodland creatures in the rare “sky island” forests — a way of loving the mountain itself. And seeing the mountain coming back to life after one cataclysm after another, I was renewed with hope at the beauty of persistence. Life finds a way.
This was exactly what I needed, and with a full heart I came down the mountain, took a long nap, and went to be with my friend.
As I write this today, I have a confession to make: I had to wrestle with that critical, guilt-inducing voice yet again before I could write. With the astonishing rapidity of Hilary’s decline I know I only have a certain amount of time left to spend with her, so I felt guilty for not canceling everything on my calendar to be with her.
But I needed to write — for myself and also for others who need a reminder that we ALL need to take time for ourselves, even in the midst of storms or crises. And the poem I rediscovered this week saved me. It took me out of my distraught powerlessness and reminded me to let others come with their gifts for their suffering friend, to take care of myself, to let others care for me. Those words of authenticity and accessibility kept ringing true. I get to choose what to share, what access I give to others, how private and open I want to be.
And today, in this moment, I knew that I would be able to show up better for Hilary in the next few days, and that I’d be more open to the sacred gifts inherent in such liminal moments, if I went back to my writing practice. Back to solitude. Back to rest.
Once I re-read the poem through the lens of authenticity and accessibility, I realized that the religious language of he poem is deeply authentic to my own history and experience, even if it no longer accurately reflects my religious views or spirituality. And my fear of that biblical language being a barrier to others dissipated with this new framework of authenticity and accessibility, because I knew that those stories of Jesus are useful, whether or not they are historically accurate and regardless of any reader’s belief. The archetype of the sabbath and sacred rest are as old as human history and are part of virtually every natural cycle, so of course they would be found in sacred texts. In my own way, I hope the words form a bridge to something we all know on some level, rather than a blockade.
I also revisited Sylvia Plath’s Daddy poem too, with an eye of kindness and a heart of empathy for a woman giving voice not only to her grief and anger at her father, but also toward the men she was drawn to while trying to fill the hole he left in her heart.
Suddenly, I had such compassion for her, again remembering the courage and beauty of the version of herself that she wrote about in The Bell Jar, and I saw that the poem could be read as a rage against the machines of patriarchy and misogyny. In a shocking twist, I realized that I love her poem now, and I understand where she was coming from. This wasn’t some hateful, abusive screed. It was an authentic cry, giving angry voice to a generation of women who’d had enough. How many, after reading that, saw themselves, and also found the courage to say, “I’m through”?
Ultimately, I hope my authentic words provide readers with access to the same epiphanies that I had — that we all need a sabbath rest, that we all yearn for inclusion, and that the old voices of our internal critics can give way to a kinder and more accepting voice. May we all have the courage to step back, rest, and allow ourselves to be renewed.
Why Was Not This Ointment Sold? “All of humanity’s problems stem from a man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Blaise Pascal. (1623-1662) I woke up covered in a silicone mask, Throat and chin bulging like a frog song. Translucent bags of sap sagged beneath my eyes As if a team of artists Had prepared me through the night For a role As an older, Sicker version of myself. Throughout the day I moved as though walking Through gelatin With the weight of my lymph And swollenness of grief That had accumulated Below my skin. Diagnoses with no end in sight And prognoses with ends too soon. War, impossibly everywhere. Famine. Kidnapping. Terror. Occupation. Greed. Indictments that will almost surely Lead to nothing. And every other injustice That could crawl across The many screens of my attention. Those transgressions Had gathered there In my veins, In exhaustion, So that I knew what it was To be world-weary. In these days The weariness of humanity Finds its way into my outstretched palm As daily bread, And I have the instinct To take, eat, and remember. The body of suffering Becomes a communion of strangers Shedding their blood — Or more often, Having their blood shed. And I drink it all in Until my body is fat with it. Until I am so full Of the products of information That my care runneth over Into limbs of lead, My eyelids heavy, Laden like oxen Tilling the hard-packed soil Of knowing too much. “The poor will always be with you,” The prophet said. And two thousand years later They are. Was this a divination? An excuse? A cruel joke? Or was it possibly a reminder That God created rest And commanded us To take it too? That even Jesus Had to let others tend To his own tired and weary feet While the suffering waited Out of reach? The prophet spent weeks in the desert In sanctuaries of desolation To become what he was meant to be. Rising early in the morning While it was still dark, He departed to pray. To find a quiet place. Even in the storm, He slept. And yet, Like Judas Grasping at the expense of perfume, We believe all the oil Of our anointing Must be poured out Onto a world that cries out For our attention. For our care. For someone’s saving grace. Yet even the son of God Had to stop. Had to receive. Had to go away to a desolate place So that he could eat the bread Of solitude And become something more: To be the bread of heaven, Risen and whole, And not just the crumbs Left over From a single frenzied feast. Who am I, then, To think my oil will never run out In a sick facsimile Of the Festival of Lights? Who am I To think I can best God In the game of caring? Who am I When I find myself alone In a place of desolation With no one there To help or comfort Except my own body, Swollen From eating too much rich misery, And tired From trying to carry All of the world’s crooked bones?
I love you,
Eric