BREATHING INTO SUFFERING

We are fragile creatures, and it is from this weakness, not despite it, that we discover the possibility of true joy.

—ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU, The Book of Joy

This quote from Archbishop Desmond Tutu stopped me in my tracks when I first read it. It is from a collaborative book he did with His Holiness the Dalai Lama called The Book of Joy. I remember rolling over the term fragile again and again. Am I fragile? Are we, humans, really fragile creatures? I feel like we usually read about our strength and resilience, our triumph and gusto. We clearly contain these attributes as well, but there was something powerful and poignant about this notion of human fragility that demanded my attention, pause, and reflection.

In the midst of my reflections, I envisioned the boxes that accompany us on our many moves or travels. The fragile ones are always labeled, and we are told again and again, through multiple sticker reminders, to “Handle with Care.” Something about this phrase seems pertinent to our often confronting way of rushing through life’s transitions, especially when faced with challenge or suffering. If we are not careful, we can be conditioned to meet the toughness of life with shields and swords, biting our tongues, clenching our fists, throwing punches in the air, hardening our gaze, staying busy, wringing the pain out of the heart like we would the sweat from a discarded towel during a boxing match.

“I got this,” we say, as our legs weaken, eyes puff, and knees buckle. “Put me in, let’s go!”

And yet, everyone around us watching cringes as they observe our blind hubris, our exhausted stumbling, our crazed path to some sort of self-induced destruction.

But what if we changed our mantra during life’s toughest moments: “I do not want this boxing match any longer. Take me out of the ring, please.”

We place a sticker on our forehead or right in the center of our chest that reads, “Fragile: Handle with Care.” A reminder to ourselves (and the rest of the world) that we are breakable, that we are not indestructible or immune to being mishandled.

We rest. We retreat. We become like the poets. We soften. We listen. We talk to nature. We “bathe in the morn’s soft and silvered air,” to use one of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous lines. We sip our coffee. We stay present with the ache. We wear the sorrows on our changing faces. We breathe into the suffering. We dare to pull it in close as inspiration for our creative endeavors and our art.

But let’s be honest. No one really wants to breathe into suffering. That’s typically not our first and most natural response. We usually try to breathe our way out of it—as far out of it as we can get. And yet many spiritual and psychological traditions tell us that in moments of despair, we should not run or flee or push the pain away but bring it in, invite it closer.

In his foundational teaching of the Four Noble Truths, the Buddha reminded us that we cannot avoid suffering. No matter how hard we try or how fast we run. Dukkha happens. Or in modern English: sh*t happens. It is inevitable. Throughout our strange existence here as humans, we run into times of loss, darkness, despair, and loneliness. We will naturally wonder what the purpose of suffering is and wander into walls of frustration and anguish. We will naturally want to push it all away and return to happier and more peaceful times. We will naturally wish for a magic wand that will simply erase the pain and make everything easier.

We may not have a magic wand, but I dare to claim that art is a form of magic. According to my trusted online dictionary, magic is “the power of apparently influencing the course of events by using mysterious or supernatural forces.” Magic blends the inner and outer realities—how we perceive that something has changed and suddenly something unexpected enters the scene. With magic, we begin to see things differently; we remember that there are forces beyond the purely physical—mysteries that we cannot intellectually understand. We are transported to a place of possibility, a place that defies our literal definitions of reality.

I dare say, art does the same.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that writing a poem or painting a picture erases the pain we experience. But it does allow, even if for a brief moment, a shift of perception, a nod to something deeper, a discovery of meaning. It can take a difficult emotion or moment of anguish and allow it a form that can become immensely healing and transportive for ourselves and others.

No doubt this is probably the most difficult section of the entire book. But it can lead us to a creative tide that is raw and real. Art that erupts or is produced from suffering has tentacles that reach into all of us who come into contact with it. It touches, inexplicably, the fragile (and often neglected) places in our psyche and heart. Even though we are resilient, courageous, brave, and strong, we are also fragile creatures as Archbishop Tutu suggested.

And there is something about acknowledging our own fragility that lets the world in, that nests around the ache within like a delicate egg. When we sit upon that ache and handle it with care, what can hatch is great (and deep) creative potential—stories and images and movements that pull something intimately personal and powerful from the depths of our being. And while intimately personal, we all, somehow, find solace in the universality and shared experience of human suffering. We begin to see, as we slowly breathe into them, that our moments or memories of suffering connect us to one another and provide the threads that weave us into a huge field of creativity that is immensely real, transformative, and meaningful.

But the key is to breathe slowly, not move too hastily, and remember that our own being and our art deserve to be handled with care and tended to deeply. This is not an easy creative practice, but as you will see in each of our essays that follow (and in your own exploration), it holds tremendous healing power. It is a form of magic. And like all magicians, we must handle our craft and our materials with care, love, and attention.

The Rupture Within: Releasing the Soul-Bird

Deborah

Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain….Accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields.

—KAHLIL GIBRAN, The Prophet

It is November as I write this. Over the past few weeks, I have watched full, green leaves burst into a bright yellow, fade to a dark brown, and fall to the ground. The trees are bare now as I gaze past the cold glass of my apartment window. There is nothing to cover their trunks. No leaves to cloak their branches. They stand bare, naked, and exposed. Empty of color and life. The imperfections of their structure shown to all, the awkward shape and twist of their branches on display. Open and vulnerable to the chill of winter, to the darkness that looms early now and in the coming months. I watch as the cold gusts of wind blow them from side to side, and I cannot help but recognize themes of my own individual life (and of our collective human life) before me.

I (like you, I assume) am no stranger to suffering. I (like you, I assume) have been blown side to side by gusts of cold, unforgiving wind. I have stood bare, empty, and colorless with a fog and chill closing in all around me. In the opening quote above, the Lebanese-American artist and poet Kahlil Gibran prompts us to accept the seasons of the heart. And no matter how much we wish for an infinite spring, endless summer, or eternal autumn, we cannot escape the pain and darkness of a harsh winter.

In depth psychological language, the phases of darkness and suffering are often called “the dark night of the soul.” In the language of ancient alchemy, this is called the nigredo, the blackening, the plunge into the underworld. This black suffering often strips us bare, tears us apart. It removes any illusion we may have of invincibility or pride. It reminds us, starkly, that we are not always in control. It begins to break down our identification with the conscious ego, and in doing so, moves us closer to a daunting confrontation with the unconscious.

Deep creativity is archetypal.

It is only when we delve a bit deeper into these ideas—the dark night of the soul and the nigredo—that we begin to see how suffering is placed within a wider context or story of transformation. We do not suffer for suffering’s sake alone.

Speaking in very general terms, ancient alchemy was about transforming lead into gold. The nigredo was an essential stage of this process of transformation, but it was exactly that—a stage, with a movement toward other phases, where darkness breaks and new material is created.

In the sixteenth century, Spanish poet and Roman Catholic mystic Saint John of the Cross wrote a lengthy poem titled, “Noche oscura del alma” (“Dark Night of the Soul”). The poem narrates the journey of the soul from entanglement in the material world toward spiritual transformation. The darkness represents the trials, challenges, and difficulties the soul must endure along the way to spiritual maturity. The point here is to recognize that suffering is an essential ingredient to the soul’s ripening. And the poem is not called “Vida oscura del alma” (“Dark Life of the Soul”), but rather dark night. Eventually, the sun rises. And it is morning.

THE SCARRED AND SACRED PLACES

These phases of loss, sadness, frustration, or despair are not chosen by us. Suffering, of course, is an inevitable part of our human existence, completely unavoidable. No matter how hard we try to get off scathe-free, we won’t. At one time or another, we are forced to deal with loss, betrayal, evil, sadness, and devastation. The rug will be pulled out from underneath us, and we will fall into the dark abyss.

When we fall, there’s a disruption. Our plans change. Concepts and ideas of what we have envisioned disappear. We lose our bearings. We may try to surrender. We wander for a while, confused and saturated with pain. And in the process, the deep, empty place inside of us begins to swell open. I have come to call this phase “the rupture within.” In this rupture, a crack or space is opened for an unaccessed part of ourselves to emerge. I call these unaccessed parts “soul-birds”—the beautiful creative potentials within us that long to escape but need an opening or rupture to find their wings. I wrote this poem in an attempt to capture these ideas.

There will come a time

when that to which your heart clings the most

will be asked of you.

You may be angry at the request.

You may scream and weep

until your tears can no longer

extinguish the flames

that burn the hands of your heart.

You may feel betrayed at the demand.

You may resist and fight

until your strength can no longer

hold back the shovel

that’s digging up your soul.

Lie down, sweet one.

Somewhere, deep within, you know.

The soul-bird

has been buried

for too many tired years

and she knows the way out

and soon

her sweet call will swell

from your pulse

out into the world

that needs her so.

I wrote this poem a few years ago, after a dark night of the soul that lasted over eight months for me. The story is long and nuanced, with many layers. In light of this essay, it seems superfluous to delve into all of the details with you, so I will try to capture only the major components—to allow you into the scarred and sacred places of my heart. I like to think it is not an accident that the words sacred and scarred are composed mostly of the same letters. For I have come to see the scarred places in my heart as the most tender and sacred.

During a trip to India in 2012, a country in which I had previously lived for many years, I got very ill. I was hospitalized in four different locations—three of which were tremendously traumatic—unable to move my face or my hands. I wondered many times if I was going to die in dark India. Each setting felt like a different variation of hell, and there was no comfort or adequate medical care until the very end.

After stabilizing enough to fly home, I returned to months of post-traumatic stress—panic attacks, insomnia, anxiety, disillusionment, and inherent distrust in my body. This was all new and terrifying to me. I had to drop out of my PhD program temporarily and take a leave from my healing practice. So much of what I had established was breaking down. All of my “powers” as a trained healer, meditator, and yogi had been stripped away. I felt bare and naked like the trees in the passage that opens this essay—vulnerable and exposed to every cold and wintry element that swirled around me. I wondered what to do with all of the fear and pain I held within. It felt immense, and I desperately wanted it all to just be blown aside. I felt lonely and terrified until I, synchronistically, stumbled upon a poem called “My Eyes So Soft” by the great Sufi mystic Hafiz. In his powerful poem, he tells us not to surrender our loneliness so quickly—to allow it to cut us more deeply.

I had read this poem long before the “seasoning” of my own loneliness occurred, long before my own dark night of the soul. But it reappeared at the perfect time after my illness in India to remind me that suffering is sacred. In his poem, Hafiz even calls it a “divine ingredient”—one that ferments and seasons us. Even a culinary amateur knows that a dish, well seasoned, has depth and interest. I believe it is the same for us humans. But we need to allow this process to unfold, to allow it to cut us more deeply. Fermentation is not an overnight procedure, and deep cuts allow for the true escape of the soul-birds—those unexpected gifts (like Hafiz’s soft eyes and tender voice) that only a true intimacy with suffering can conjure.

SIFTING FOR GOLD

In the opening pages of his book Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life’s Ordeals, Thomas Moore states that during these periods of suffering, “[our] job is to get close to it and sift it for its gold.” Sift suffering for its gold. This, I be lieve, is where the path of deep creativity comes in. This is where suffering becomes the raw material for a rich and powerful surge of creative potential. But we must get close to it, as Moore suggests. Sifting is not done from a distance. Sifting involves getting your hands dirty, working in the soil. And it is the dark soil that is often the most rich and fertile.

During the dark days after my illness, instead of getting stuck in post-traumatic stress, I moved closer to my pain and suffering (often with great fear or hesitancy and with the professional help of an amazingly compassionate therapist). Moving closer to my suffering meant I stopped wishing it away. I stopped wanting to return to my life and the “me” that existed before the darkness. I accepted that a new, altered, and different version of me was perhaps emerging and began to invite the difficult emotions in (rather than pushing them away) in order to get to know them and understand them more intimately. In doing so, I found myself writing prolifically. There were unaccessed parts of myself that wanted a voice, and writing became an essential part of my process. This is the interesting relationship between suffering and creativity. Suffering can bring creative eruption by breaking down conscious structures in our psyche and increasing our capacity to feel. Really feel. In his essay on the feeling function, James Hillman wrote that our capacity to feel “has lain like a buried continent in the collective psyche” (in Lectures on Jung’s Typology). Our collective psyche favors the capacity of the intellect over that of the heart. But then we, as artists, must lead the excavation. We must revive the capacity to function with and within our feelings—to work, expressively, with the raw and tender material of our complex lives.

Deep creativity is emotional.

Suffering pierces the heart, and a pierced heart allows these feelings, questions, and struggles to seep out into expression from deep within. Whatever we feel, however we suffer, becomes the material for our craft. But, at the same time, as we create with these materials, we build a container, a story, a sacred space for the suffering to express itself. We become more intimate with it through our creative endeavors, and a new level of understanding opens up. In essence, this is often a deeply moving and healing process.

Deep creativity is healing.

As an example, a few years ago, I drove to the home of a client I had been seeing for many months. Part of my work is to practice and teach pranic healing, a comprehensive system of energetic medicine. This particular client was a man in his midforties, who suffered from terminal brain cancer. I grew very close to him over the time we had the honor of working together. He was unable to make the trip to my office toward the end of his life, and so I began to visit him at home.

I walked up the long driveway to the door at the side of his house. There was a wooden ramp for his wheelchair built over the few steps that led to the main door. Instead of leaving it as a plain, boring slab of wood, he had painted a series of images upon its surface. As I approached, I spent a few moments frozen in front of it. My heart was completely captivated by his artwork. The ramp was astonishing. He had powerfully transformed this plank from a stark and daily reminder of his disability to a work of art that carried him home. How agonizingly beautiful.

I walked, reverently, into his house, my feet literally touched by his paintings on the ramp underneath them. His wife greeted me, and as I entered, I again found myself frozen for a few moments. Along the upper edge of the walls, just below the ceiling, were dozens of powerful and evocative paintings. Struck by their impact and beauty, I asked about their origin. “He painted them all,” she said, as she motioned to her husband. “During the illness.”

My client—a kind man with soft, tired eyes—looked up and smiled at me. His physical suffering had made its way into the sound of his voice and the appearance of his body. His head was bald from months of harsh chemotherapy, his face puffy and swollen. Under his blanket, his legs were thin and pale, holding on to whatever tinge of color they had left. But he was undeniably beautiful. I could not deny the appearance of peace in his eyes, in his body, in his aura, and in his smile. It was like a golden hue that softened all around him and stood in stark contrast to the lead, the darkness, and the tragedy of his situation. I immediately felt that the art all around him was an absolutely essential part of his own alchemical metamorphosis from lead into gold. He had let his loneliness ferment and season him, as our poet Hafiz encouraged. And each piece of art stood like a temple to his transformation. I could only bow before them. “It was my way of getting everything out. Of making something out of this mess,” he said softly. “From mess into meaning,” I thought to myself. That is what art and creativity provide during deep periods of suffering. And clearly he hadn’t shied away from it. He moved in as close as he could get.

Deep creativity is alchemical.

I felt honored and moved to be among the company of his raw feelings brought to form, each one a testimony to the different phases of his life, his illness, his approaching death, his struggle, and his loss. While they were created by him, they transcended his individual story. He gave expression (in often very unedited, disturbing, and uncomfortable ways) to the human themes we often avoid—darkness, death, tenderness, frailty, and turmoil.

While there were so many that moved me, one painting in particular has stayed with me ever since. Painted in black and red was a man shouting, his eyes bulging from his head. I am not sure why that piece stood out among all the others. Perhaps it was the stark use of color—only black and red on a white canvas. Or the thick, bold, angry, and desperate strokes of paint that mirrored the expression of his subject. Or maybe it was the confronting simplicity. Whatever it was, the particular pain in that painting belonged to my client, but he had also touched upon a deeper layer of frustration and struggle that cut me open and belonged to us all.

In observing his work, there was no denying that suffering and despair stretch our entire sensibility, and this makes us better artists and creatives. And while I do not believe that a life of despair and great distress are necessary conditions for a great artist to emerge, I do believe that great artists will use the inevitable despair and distress of life as creative material. This is sifting the suffering for gold, freeing the soul-birds longing for escape. I often wonder if artists, indeed, suffer more or if they are simply the ones expressing the suffering more explicitly—courageously entering the darkness that many of us avoid. We all suffer, but the artist within us does something with it. The artist within us moves closer to the ache to see what tones, or colors, or sounds or movements or words are begging to come out of it.

My client reminded me that, inherently, we are creators. Our destruction often provides the very pieces we need to reconstruct, to remodel, to re-create. Our vulnerability and our shivers need not be seen as shameful or weak. In fact, they provide the keys to the cage, which when opened releases a soul-bird, the beauty of whose call we cannot come close to fathoming. The call of the soul-bird is ghastly beautiful because it holds puncturing notes of pain that have a long-lingering and familiar residue, which remains on all of those who hear it. When we witness the call of another’s soul-bird, we hear pieces of ourselves and our own stories of suffering. All of a sudden, we remember that we are not alone. Or if we feel alone, that we are alone, together.

The places of scarring in the heart are particularly tender. And when we recognize those same scars in one another, a deeper story emerges that stirs us at a very meaningful level and reminds us of the mysteries we all take part in. Great artists express what so many of us are feeling, wondering, and questioning. I wrote the following poem during a recent, drastic turn in my father’s health, and it seems to grasp what I’m trying to get at here.

There are moments in life,

when everything you’ve told yourself

and everything you believe in

fall out from underneath you.

And you sit,

On a groundless floor,

more tender inside

than you ever thought possible,

asking the one question

you know

we can never fully answer,

Why?

No matter what anyone tells you,

don’t press yourself

into a perfect package

of false compliance.

You are allowed

to throw stones

at the sky.

To write “fuck”

in your journal 74 times

and break into a million little pieces.

You are allowed to ask for help

and wonder, deeply,

about the nature of suffering,

even though you’ve read

a thousand books on the topic

and are supposed to be

“the spiritual one.”

The truth is beyond

what we can see,

and until the veil has truly lifted

sometimes

the blindfold can feel

cruel and suffocating.

This is all ok.

Everything

you feel

is ok.

You have not lost your faith.

You are no less of a person.

And when nothing else

soothes you,

apply this balm, slowly,

to your swollen, cracking heart,

and know

you are not alone.

I had to write that poem. It was my way of remembering that I am not alone when suffering. And perhaps my own remembrance can spark the remembrance of whoever stumbles upon it—the beloved “you” in the poem that attempts to hold us all. I simply longed, desperately, to make some meaning out of the mess, as I had witnessed so powerfully with my client many years before.

A few short days after I visited their home, he died peacefully in his own bed. Surrounded by his wife and his paintings. When his wife called to inform me, I could hear the tremble in her voice. A new phase of her own suffering had begun, and I gently reminded her of the gift her husband had given us—inspiration to sift our suffering for its gold, to get close to it, to free our own soul-birds, to allow this newfound loneliness to ferment and season us. And somehow, as we spoke, I found myself smiling. I imagined my beloved client and friend getting up from his wheelchair and walking upon a beautifully painted ramp to his Eternal Home.

He would remain forever within me as a pillar of strength and inspiration—a reminder of the internal alchemy that our creative endeavors can foster. As artists, when we truly tend to the ruptures within ourselves, we allow the powerful call of the soul-birds to swell out into the world that needs them so.

EXERCISES

Deborah invites you to these reflections.

It’s a very human longing, to make meaning out of mess. Make a list of four or five times in your life when you suffered the most. What meaning did you make then or do you make now of your suffering?

As creative people, part of how we make meaning out of mess is to make something tangible out of our suffering. For each of these four or five times, what did you make out of your suffering? It could be something you made while you were in the suffering, in the immediate aftermath of the suffering, or years, even decades later.

The phrase “the suffering artist” is a common one (over 36 million hits on Google, as of this writing!). What is the relationship between your suffering and your creativity? Are you more creative during times of suffering, or less? I ask because while I’m suggesting we create out of our suffering, I’m also aware that for many people, suffering may stifle creativity, at least during the darkest part of the night.

Can you create something from these reflections?

Deborah invites you to this practice.

SIFTING SUFFERING FOR GOLD

In my essay, I advocate for leaning into suffering, moving closer to it, feeling its feeling, becoming intimate with it. I don’t mean this in a masochistic way, of course. If I could have willed away the PTSD I suffered from after my illness in India, I would have. If my client could have willed away his terminal brain cancer, he would have. Not all suffering is necessary, but suffering is also not unavoidable. When it is unavoidable, when we are going through a dark night of the soul, I believe our creativity can be a powerful ally in the process.

For this practice, I want to suggest you sift your own suffering for gold. Do this to whatever degree you are psychologically comfortable—perhaps you have a situation that’s causing a very dark night indeed, so dark you’re not ready to take a look at it yet. That’s fine—trust your soul’s wisdom on this. Choose a situation of lesser suffering from any of these common domains—work, relationship, family, money, health, etc.

After you’ve decided what situation you want to sift through, see if you can give your suffering a form. I turned to poetry when I was suffering over my father’s illness, but for this practice, I want to suggest you give your suffering a visual form. Using crayons, markers, colored pencils, paints, or any materials at hand, ask yourself, “What does my suffering look like?” Or ask your suffering itself: “Suffering, what do you look like?” Allow yourself to give it form. As I suggest in my essay, “see what tones, or colors, or sounds or movements or words are begging to come out of it.”

Just by giving Suffering a form, insights into it should arise, but you can take it even further with a form of active imagination. You may wish to ask Suffering some questions, such as:

How do you feel?

What would you like from me?

What are you here to teach me?

Where is your gold?

How can I express you?

What would you like me to create from you or with you?

To Create Is to Re-Create: Repairing and Restorying Childhood Suffering

Jennifer

I am in love with New York City. I have always been in love with New York City. I’m not sure whether my love affair began with Woody Allen’s movie Manhattan, or if its genesis was from books I read when I was young, or perhaps even further back to another lifetime ago, if you will entertain such a thought. I was born and raised in a small town in Northern California, a fifth-generation girl whose parents never traveled beyond the lake up north to go fishing or the mountains to the east to go camping, but somehow I came to love New York.

I made several sojourns there in my twenties and thirties with different girlfriends, and I was always surprised that they weren’t as in love with New York as I was. It was inevitably an uncomfortable threesome, and I couldn’t wait for one of them to go to sleep at night so I could walk with the other, the one who never sleeps. My love for those women faded, but my passion for New York remains unabated.

In my late thirties, I took a short sabbatical from work and treated myself to six weeks alone in New York—if you can ever be alone in New York. I had been studying screenwriting at UCLA Extension that year. While I never had the patience or the inspiration to be a novelist, sometimes stories would come to me that I could see on the screen. I planned to use my six weeks in the city to combine sightseeing with screenwriting, to allow the energy of the city to infuse my creative energy, and to finish a screenplay I was working on at the time.

I spent one Sunday exploring Harlem. I was hoping to experience gospel music at one of the oldest churches there, the Abyssinian Baptist Church, but so were hundreds of other people (tourists, they were, not someone in a committed relationship with New York, like me). Instead I sat outside the church and watched the men and women stream out of the services, the men in their spruce suits and the women in their finest, fancy hats. After the parade was over, I walked back to the subway station. The crowds thinned out, until the sidewalk was my own.

I heard her before I saw her, a voice off to the right on a parallel street. She was screaming at someone, cursing, yelling at them to hurry the fuck up, calling them a burden, telling them they ruined her life, it was all their fault. Then she rounded the corner in front of me, and I saw the target of her curses—two small children, a girl around six and a boy a few years younger. The woman was walking fast, yanking their fragile and too thin arms when they couldn’t keep up. She continued to yell the whole way to the subway, her voice only muted to me when she entered the stairwell and descended down to the tracks. I entered on the other side for the opposite track, but I could see her across the station, and everyone could hear her as she took up her tirade again. I felt such sorrow for those children—I wondered what chance they had in life—and I felt so helpless.

Once on the train, I stared into space, thinking about the scene I had just witnessed. And then, all of a sudden, in my mind’s eye I saw it in a vision. I saw what chance the little girl had. I saw her wait beside her mother for the right train. I saw her catch the eye of a kind older man. I saw his response, saw him tip his hat to the girl slightly, with something akin to an apologetic wince on his wizened face. I saw the door of the train, which was not her train, open, and the man get on, take a seat across from the door, and look at her again with those kind eyes. I saw her calculate her move—and then, I saw her bolt. She leapt into the man’s lap, and the door closed before her mother even knew she was gone, fussing as she was now over her son. And it all went quiet, and I wondered, what now? What is he going to do now, with that little wounded waif of a girl on his lap?

Deep creativity is autonomous.

I knew I had the beginning of another screenplay, and writing it would be the only way to know what happened next. I couldn’t get back to my sublet in the city fast enough to get to my laptop, so I got off at the next station and went upstairs to the closest bodega and bought a pad and a pen. I sat on a bench and wrote. I wrote about how he felt with that girl in his lap all the way to his stop in Brooklyn. I wrote about his attempts to take her to the police, and her response of resolute refusal. I wrote about his decision to take her to his apartment, just until she calmed down. I wrote about how he came to love her and how she came to save him and how it all fell apart. I abandoned the original screenplay I was writing when this one became so alive that I couldn’t let it go, in the same way that kind older man could not let that little girl go.

The story took on themes eventually, as a good story will do. In some ways, it was a classic struggle between good and evil. It was about justice, and issues of innocence and guilt. It was about how a man can be father and mother both. It was about family, and second chances. It was a redemption story, and though the ending was tragic, it was finally about love.

Art heals, and oftentimes the person the art heals is the artist. And sometimes the artist is unsuspecting. I didn’t set out to write that story. The story found me, and for the first year after, I marveled at the gift of it, thinking it dropped down from heaven as a gift to me from the Muses. It wasn’t until I asked the question, “Why me?” that I understood that if it was a gift from the Muses, they had chosen me for two reasons—because my early life experiences of abandonment by my father gave me a certain sensitivity to the story, and because I was in need of healing from that father wound. I was the girl who wanted to leap into the lap of a man who would love me, and he was the father I wanted, the one who refuses to give you up, to give up on you, who takes your hand in his and will not let it go until it is pried out of his cold dead hand. My past pain and suffering would serve the story well, and the story would serve me well. My pain would help me write a healing story, and that healing story would assuage my pain.

Deep creativity is healing.

That screenplay, titled “Mary” after the Patty Griffin song that quickly attached itself to the ending, and some divine intervention in the story by the archetypal energy of Mother Mary, has never been made into a movie. When I worked with a leading Hollywood screenwriting consultant on it, she told me it was an amazing script but it would probably never get made—the story was too small, not commercial enough. Do I wish I could sell it? Yes. Would I like to see it made into a movie? Of course. But if it never gets made, was it a waste of time to write it? Not at all. The story provided me with some healing. That story reparented me. It gave me the father I never had, and it allowed me to experience his unconditional love, even if it wasn’t my father, even if it wasn’t the little girl’s real father either. That story still moves me to tears every time I get to the end of it. I mean, I wrote the story. I knew the ending. So why would it make me cry?

A better question, as archetypal psychologist James Hillman would say, is not why, but who? Not why does the story make me cry, but who in me is crying at the end of the story? You know the answer. That girl. That little wounded girl. She who is me.

CREATION AS RE-CREATION

I developed and taught a course at Pacifica Graduate Institute called “The Complex Nature of Inspiration.” In that ten-week course, I spent the first two weeks discussing psychological complexes—in particular, how our childhood wounding becomes our prima materia—in alchemical terms, the material that primes our creative opus.

Though C. G. Jung didn’t “discover” psychological complexes, his work with them at the turn of the twentieth century certainly popularized them. He theorized that out of a wound or a trauma, especially those we suffer when we’re young, a complex may form, and we carry that complex with us for the rest of our lives. He saw complexes as an inevitable part of life, especially mother and father complexes, for few of us can escape some form of wounding by and from our parents.

Complexes are distinguished by the emotional affects that come with them, and these affects have an autonomous quality. They grip us. When I see a little girl on the sidewalk holding her father’s hand, tears immediately well up within me and sometimes spill over. There’s no thinking then, only feeling. I don’t think, “Oh, isn’t that sweet, I think I’ll have a good cry over that.” I just cry, or rather, she just cries, that wounded girl in me with the father complex. She grips me—she abducts the adult woman that I am, and she cries within and through me. If you want to console me, you have to first recognize her-in-me and know she is the one who needs consoling.

Deep creativity is emotional.

Complexes are also distinguished by their irrationality. It is irrational for a grown woman to burst into tears at such an everyday occurrence—a father holding his daughter’s hand on the sidewalk. Accidents happen, and not every sperm that meets an egg comes from a man who desires to be a father. People meet and become parents, and sometimes parents split up. Some parents don’t stay in their children’s lives. I know all this, of course. This, too, is an everyday occurrence. Down that same sidewalk, other fatherless women with holes in their hearts walk too. They may be gripped with different affects than me. Some may see the father and daughter and their faces flush with envy. Others may feel a blow to their stomach or a sudden rush of anger. Some may go limp with sorrow or feel a steely chill run through their bodies. Our wounded children within have their own particular way of expressing themselves when a trigger in the external world awakens them and disturbs their peace.

Jung saw complexes as normal parts of our personality, parts that make up our everyday neurosis. We can never entirely rid ourselves of them—the analogy I often use is to matryoshka dolls, otherwise known as Russian nesting dolls. Crack open my fifty-year-old self and there’s the smaller doll of my forty-year-old self, and crack her open to see my thirty-year-old self, and keep going and keep going and there she is, my child self, newly and forever fatherless. I can’t kick that child to the curb—she is in me, she belongs to me, and in the deep wisdom of complex theory, I belong to her.

So she comes with me when I create, and sometimes, she is the creator. She jumped through the subway door into that kind man’s arms, and I, grasped by the image and gripped by the emotion, wrote her story. I have many stories to tell, of course, but I find myself telling her story again and again in different guises and disguises. All the research and writing I’ve done on Martin Luther King Jr. can certainly be seen as a daughter’s homage to her spiritual father, a father who advocated fiercely on behalf of “all of God’s children,” and while I was a grown woman when I wrote my book on King, the child’s there too, pen in hand. Her story is my prima materia, and so much of my creative opus is variations on her (our) theme.

In my course, I encouraged my students in those first two weeks to consider their own childhood woundings and traumas and subsequent complexes as the sources of their creative inspiration today—how they influence their work and sometimes become their work. We looked at the themes present in their creative opus so far and how those might trace back to their past. We looked at how they may be telling the same story again and again; we considered the act of creating as an act of re-creation, of restorying, which means in part to repeat the same story, in its different guises and disguises. We are doing this all the time with our acts of creation, and my point is that there’s something to be gained from doing it more consciously.

And what is to be gained? Why crack open our matryoshka selves to find the smallest one within? Because she is our essence, the proverbial piece of sand around which the pearl that we are has formed. The pearl is more than the sand—we are more than our wounds—but the pearl cannot be without the sand, without an irritant around which it wraps itself. Etymologically, the word irritate means to excite or provoke, to stimulate and arouse, and so our wounds are those irritations that are always with us and within us, and we can count on those irritants to excite, provoke, stimulate, and arouse our creativity.

A second reason to crack ourselves open to expose the wounded one within is as obvious as it is profound. Julia Cameron, author of the popular book The Artist’s Way, wrote, “Art opens the closets, airs out the cellars and attics. It brings healing.” When we consciously open the closets of our pasts through our art, when through our creativity we air out the cellars and the attics where we have relegated our suffering, we can restore something lost or missing and repair something broken or severed. Through writing that screenplay, I creatively re-paired myself with my father and restored our relationship. Not literally, of course, but energetically and symbolically. I wasn’t conscious of this when I was first gripped by the complex and had the story shaken out of me, but later, upon reflection, I understood that the story functioned for me in part as a piece of psychological restoration and repair, and if it never sells and never gets made, you can’t take that away from me.

I tell my own story in those first two weeks of the course, and then we turn to look at a few other artists and creators who use the parental complexes as the prima materia for their work. The choices are endless—scratch the surface of any artist’s biography and there the wounds appear in the life and the work (and aren’t we drawn to those biographies in part to crack open the doll and uncover the selves nested within? To discover the sand, the particular irritant that excited and provoked the opus?). Because I happened to hear an interview with the contemporary American writer David Vann during the time I was conceiving this course, and because he has been both vocal and vulnerable about the role his father complex plays in his work, we turn to Vann and his book Legend of a Suicide.

I should say, we turn to the book first, because as much as I believe our personal biographies inspire and influence our work, our work also stands alone and can be and should be enjoyed and assessed on its own merits. I don’t value Vann’s book because it is the working through and the working out of a father complex. It’s a great book, containing many moving short stories and one gripping novella, “Sukkwan Island.” I don’t need to know anything about Vann to recognize the excellence of his writing and the craft of his storytelling. Nor do my students. So first, we read the book. Then, we read the author.

You might want to do the same, dear reader. Spoiler alert. Place a bookmark on this page, and then go read the novella. If you’re impatient, you can download it immediately as an e-book. Go ahead. I’ll wait here.

“DON’T DO THIS TO ME, YOU ASSHOLE”

When David Vann was thirteen years old, his father committed suicide. His parents had divorced when Vann was six, and he would spend a third of the year with his father who lived in Alaska. He knew his father was depressed, but he didn’t see the suicide coming. Worse, it came just two weeks after Vann declined his father’s invitation to come live with him in Alaska for a year. Vann was so filled with rage that for the first three years following the suicide, he lied and said his father died of cancer.

He was also filled with a sense of doom, which he reported lasted twenty years, during which time he was afraid he would spiral downhill and out of control like his father. “That was my fate,” he said in an interview with Rachel Cooke in The Guardian. “Things would be bad, I would get depressed, and it would be unstoppable. I believed it.” In the decade between the ages of nineteen and twenty-nine, he worked on Legend of a Suicide, and then it sat in a drawer for another decade, as Vann was unable to find a publisher for this dark material. Finally, he entered it in the contest for the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction and won, and he’s since become an acclaimed author of many books and several works of nonfiction.

“Sukkwan Island,” the novella at the heart of Legend of a Suicide, is named after an island in southeast Alaska where the thirteen-year-old character, Roy, has gone to live with his father, Jim (the same name as Vann’s real father, the same scenario which thirteen-year-old Vann declined two weeks before his father’s suicide). After two divorces, Jim has given up his dentistry practice and purchased a shack in a remote location, and he plans to live off the land, supported only by a plane delivering essentials every few months. Jim and Roy’s days are spent trying to survive, and it soon becomes clear that Jim is woefully inept.

He’s also psychologically unstable—he’s weak and depressed most of the time, yet erratically optimistic and full of cheer. At night in his sleeping bag, Roy hears his father weeping. “I’m sorry, Roy,” he eventually tells him. “I’m really trying. I just don’t know if I can hold on.” Roy longs to go home, but his father makes it impossible by telling him, “I just can’t seem to be alone.” His father cries, telling Roy, “I know I’m not alone. I know you’re here. But I’m still too alone. I can’t explain it.” When Roy thinks of leaving his father, Vann tells us, “He felt terrible, as if he were killing his father.” At the same time, he wishes his father would die.

A sense of doom pervades the novel, the same sense that Vann lived with for twenty years. A sense of despair, too, which Roy describes as “part of a large despair that lived everywhere his father went.” As readers, we feel suffocated in the sleeping bag with Roy, listening to his father’s sobs, and we feel trapped in that shack and in that harsh landscape, with no escape. We know suicide is coming—we know from the title of the book and the stories leading up to “Sukkwan Island” that introduced Roy and discussed Jim’s suicide—and we are waiting, literally, for the incident that will trigger it.

It arrives at the end of part 1 of the novella. One day Roy comes home from a hike and finds his father sitting in front of the radio with a gun in his hand, talking to his ex-wife, Rhoda. Roy hears Rhoda say, “Don’t do this to me, you asshole.” When Jim sees Roy has come in, he seems embarrassed. He turns off the radio, stands up, hands Roy the gun, and goes outside.

In this moment, we imagine that Roy’s presence has saved his father from killing himself and spared Roy from being alone in a place he’d be hard-pressed to survive. We imagine that perhaps Jim realizes he is not alone, and he has his son to think about. We imagine that maybe Vann has written a literary do-over for himself. He has accepted the offer to live with his father for a year, unlike what he did in real life. Perhaps if he had done this, he could have saved his father like he is doing now, literally accepting the gun from his hand. Perhaps the words “Don’t do this to me, you asshole” are Vann’s words too, and they got through to his father and stopped the suicide. In creating this alternative scenario, we imagine that in the moment Jim hands Roy the gun, Vann is re-pairing himself with his father in order to repair the relationship and write a new story for them both. With only one paragraph left in part 1 of the novella, we sigh with relief at the tragedy averted.

And then, we read the next paragraph.

Roy looks at the gun, raises the barrel to his head, and fires.

“IT’S A PLACE TO EXORCIZE DEMONS AND SUCH”

In a Bookworm interview, Vann tells host Michael Silverblatt that he had no idea Roy was going to take the gun and commit suicide himself. He had been writing toward the father’s suicide, not the son’s—not his own. He had recreated the scene where his father was talking to Rhoda—and this had really happened just before his own father shot himself—but something seized Vann in that moment, and he wrote a different ending that surprised himself, the writer, as much as it surprises us, the readers. In fact, Vann tells Silverblatt that he woke up the next morning with the intention of changing the ending, but the story itself wouldn’t let him.

Deep creativity is autonomous.

In reflecting upon the power of writing, Vann notes, “Fiction allows me to live in the other world. It allows me to have a parallel life, and it’s a place to exorcise demons and such.” The burdensome question that Vann has to live with his entire life—“Could I have saved my father if I went to Alaska with him for that year?”—is answered in his fiction, in this parallel life he created with his father. The answer is yes, perhaps, but only at the cost of his own life. He could not have survived that year.

The novella, which until now had been told from Roy’s point of view, is only halfway over, and after we get past the initial gasp of shock and horror at Roy’s suicide, we are left to wonder, what next? The story shifts to Jim’s point of view and becomes even more horrible and incredibly gruesome, as Jim lives with Roy’s decaying body for months, moving the corpse from place to place across pages and unrelenting pages of the novella.

When asked in The Guardian interview why Vann focused so much on the body and its putrefaction, he responded, “I think I know why I described it so much: I was trying to make my father’s body real because I never saw it, and for years I would convince myself that he wasn’t dead, that he was running through drifts of snow somewhere in Alaska.” But there’s another answer I explore with my students—literary revenge. Vann has to carry the heavy weight of his father’s suicide all of his life. Might we imagine this re-creation of the suicide as Vann’s way of making his father carry the heavy weight of suicide instead? His proxy in the novella has to carry the heavy weight of his son’s body, literally, and also, he must carry the psychological weight of the suicide, and he knows this. In the novella, Vann puts the gun back in Jim’s hand again, has him put the barrel to his head, but he’s unable to pull the trigger. “You can’t even kill yourself,” Jim says to himself out loud. “You can only play at killing yourself. You get to be awake and thinking about this every minute for the next fifty years. That’s what you get.”

That’s what you get. Vann gets to shake off his own burden and place it on his father’s back. That’s what you get. It’s your turn. You think about this every minute for the rest of your life. Vann exorcises his own demons in his fiction and punishes his father with a taste of his own bad medicine. In attempting to recreate his father’s own suicide, his father complex gripped him and wrung out from him a different story, in the same way my father complex gripped me and hurled my literary proxy into the arms of the father figure she needed.

I have read all of Vann’s novels to date, and every one of them is a working out and a working through of some aspect of his family’s story, some part of his history he’s seeking to better understand. Though he writes about marriage in his works, it’s really the parent-child relationship he works the most. In his later novel Aquarium he writes, “Anything is possible with a parent. Parents are gods. They make us, and they destroy us. They warp the world and remake it in their own shape, and that’s the world we know forever after. It’s the only world. We can’t see what it might have looked like otherwise.”

But that’s not entirely true. We can see what it might have looked like otherwise through our acts of creation, which are also acts of re-creation. We can exorcise our demons, we can play with parallel lives, we can sit down at the computer or stand in front of a blank canvas to try to understand our pasts, even transmute them. Our creative acts can be a form of alchemy, where we as artist-alchemists take the prima materia of our lives and transform it into gold. Our creative acts can also be acts of healing. Cathy Malchoidi, a leading expert in the field of art therapy, writes, “Art is a constant agent of transformation, and is indeed the soul’s drive to health” (The Soul’s Palette: Drawing on Art’s Transformative Powers for Health and Well-Being).

Deep creativity is alchemical.

“AN ALLEVIATION AND A BLESSING”

The American nature poet Mary Oliver is the opposite of David Vann when it comes to divulging information about her childhood, about her family, and until recently, about her four-decades-long relationship with photographer Molly Malone Cook. Vann has made the stuff of his life very public, including the seven suicides in his family, one a murder-suicide, and he’s made all of it the stuff of his novels. Mary Oliver has been famously private, and even her poems are rarely personal or about people at all. She is often quoted but seldom interviewed, though in 2011, at the age of seventy-five, she did open up in an interview with Maria Shriver. Shriver asked her, “Why did you first turn to a creative art?” Oliver replied, “Well, I think because with words, I could build a world I could live in. I had a very dysfunctional family, and a very hard childhood. So I made a world out of words. And it was my salvation.”

In the same interview, Oliver publicly stated for the first time the source of her childhood trauma: she was sexually abused, and in many ways neglected, through not enough “mother love and protection.” She acknowledged she is just one of many, that “there are millions of people walking around the world who had insufficient childhoods, and I just happen to be one of them.”

But before there was this revelation, before there was this new Mary Oliver who is committed to being braver and more open, there was Mary Oliver in 1995, who alluded to her difficult childhood in the chapter “Staying Alive” in Blue Pastures. Of children in general, she writes, “They are the victims of every sorrow and mischance and rage around them, for children feel all of these things but without any of the ability that adults have to change them. Whatever can take a child beyond such circumstances, therefore, is an alleviation and a blessing.” For Oliver, there were two such alleviations and blessings in childhood: the world of nature and the world of literature. She writes, “These were the gates through which I vanished from a difficult place.” And through the vantage points offered by these gates, she began to see that “the world’s otherness is antidote to confusion—that standing within this otherness—the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books—can re-dignify the worst-stung heart.” She wrote, “I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too.”

So to the power of creation to restore, to recreate, to repair and re-pair, to transform, and to heal the suffering soul, we must add this: creation as salvation. Oliver’s life was saved by literature, by the creative acts of those people who came before her, those “walking around the world who had insufficient childhoods” and by the creative acts of some, we can be sure, who walked around the world with sufficient enough childhoods yet who were still in touch with the agony and ecstasy of living. So we create for our first audience—ourselves—and if we can save or heal or transform or even alleviate some of our own suffering through our creativity, we have been blessed, in the way that I was blessed in the creation of my screenplay “Mary” and all that it has offered me and still keeps offering me in terms of my own healing and the restoration of my psyche. And if our work reaches a second audience (and I do hope “Mary” will someday), and that audience resonates and is moved, then we will have provided some alleviation of suffering and a blessing to others, and in that way, help to “re-dignify the worst-stung heart” we collectively carry as part and parcel of the complex human condition.

EXERCISES

Jennifer invites you to these reflections.

In what ways have you been wounded by your mother and your father? Have you found ways to turn that wounding into creative works?

What alleviated your suffering when you were a child? Music, literature, film, art—which creative works have redignified your “worst-stung heart”? Is your creativity now connected to and/or an homage to that?

What are the “irritants” from your childhood and how can you mine them to excite, provoke, stimulate, and arouse your creativity?

Can you create something from these reflections?

Jennifer invites you to this practice.

RETURN, RESTORE, REPAIR

This practice asks you to look at relationships in your life that are broken and consciously make art in an attempt to repair and restore them.

This is a psychological exercise in healing and alchemical transformation. It may do nothing to your literal relationship in the world with the person you choose. I can’t literally repair and restore my relationship with my absent father; nor can David Vann. But we can use our art to do so. What we create can become a sort of psychological proxy, a symbolic stand-in to alleviate our suffering.

Choose someone you wish you could re-pair with in relationship. Then, choose a medium for restoration. By restoration, I mean I literally want you to “re-story,” to tell a different story, to work in story format. Take a moment where your relationship ruptured, and write a different story (or paint it, dance it, sketch it, or collage it). It doesn’t need to be a specific moment; it can be the relationship in general (though most ruptured relationships have a moment, or turning point, to which we can return).

As you are doing this practice, pay special attention to your feelings. How does it feel to re-pair with this person? It may feel great, or it may feel terribly sad. It may bring up love, or it may bring up longing and loss. Re-pairing might not feel reparative; it may feel like an exercise in futility and leave you feeling frustrated, instead of feeling restorative and freeing. Most likely it will feel great and sad; bring up love and longing and loss; feel futile and frustrating and restorative and freeing. No matter what you are feeling in the moment, remember what Rainer Maria Rilke tells us in his poem “Go to the Limits of Your Longing”: Our feelings are not final. We can use all of our feelings as fuel for our art.

Suffering the Story into Being

Dennis

We have all heard how suffering can bring us to our knees—in fear, in resignation, or in the loss of all defenses. Okay, but I think suffering can also bring us to our needs—what we need, not what we want or desire. It may be a good idea to make some distinction between suffering and pain. It seems that the latter is closer to physiology, while the former is more akin to psychic, emotional, and spiritual conditions. The two need not be separate experiences, but they often are. I sense that pain is suffering we feel, while suffering is something we become. Pain can of course lead to suffering, but it may be rarer for suffering to lead to pain. While pain is more physical, suffering is more existential—it touches, attacks, and brings down who we are, not what we are wounded by. Pain’s locus is the body; suffering’s locus is the soul.

I remember decades ago taking a graduate class on tragedy and comedy as literary genres that in their internal structures offer us landscapes of the soul through physical wounding. Attending first to tragedy and the action that drives it, the insightful instructor introduced us to a Greek term, pathei-mathos, or “learning from adversity,” which signified a suffering into knowledge. A particular and unique form of knowing has its genesis in suffering, an emotional pain that can become so intense that it alters who and what we are, not just within ourselves but in relation to others. Below, I have provided several illustrations of these ideas that I hope will enflesh and ground what could be an abstract series of comments on suffering’s deep affinity with the creative impulse in us all.

Recently, the documentary filmmaker Ken Dornstein, whose brother died in the December 1998 plane crash that was caused by a detonated bomb on board, uncovered new material about the culprit responsible for the devastation. The New Yorker magazine published a lengthy article in one of its October 2015 issues. I remember reading the article in my dentist’s office. I came to a line in the story that arrested me, sending me emotionally into a deep pocket of sadness and anger. The image from the article haunted me for days. As Dornstein showed the article’s author, Patrick Radden Keefe, his rooms stuffed with photos and other materials related to the downed flight, he drew Keefe’s attention to some pins on a map. Keefe writes, “Motioning at a scattering of pushpins some distance from the rest, he said, ‘They were the youngest, smallest children. If you look at the physics of it, they were carried by the wind.’” Such a painful reminder to us all of how the children’s lightness of being allowed the wind to keep them aloft longer than the bodies of the adults. My sadness and outrage cried for an outlet. Unable to hold this rage and darkness in me any longer, I turned to giving it expression in a poem, which served as a release valve on the pressure cooker of my emotional condition. What follows is the poem and an explanation.

Deep creativity is emotional.

THEY WERE CARRIED BY THE WIND

Their bodies so light

like kites without strings

shirts and skirts rustling

hard to remain aloft

miles above

the earth looked up at them

first with indifference

then with a yearning petrified

out of the field grass

to welcome them with

fragile limbs.

But the winds aloft

refused to let them fall

so fast

so they floated above the debris

of their parents’ bodies

too heavy to resist the flow

of gravitas after the

explosion thrust them

beyond metal and fuel

beyond all distractions

save one.

After the initial violence

the young souls

were shot into the thin air

too anemic to breathe.

But they were close to those

who loved them most

till size selected the

small ones to sail the currents

farther and longer than

their elders—more mattered

than they.

In my memory I prayed

they were not allowed

to think any of these

thoughts

but only to clear the trees

houses towns to secure

a place of repose coming

to greet them now faster

in desire

quicker, fleeting even

rushing to an end of land fill

and then serene, clear of torched

homes and villagers burning

from the apocalypse in paint

and loose chairs;

tattered seat belts only a

nauseous dream.

Settling now, the winds

calming their fury of rage

over the blackened hearts that

knew not one of their first names

or what they dreamed of becoming.

When I think back on the suffering that gnawed at me for days, I realized that only some creative outlet, something made from the memory of the dead children, would satisfy; left to itself, the anger would only corrode something in me that, if channeled properly, pointed to a creative response that might heal some part of me suffering the rage of the person(s) responsible. I also began to suspect that, like suffering itself, creativity has many levels and intensities. When I suffer, I seem to have more courage, more desire to risk something, feeling perhaps like “what the hell, just go for it and scrap the critics for now.” Being in a dark place emotionally can paralyze, to be sure, but it is also a place of germination, rejuvenation, and renewal. A clear resolve may then grow from such soil.

Deep creativity is responsive.

The etymology of suffer is also worth a nod. It comes from the Old French word of the fourteenth century, souffrir, meaning “to bear, endure, resist, permit, allow.” It also has origins in the Latin sufferre: to undergo, endure, carry, or put under (sub + ferre). I find the definitions “to put under” and “to bear” (or to bear up) crucial to the experience of suffering. One under-goes an experience. The etymology of undergoes includes the idea of permitting something and resisting it as well. Some paradox begins to emerge in suffering; it brings into the life of an individual something to resist and to permit, to allow and to deny, to place it under one, or even to carry under, like one might transport something from an upper world to an under world. My under-standing here is that some deeper level of consciousness is achieved, some form of creativity not attainable without suffering is enacted, where we are taken to a deeper realm of being and can then create something out of that space. C. G. Jung helps us here when he states in his essay “Conscious, Unconscious and Individuation” that no process of individuation, wherein one becomes a complete and whole person, is even possible unless it begins in a crucifixion. So we must under-go something deep, be willing to be nailed to the crux of our problems and our capacities, for the most creative act we can engage in: becoming as whole and complete as we can in the interval between birth and death to be born and be borne. This last sentence touches on the nature of the heroic within us that cannot be born or borne without risk and acceptance of adversity. Suffering is the form adversity assumes as it surfaces suddenly in our lives.

Whether our wounding is emotional, psychological, spiritual, or physical, the affliction digs deep and clamps down hard. It disses us in the way of the word disaster. Trying to avoid disasters or wounds of any sort is naïve and really ignores a necessary fact of life: suffering is inevitable and instructive. One of my favorite fiction writers, Flannery O’Connor, who suffered from lupus her entire adult life, writes in Mystery and Manners that a chronic illness is much more instructive than a trip to Europe. From her wolf (lupus) at the door she learned volumes about suffering and its affinity with the creative process. Her kin in this field was the epileptic Russian poet Fyodor Dostoyevsky, whose illness’s genesis emerged as a consequence of harsh years surviving in a Siberian gulag. Upon his release, he emerged physically broken but spiritually fierce. The illness was his muse; his suffering, both through the illness and within his addiction to gambling, allowed him to create some of the world’s finest literature on the relation of suffering to profound insights into our human mystery, misery, and spiritual power.

Years ago, I wrote in my book The Wounded Body that to be wounded is to be opened up; it is to be pushed off the straight, fixed, and predictable path of certainty and thrown into ambiguity, or onto the circuitous path, and into the unseen and unforeseen. Suffering woundedness, one begins to wobble, to wander, and perhaps even to wonder not only about one’s present condition but also about one’s origins. Circling the edges of the wound, so to speak, one’s vision may clear and perception sharpen, allowing one to grasp for the first time what James Hillman describes in The Soul’s Code as that “innate image” that lies at the heart of the acorn that is me, that defines my heritage and my destiny. How one lives one’s own embodiment, especially in its hyperbole—its woundedness—reveals the acorn’s possibilities as well as its origins. It is to see the form of one’s life at once, without development, without linearity and without theory. One grasps the form of one’s being in an instant. I would say now that it is to see mythically, whole cloth, with nothing important left out or ignored. Some of the most interesting qualities about us hover around our wounds and the suffering that attends them. I think it is the stuff of our deeper narrative, the one lying always below the floorboards, looking up at us through the thin spaces between the slats of wood or cracked tile or crooked tales of our histories.

Since February of 2015, I have been revising a book I published twelve years ago, Grace in the Desert: Awakening to the Gifts of Monastic Life. The original manuscript was approximately 120,000 words; the publisher, Jossey-Bass, would allow me only 65,000 words. I consented but always longed to tell all of the story that out of necessity remained muted. But in the past year, I have recovered the original manuscript and added some 50,000 words to the published version because I wanted the whole story of my three-and-a-half-month pilgrimage exhumed.

Now much of the story included not only my deceased father joining me at the second of thirteen monasteries, which began a series of intense conversations about the two of us that exceeded those we had when he was alive. But in reading the original document I noted so many memories of when my father, a raging alcoholic for most of his life, made his wife and all of his children suffer in ways I won’t recount here. My point in bringing it up is that for the past eleven months I have been reliving so many of those traumatic instances I grew up in. But here is the clincher: writing about it and now revising so many of these moments have comprised some the most creative periods in my writing life. I want to say I have suffered into my past and grieved into the creative field that allowed that past a new life in the present. Something “down under” was retrieved and brought back to the surface. Suffering once more many past traumatic years of my youth has been fully worth the price in order to gather them again in the memories that only writing can accomplish. For the satisfaction of telling the larger story, not the reliving of periods suffered through and survived, is the real point of the enterprise from first word to last. The experience of my father accompanying me on the pilgrimage, followed by my writing about it more fully initially, has occasioned a period of reconciliation. Let no one tell you that a relationship with another is somehow completed or finalized at death; on the contrary, death can be the opening to a whole new relationship that in life never had a chance to be born, much less survive.

I will close with some questions that surfaced for me at the end of this essay. For instance, from an imaginal perspective that carries mythic resonance, I ask: “What does the wound want?” “What god or gods reside in the wound?” “What is this distortion in my life asking?” “What is the story that it poses or proposes?” “What plot wishes to be born through the suffering?” Behind these questions is the implication that the body carries, in all of its lineages and lineaments, an archetypal or universally patterned correlate that corresponds to some deep psychic and even numinous reality that must be attended to. Our own embodiment then acts like a vision that aids our imagination to deepen the texture of our lives through the wounded corridor explored here.

Deep creativity is embodied.

Finally, is it too much to think that suffering and creativity have such intimacy as they circle one another, that they work together to place us anew in the world? Placement, being placed or finding a place in the world through our wounds, is also an important region to explore. Perhaps our mattered place and our embodied placement are congruent and equal counterparts; each needs the other and perhaps each creates the other. Each suits the other. If we reflect deeply enough, we may discern that our place stories us anew and that our story places us into a new locale. Our suffering wound is a location where something heretofore buried or hidden splits open, breaches from below, and reveals a memory, a site of pain and of promise, of suffering and salvation, emitting a joyful sense of new freedom.

One of my favorite Greek divinities who reveals this insight is Hephaistos, son of Hera and Zeus, who suffers a wounded or clubbed foot. He shows us that out of our deformities we can create imaginatively something that is our own, a creativity that rises from the defect. Suffering our wounds has the capacity to advance our consciousness to new levels of awareness, to be crafted into something of beauty and permanence. Our suffering may then be our embodied emblems of our defects and imperfections. From them we feel most vulnerable but also most venerable in our contact with the world and others, with divinity and with ourselves. As such, the body may invoke an entire cosmology; it is cosmic in its symbolic nature.

Suffering can be a moment of birthing what has not been fully realized until now into a fully formed fetus, rather than a fully formed fatedness. Suffering might be likened to the canary in the coal mine that signifies life, indeed, is present and is doing as well as can be expected. Such is suffering’s ultimate gift: life itself.

The author Tim O’Brien reflected on and wrote about his horrid and dismembering experiences in Vietnam to help him purge some of the memories that had haunted him for decades. The result was The Things They Carried. Writing it taught him astonishing lessons about suffering and stories, and yet he writes at one point: “And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It’s about sunlight. It’s about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It’s about love and memory. It’s about sorrow. It’s about sisters who never write back and people who never listen.” Terrible, yet wrapped or shrouded in a forceful nostalgic sweetness of loss. The story finally suffers itself into being. The journey from wounding to wondering is shorter than we might imagine.

EXERCISES

Dennis invites you to these reflections.

I write about the “placement” of suffering, how suffering can place us somewhere new if we can endure it. Have you experienced the kind of suffering that has moved or migrated you to a new place, a new locale or location, a new state of being, or a new attitude?

Sometimes we create art out of suffering, to help alleviate it or express it, as I did with my poem “They Were Carried by the Wind.” But we should acknowledge too that sometimes our art-making can create suffering. Have you ever suffered in an act of creating something? Was it worth the ordeal, or not? Think of when your suffering and subsequent art-making has less appeased you than it has afflicted you.

As I mentioned in my essay, “When I suffer, I seem to have more courage, more desire to risk something, feeling perhaps like ‘what the hell, just go for it and scrap the critics for now.’” Has suffering ever emboldened your creative practice in this way?

Can you create something from these reflections?

Dennis invites you to this practice.

BEING RESPONSE-ABLE

Sometimes we turn to creative practices when we have had a personal experience of suffering, when something has happened to us, like Tim O’Brien did when he wrote about his experiences during the Vietnam War. At other times, we turn to creative practices when something happens or has happened to them, when we hear of or witness other people’s suffering, such as I did when I wrote of the small children carried by the wind after the plane crash. When we feel the experience of another’s suffering, we feel compassion, which etymologically means “to suffer with.” Looking back over your opus, what have you created that arose from your compassion toward others?

Now, let’s look forward. Pay attention in the next few weeks to situations where you feel a sense of compassion for the suffering of others. This feeling may be attended by other feelings like anger over unfairness, or disgust over injustice. Note those feelings as well, but let compassion be your strongest guide here.

Take your compassion with you into the art studio or onto your writing desk or out into the streets with you. Take it, and in the reciprocal nature of deep creativity, allow it to take you somewhere, toward some creative action on behalf of those who suffer. But here’s the kicker: Make your art public. Let others witness your compassion, which may open them to experience it too. Tack your poem up to a telephone pole in your neighborhood. Make prints of your photographic response to suffering and leave a stack of them at your local coffee shop. Use sidewalk chalk to memorialize the suffering, if only for as long as it takes to wash away. Share your response on social media and invite people to not just hit “like” but to respond as well.

This practice will not only increase your capacity for compassion but may also mitigate some of the learned helplessness we often feel in the face of suffering. It enacts a core principle of deep creativity (deep creativity is responsive) and also affords us a measure of agency, as we become response-able to others in our interconnected world.