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Visits with the healer bookended the present semester, the highlight of which was Chaos and Compassion: the Maitri class. I returned, blocked, to the sanctuary last Friday with a story of stasis.

In a voice as nonchalant as a heron unfurling its Paleolithic wings in one-hundredth of a second, an act that is both natural to the heron and astonishing to a human looker-on, she unfolded a series of concepts that aligned mind, soul and core; and, speaking truth with generative force, delivered me to a new space of understanding. And when she was done, I felt more whole than I have felt since chronos hauled me stoically out of childhood.

Ms. Moore taught me more about narrative in twenty minutes than I learned acquiring three English degrees—studying narrative! Narrative moves and shifts, unbidden, beneath consciousness; it molds itself to the shape of the narrative vessel, the present mortal. Unacknowledged, secreted narratives grow like the bastard Smerdyakov, calculating and murderous, willing to frame an unwitting brother, who suddenly finds himself, an innocent man, facing the death penalty. Lacking a brother, I implicated myself.

I asked her if it were possible to go back into the void and retrieve something from it—my voice had been paralyzed in a bizarre assault. She told me that there is a better way: to bring the void forward into the now. Then came the revelation: the void transforms as I pull it forward out of stasis, and its essence can be integrated with my present self, who had changed considerably over time. The void has, in fact, been transforming all along as I’ve been evolving and growing, but I’ve had this “freeze-frame” shield patched onto it, a silence that has kept it stuck in past perceptions, mostly for reasons that feel like safety. And my present self, which is stronger and more whole—transformed since that time by life, experience, soul-growth—can pull the essence of the evolved narrative into the now and integrate it into my present, whole being. I defrost the frozen moment, liquefy it, and it flows into who I have become. As I pull the story forward, I reconstruct it with a more flexible architecture, letting it breathe with me until we fuse and morph into the next form.

She showed me the design flaw of the void I constructed (stasis—like a broken arm too long in a cast) and stated what my core recognized as truth: that whether we are consciously aware or not, essence evolves constantly, as we do, moving through time. The essence of every part of our past is not stuck in our past; I, the narrators of my “lives,” determine what is present for me. One of Faulkner’s characters laments that the past is not even past; he is caught in the snares of his culture’s past and cannot live in the present; he tears the hands off his clock and drowns himself.

I narrated a “freeze-frame” for the anomalous and terrible incidents so as to avoid feeling the traumatic emotions again by not re-creating the circumstances they accompanied. Those feelings need to be honored, and they can be honored in present tense if we let them breathe; the hurts can also move forward and be integrated with my present self.

Here’s the genius part: behind the shield—the fixed story I tell myself about my past experience to hedge myself against experiencing anything like it in the present—lies the transformed essence, which has been locked in time only because I have created the narrative to make it thus. So the shield has become a fixed belief system that is so solid it can actually be moved aside to reveal the essence of the evolved narrative. It is ridiculous to shovel rain off my sidewalk, but I must use a shovel to move frozen water from the same sidewalk. The idea that we can move a belief system or a fixed concept out of the way to reveal the transformed essence of the injury it masks and thereby see that the wound has healed, through conscious integration of a more whole narrative, was wholly new to me. We can part our own curtains; first we have to name them curtains.

Kafka said that “a book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us”; compassion must likewise be the axe for the frozen interstices of our hearts. But must there be an axe? Humans are three-quarters water; the fluid state is our natural medium. Moisture has three states: vapor, liquid, and ice. Liquid is the familiar form that acts as the go-between for the other less and more solid forms. Under certain sunny wintery conditions, ice transforms to vapor without the intermediate step, a process called sublimation.

The most radical element of the conversation with the healer: as she spoke, my core heard truth. Words elicited a cellular response. The labels peeled off, and the essence emerged, whole and intact. I saw that all essence had been present all along. The wings of her words carried all forgotten, abandoned, and wounded essences, which stepped forward for integration in the sweet and chosen present. The porous vessel of the narrative held all the stories intact, roiling, gasping for breath. Ice turned to vapor. And, yes, the experience was sublime.

Deb Thornton

A lot could be said about Maytrees’ falling love with Deary and leaving his family, but his recognition of these changes served a compassionate quality of sorts. Like Lou, his came with a recognition of his own and his spouse’s wholeness. I know a lot of divorced people, being “divorced-with-no-kids” myself for three years now. My story and the stories of others tell me that it’s very difficult to moralize over the details involved in a separation, even a seemingly “clean-cut” case like that of the Maytrees. Yes, Maytree is a very bad husband and daddy for leaving his family from the easiest way of looking at it, but life is rarely that simple. For as many divorcees and children from divorced families that I know who have been hurt by their family’s dissolution, it seems I know just as many who regret that their families stayed together under false pretenses. Maytree’s infidelity aside, I think staying with Lou after the comprehensiveness of the changes that came over him would have been a much less compassionate choice for everyone involved.

My role in my divorce was like both Lou’s and Maytrees’ in their separation. I did the leaving like Maytree, but it wasn’t over any specific misbehavior on either of our part. Unlike Toby, we had allowed our relationship to go on badly for a long time, neither of us capable of mending the various harms between us nor in touch with our wholeness as individuals in a way that would allow us to imagine a world without the abuse of the other. When I did the leaving I had to do it for both of us. The last year or so of my marriage, life had graced me with some miserable but extremely effective opportunities to find myself. I suddenly saw myself as a whole person, took a branding-iron, outside view of what my marriage had become, and resolved to do everything I could to reverse the damage and help pull my wife through all the baggage of our pasts. I was in a state of great personal peace the last terrible months of my marriage. I stopped shouting. I forfeit every verbal battery match before it began. Despite my new capacity, it was fragile and limited. After extending the limit of my compassion to my wife for the sake of having a life together, I met the limit of my capacity and felt my calm cracking. I knew if I slid back into that mode again after so many months neither of us would survive it.

From then on, compassion for my ex-wife was more complicated. It meant leaving. It meant being blessed with an outside view that was meaningful and solitary, enlightened but cursed. I knew from the previous months of trying everything in my power to reach her that her identity was too deeply inscribed in mine for her to ever be able to see the self-sufficiency of who she was without me. My presence in her life eclipsed every other possibility for her. I had a big role over the years in helping her identity become dependent on mine, making my guilt in the situation very convoluted. I knew I would be tagged as a deserter. I was a deserter. But sticking around for the sake of mutual misery didn’t seem like spirit of stick-to-it-iveness, or marriage.

My fiancé of three years and I are both divorced and talk about our previous marriages pretty much whenever they come up. I told Karina the other day that if I were the person I am today about five years ago that I could have saved my marriage, and I think that’s probably true. It’s also a very humiliating admission to make, because in the grand scheme of things, my capacity for love and compassion has changed only a tiny increment. I knew these would be things I was going to have to grapple with in the future back when I decided to get a divorce. My decision was largely based on the immediate needs of both of us, but had permanent consequences. Being able to make that decision, like Maytree, depended a lot on my having faith that my ex-wife really was a whole person without me, that someday she might find that wholeness and then we would have a lot to talk about. Until that day though, I knew it would be impossible for her to see me as anything but a monster, which I also deserved on a lot of levels.

See, I’m already starting to go round and round with all the guilt/blame stuff, because that’s the real nature of how it works inside me still. What’s important about my story for me is that I recognized a solution that took some degree of faith and sacrifice on my part, one that was completely counter-intuitive to everything else I had ever thought up to that point. I didn’t want to divorce my wife at all, but I knew it was the only way at the time to give her a chance to find for herself what I had found for me. Having been on both sides of that divide now, I knew how devastating and reality-shaking it would be for her for a long time, but I hoped. Compassion acts and feels a lot like chaos sometimes. I have a deep inner peace now about the direction my life has taken and the ambivalent choices I’ve had to make along the way. There are also quiet times when no one is around still, years later, when if I’m thinking about my past life, I doubt my every motive, cry tears I believe I don’t deserve to own, and desperately search for alternate solutions to problems that have long since become history.

-Justin

Jack’s return itself is a kind of maitri too, especially his campaign to be accepted by his father, Boughton. Although his return was also motivated by more immediate, physical needs, I think Jack’s real reason for coming home was in obedience to a drive that seeks reconciliation. The theme song to Jack’s story of compassion might be reversal. Everything gets switched around in Jack’s case. Here, the maitri is generationally reversed, and instead of extending hopefully into the future, Jack’s aim is to mend the past and reverse a life history of rejection. I even read Jack’s leaving as an attempt at compassion, although I think it’s also pretty clear that he should have held out just a while longer. The pain that surrounds Jack’s home life, because of Boughton’s rigidity and tangle of memories, make his efforts to identify as a son pretty excruciating, certainly aggravated by his father’s deterioration. A lot of Jack’s distance from home and his family is a kind a compassion toward himself, primarily anyway, and then perhaps towards his family in turn.

It’s not that I think Jack’s decision in Home is necessarily a good one. It’s just that I know that distance can be a kind of compassion as well. My family’s history is full of disasters, especially this one span of years a few years back when the universe took to repeatedly sucker punching us, it seemed. In my family, tragedy usually strikes in cascades, showers. Sparing ugly details (for now), it seemed like trouble was coming from all sides in each of our lives and all smashing together in a big mess in the middle. In the aftermath of our separate-yet-inseparable lifewrecks, somehow I unlearned that misery is normal and snapped into some kind of awareness (jury’s still out), the process of which being about as comfortable as a completely numb limb regaining full circulation all at once: life. My perspective came out a little differently than the rest of my family members. A lot of my awakening included a realization that we were hurting each other. Not necessarily the individuals, but the family, the dynamic of us. I was barely dragging myself along for the first time in a long time like the rest of them, but unlike them, part of my answer to moving on meant staying away for a while.

This might be a hard thing to understand, a thing like Jack and I did, but sometimes compassion works that way. Jack’s distance was much more prolonged and severe than mine, and damaging to Jack. I only dropped off the map for about a year, and not even completely. Even so, what I knew was best for me and my family’s situation at the time has caused some hurt feelings that I have to accept. In Jack’s case, I think his error is that he gave up on the future. I think there was some compassionate thinking involved in his leaving, but it was also a way of giving up. But considering his history, I don’t think it’s hard to empathize with Jack.

My compassionate stepping out of my family’s picture for a while was always meant to be temporary, and with that in mind, even allowed me to lay some groundwork for a successful “homecoming” of sorts. It’s been much like I would imagine Jack’s could have been if he had turned right around a couple days later and somehow worked it out with his parents and siblings. One of the things that equipped Ames so well to anticipate and overcome (I think) his son’s future maitri needs was his experience and observation. He had Jack and Boughton’s examples to draw from, not to mention that of his father and Edward. Like Ames, any success at compassion in my family over the last few years has only come through a combination of favorable experience and circumstances. And even then, each capacity of it is fraught with incapacity. For all of the power of Ames’ writing, for example, it will only reach his adult son in the absence of Ames. Inversely, for all of the presence of Jack’s return, the message and value of the man he has become fails to land on his father.

I haven’t quite worked it all out in my head yet, this really complex relationship between Ames and Jack’s stories, but considering their simultaneously parallel and mirroring nature, I think Robinson is commenting on the nature of capacity and incapacity in compassion. It’s as if compassion needs its inverse present in the universe somewhere to operate, like how Jack and Ames’ stories need each other to be told. Jack’s story contributes to Ames’ as a way for Ames to see how he can best love his son from the other side of death and time. And in the end, Ames reciprocally turns around and steps in as a narrative surrogate for Boughton when he blesses Jack, then, acting again as a mediator, goes to tell Boughton farewell for Jack. The two act as unlikely agents of grace for one another when their compassions collide. And although this collision effects their respective past and future acting maitris, it happens and operates for both of them in the present.

-Justinator

I believe in creation.
I don’t just mean that God created the earth,
I’m certain he did, but I think he burns it too.
Sometimes I think he lights worlds on fire. Watching them smolder
Watching us smolder. Spark and frazzle.
Not destruction
I do not believe in destruction
Only creation.
Destruction would have to mean a total obliteration of what is or was, to a nothing.
A complete absence of elements. Has anyone ever seen that?
I’ll make the brash statement that there is no such thing.
To Change is to create and never to destroy.
There is but one, to acknowledge the existence of another is only to confuse what is actually a lack of the first.
Like light. When you swing a door open from a lighted area into a dark room, your feet are not suddenly drenched in darkness, it can not inhibit light.
It is prohibited, limited, by it’s characteristic tendency to be well…
non-existent.
When I open that door light spills in.
When I light a moth on fire it blinds
My vision clearer than ever
Defibrillated by powdered wings and electric currents
I create something special. Something Hollow

In class we talked about the change that had occurred in the Boughton home since Jack was last there. There is a constant quiet in the home that has everyone on edge. The still apprehension of what that silence knowingly bares is almost more than Jack can stand. You see, chaos is concealing and noise is safe when it’s keeping secrets.

I grew up in a home with parents who loved me, a family who cared, and occasionally, more emotional stress than I cared to handle, though I will admit, I usually feel I am more equipped to deal with it than most others. My house was busy and eventful and always clever when it came to ignoring the mountainous problems that prohibited progression. There was always too much going on to really notice what was going on. And that suited us. Ya’ know, I tell it like I’m exempt from my family’s problems. To be honest, I’m realizing that it’s something I do a lot. I tend to mentally distance myself from sad or stressful situations to say that I can better analyze what is going on. Really I’m just scared. I cause a cognitive racket that keeps me from things that hurt the most. Sometimes they’re simple. Sometimes it’s being so upset I just drive. I drive until I get somewhere unfamiliar, I blare loud music to an unearthly decible and finally all the chaos in my head is enough to prevent me from thinking logically. Perfect. Then I point at my family and ask why they can’t cope like me. They’ve never seen me lose it. Calm exteriors keep you safe, make people trust you enough to unburden a little of their chaos too. It keeps you full. Not filled, just full.

Our bodies are homes too. Homes to our spirits. As explained above, we can alter the noise, chaos, or commotion experienced in our bodies as well; especially when it comes to emotions. It might seem like I have a hard time being patient sometimes, that I get angry before I let my heart break but, I’m just scared. I’m just like everyone else I suppose.

My older brother has had a severe alcohol and drug problem since he was a teenager. I was two years younger, he should have been older than me. When my family first realized what the things were that caused such a drastic change in my brother, we were all devastated. My parents fought, well, they fought more; and I laid on my bedroom floor crying and praying for hours. God it hurt so bad. I was completely disconnected from my physical self, I knew I had felt home once. I craved it, longed for it. I had never been so aware of my spiritual being until I recognized it was in an unfamiliar place and that there was somewhere where it didn’t have to hurt like this. I just wanted to feel home.

As a senior in high school I received a message at school that my brother had not returned home from a party the night before. Hours later we discovered he was in a hospital room recovering from a binge drinking episode in which his lungs collapsed. I closed my phone abruptly and cried. I cried long and hard; it was not because I was sad. I was so pissed my skin burned and I ground my teeth. How long is a person suppose to be patient? I knew one answer, and it was the reason why I cried. I was so vengefully mad at myself for having those feelings. “What the hell was wrong with me?!” I had wondered. What kind of a person gets angry instead of mourning the potential loss of their brother? How could I not extend some compassion towards my brother when it was easy for me to do for others in far less serious circumstances? I think now, it’s because most people had never hurt me so bad, I didn‘t love them like I love my brother. Since then I’ve always been scared for my brother. I worry about his life, that he may not value it at all one of these days and I’ll have to deal with another phone call. I’m scared he might truly destroy himself and that he won‘t know it was always me who harbored the greater sin.
I hope he knows I’m sorry. I am so desperately sorry.

It takes great effort now to show mercy and compassion towards my brother, to listen to his theories without getting annoyed, but I am doing it. It is a strange concept, especially since I’m so fiercely defensive of him. It tears me to pieces when I know he hurts; I want him to trust me. Sometimes I still get frustrated with myself when that empathy doesn’t come with ease, when I have to remind myself to be kind, but the most important thing is that he doesn’t notice my struggle. I don’t punish him more than he tries to punish himself. I really do forgive him, and I hope someday he’ll forgive me, though I don’t imagine he will ever guess it is I who seeks repentance.

I truly am a loving person. I’d do almost anything to help someone in need, even a stranger, or maybe it’s especially a stranger. I have a lot of respect for the untold stories. It’s the ones that become you I have so violently rejected. Yet, as I’ve not only forgiven others, but granted myself a little compassion, I have become familiar with a quiet contentment. I’m slowly making peace with myself and the immature, selfishness of my past actions. The more focus I put on compassion, for myself and others, the less I feel the need for chaos. It’s quietly diminished by a greater, less intrusive power. This calm exterior feels honest.

Eric Wilson

To admit our incapacity is to extend compassion to the self, the same compassion we extend when we see the essence of others’ capacity.

There is no demarcation between capacity and incapacity, as there is no distinct shoreline on continent or island, only a blurred beachhead, breathing in tides. And neither is capacity or incapacity water or land, each having simultaneous fluidity and solidity. In the moist granularity of particle and wave, light and light, no space for judgment exists–judgment being too solid, not malleable enough, to be part of a landscape always in moonpulled flux.

The essence of capacity and incapacity completes the soul, forms the All. Then wholeness is the basis of compassion without judgment.

Deb Thornton