A Joyful Vapour

Ease yourself in. Feet first, lowering your limbs into it, toes then ankles then calves and torso. As your breath tightens in your chest and your skin numbs in the grip of the water, relax into the cold. Breathe through it. Take back control from your reflex to seize up, and exhale, an unspoken command to behave as though everything is okay.

I’ve been swimming most mornings in icy waters, of twelve degrees at sunrise, and this ritual has become a sacrament of sorts, a physical instruction of deeper truths:

There is a poet by the name of Gregory Orr. When he was twelve he accidentally shot and killed his brother on their first hunting trip. Orr uses poetry to give shape to the chaos of trauma, to give expression to those things that can engulf us like ink bleeding through the unconscious mind. He says that these words don’t change or dissipate the grief — but they do hold it. In much the same way as the bereaved longs to be held more than they want to be given rationales, words can hold our grief, and be present with us in it.

“... in our daily lives, we experience enormous amounts of disorder and confusion. It’s inside us. It’s in our past. It’s in the unknowable future. So disorder is a part of our life. We all know that. We also know that we need order, that some kind of patterns reassure us: the sun rising, the stars and the moon, the seasons, our personal habits, which I love, the habit that reassures us about the world. And we just navigate our lives with this kind of interplay of disorder and order.

But a person in crisis, an individual in crisis, is someone who has been bowled over by some kind of crisis. And what poetry says to us is, you know what? Turn your confusion, turn your world into words. Take it outside yourself, into language. And poetry says, I’m going to meet you halfway. You just bring me your chaos. I’ll bring you all sorts of ordering principles. I’ll bring you story; if you want sonnets, I’ll bring you sonnets. What we’re going to do is, we’re going to let your crisis shine through this ordering principle.”

“To find one person inexhaustible is simply the definition of love.”

“Don’t get me wrong: grief sucks, it really does. Unfortunately, though, avoiding it robs us of life, of the now, of a sense of living spirit.

...

The bad news is that whatever you use to keep the pain at bay robs you of the flecks and nuggets of gold that feeling grief will give you.

...

You begin to cry and writhe and yell and then to keep on crying; and finally, grief ends up giving you the two best gifts: softness and illumination.

I’m pretty sure that only experiencing that ocean of sadness in a naked and immediate way do we come to be healed – which is to say, we come to experience life with a real sense of presence and spaciousness and peace.

Only grieving can heal grief.”

‘Don't play what's there; play what's not there.’

“Silence is letting what there is be what it is. In that sense it has to do profoundly with God: the silence of simply being. We experience that at times when there is nothing we can say or do that would not intrude on the integrity and the beauty of that being.”

“Let tiny drops of stillness fall gently through my day.”

There is this word in the Ngan'gikurunggurr language of the Nauiyu people of the Daly River region in the Northern Territory.

“Dadirri”

It means inner, deep listening and quiet, still awareness.

I came across this word and these words by Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann in Julia Baird’s new book, and I thought I would write it here to share with you and remember myself because I find this very hard.

“We don’t like hurry. There is nothing more important than what we are attending to. There is nothing more urgent that we must hurry away for.

We wait on God, too. His time is the right time ... To be still brings peace — and it brings understanding ... .

In greeting each morning, remind yourself of dadirri by blessing yourself with the following:

What I had come to know (by feeling only) was that the place’s true being, its presence you might say, was a sort of current, like an underground flow of water, except that the flowing was in all directions and yet did not flow away. When it rose into your heart and throat, you felt joy and sorrow at the same time, and the joining of times and lives. To come into the presence of the place was to know life and death, and to be near in all your thoughts to laughter and to tears. This would come over you and then pass away, as fragile as a moment of light.

It’s an incoming tide

Inching forward

Until there is no where to stand

It’s a falling sun

Stretching its shadow

Until it is cold and dark

It may be that when we no longer know what to do

we have come to our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go

we have come to our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.