It finally rained yesterday in rural north-central Oregon, where I live.
It was our first rain in five months, and we reveled both in the moisture it brought, and in the anticipation of clearer skies we expected to immediately come-with.
Oddly, though, the rain didn’t clear the wildfire smoke so much as mix with it all day, such that all outdoors smelled like someone had just wet down a campfire.
Sometime in the night that changed, and this morning we woke to both a deep blue sky washed clean for the moment of smoke and clear of clouds,
and to the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
For such a feeling was the compound neologism “grie-lief”1 coined.
As with so many of us over the past twenty years (and in an accelerated way, in the recent few), too much fear and loss for the nervous system to process or contain has caused mine to register our basic vulnerability much more directly than it used to, and my heart in particular to feel more immediately and deeply all there is to feel about in the world.
And yet (I am realizing this as I write it down) I would not give the pain of that sensitivity back.
Why?
Because it is teaching me what my mind “knew” but what my body (and therefore my soul, since it lives there) did not yet really comprehend: that it is only in being willing and able to feel our own vulnerability directly (fear as fear, and sorrow as sorrow) instead of through their protective avatars of hate, blame and judgement that we can actually tend (versus simply defend) that vulnerability, and all the vulnerability-history our individual and collective bodies hold. Which has in turn helped me to really begin to understand also that it is only by way of that seeing and tending that I can bring into the world more care and compassion, instead of simply adding more hate, blame and judgement, however “righteous” I might think my own blame and judgement is.
And really, does the world really need more hate and blame? Even mine? Even yours?
So, on this twentieth anniversary memorial morning, my heart’s tender grielief longed for the kind of language that can hold sorrow without resorting to either sentimentality (the kind of pseudo- feeling that is more about being “a tourist inside someone else’s suffering” as Leslie Jamison described it in her article on the topic in the Atlantic ) or pseudo-certainties, and that can bear witness to ways sorrow can expand the heart by way of utterly breaking it…open.
Which longing sent me first to poetry, via a search on the poets.org website, where I learned that in September 2001, Lucille Clifton sent the Academy of American Poets a short manuscript of seven poems, one for each day of the week, entitled “September Suite” in response to the events that transpired on September 11th, and written in those immediate days following the attacks.
In their comprehension of the dangers of falling prey to hate, self-righteousness and despair, these “occasional” poems only read to me as being more timely than ever, twenty years on. You can find all seven poems there, in Clifton’s typescript, each one of them a facet of the Suite’s seven-sided gem of grief. .
Later, checking my email after reading Clifton’s poems online, I found a link from Plough Quarterly (to which I subscribe) to “Two Mothers of September 11” in which (per the introduction) “A woman who lost her son in the World Trade Center looks back on twenty years of vengeance and her unlikely bond with the mother of Zacarias Moussaoui” .
How grateful I am to have read that, next.
Which in turn (the mother’s story in Plough) reminded me of the piece of music I listened for days after the 9/11 attacks (and which, having remembered that, I am listening to now): Henryk Górecki’s Symphony No. 3. (a.k.a. “The Symphony of Sorrowful Songs”). The central theme of the symphony is the suffering and despair of a mother’s loss of a child, and a child’s loss of a mother. “Music to grieve to” this symphony is, and soprano Dawn Upshaw’s voice is exquisite.
How to end this, then? I wondered to myself just now, wanting to take care not to default to sentimentality or certainty as a way to close this piece.
Into which uncertainty the words of my current-favorite closing prayer (for pretty much anything, but for meditation especially) arrived; a prayer attributed to the 8th-century Indian philosopher, Buddhist monk, poet and scholar, Shantideva:
May all those who are sick or ill
quickly be freed from their ailments.
May whatever diseases there are in the world
never occur again.
May the frightened cease to be afraid,
May those who are bound be freed,
May the powerless find power,
And may beings seek to benefit each other.
Amen.
Note to readers: I am currently in the process of migrating “Are You With Me Here” from WordPress to Substack. So for the present, you can find the complete archives (including "A” through “O” of this Abecedarius series of posts, and previous posts), Here.
Thanks to my sister, Darcy Henderson, for passing the neologism, “grielief” along from her friend