This post was originally on my other blog about exploring spirituality and philosophy through post-rock music. I share many of the posts from that blog when I write them, as they fit in well here too. This one is about the beauty and power of Old Solar’s version of the Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, for instance. At the beginning of the year, I wrote a post on the best albums of 2022 in post-rock, so I recommend checking that out if you find the music in this post interesting.
This is one of two posts in preparation for the 2 days of Post.Festival 2023, the largest post-rock festival in the US and an event I’ve been dying to go to in recent years. I’m going to cover two bands that have been crucial to my love and experience of post-rock as well as difficult touchpoints on my healing journey of the last couple years due to difficult associations.
This is a sweeping album. The concept of it feels like a post-rock version of Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons”, and I think they capture the sentiment of each season well. You’re likely to be moved by one or several of them. Favorite track: Autumn Equinox: A Winnowing Fork in His Hands.
SEE flows through the ebbs and flows of the seasons, the highs and lows of abundance and lack as the course of beautiful, heart-rending change. It is nothing short of a glorious album. Although I suspect the band are deeply Christian, the well-captured experience of the vibrant change of presence and absence remind me of Taoism and my own deep interest in it; this album captures the resonance of something like an I Ching-esque progression of yin and yang through the seasons.
I’ve found the track: “Autumn Equinox: A Winnowing Fork in His Hands” particularly haunting. My first connection with this album was a brief obsession, a spring dalliance of sorts. Months later, I woke from dreams with this song stuck in my mind, hearing it over and over on repeat. I fastidiously dug through my album collection to recall where it came from, niggling in my subconscious until I rediscovered this album. I’ve never had that experience prior or since with any other song.
The song represents my favorite season, fall, and it expresses that shift into a pensive mode of fullness slowing down, being harvested and brought in before the cold. It also feels pensive as though a high feeling is now on the edge of loss – that transition of connection into withdrawal and repose (Hermit – Virgo) and an independent vibrance of compassion, growth, and abundant harvest despite this (Empress – Libra). It also feels like a time of things balancing out, the decisions and efforts of the year being weighed out into their results, karma playing out, and the symbolism of all that balance in the equinox (Justice – also Libra) just before the strong transformation of the reaping and movement into quiet (Death – Scorpio).
As far as I’m concerned, if you can listen to this song and not feel its poignancy, your heart is completely cold. It pulls strongly at a variety of emotional depths like few songs do. Returning to this album has been a slow and difficult process for me, but it’s one I have relished listening to again recently. Old Solar is one of the main bands I’m thrilled to see on this trip to Post.Festival.
NOTE: Use the time stamps in the YouTube description to jump to the song
I started this a while ago, and I left it aside, doubting my creative voice here, and it felt more dramatic than I could write in a way that resonates with me yet still feels like a fitting tale. However, various events of late have brought back past memories and feelings, a sense as a friend has said of the universe throwing events out that echo elements of past occurrences – asking the question of me: “Did you learn the lesson at hand?” As such, I thought it worth finishing this little fairy tale story about resilience in the depths of pain and growing beyond those experiences. It is fiction and yet represents learning and catharsis with an emphasis on the lessons learned, as poor as I might be at expressing them. For me – it was almost like a journaling exercise to strengthen my own understanding. I can only hope it speaks to someone else out there across the ether as well.
What is love?
It’s an easy question. People speak about it confidently, certain they know and can express it simply. She, however, thought that the apparent ease was deceptive, uncertain the answer was simple or readily uplifting. The thoughts congealed into thick globules of disbelief in her mind as the Empress bled out on the floor.
Months prior – he swept her off her feet. She resisted at first, having come to believe that love didn’t matter after many a life adventure. He spoke of connection. He understood her in ways that others didn’t. He valued her for more than just her looks or her charm. He was captivated by her mind and heart, and he eventually captivated her in turn. The King of Fire wooed the Empress with charisma, confidence, charm, and passion.
Then the drama. On. Off. Up. Down. I love you. I love someone else. You’re the one. I prefer someone else. At first she was somewhat at fault too, but as it dragged on, any “both” or equality long went away. She was no longer seen. No longer valued. No longer understood. She was a nuisance most of the time, a shiny bauble to be remembered when wanted, and yet, she did everything she could to calmly and glowingly exude: “I love you,” to let it permeate and radiate out of every pore of her being. In seeing his darkness, she leaned into compassion, care, understanding, acceptance, and patience.
In truth, she was an Empress no more, beholden to desire, a reversal of energy, a misplacement of her way in the world. She had lost her self-worth somewhere along the way, the golden glow of the Empress.
Finally, he made it clear that she was no longer wanted, never again. He made it clear that he felt angered by her lack of respect for his other commitments, even though those activities and behaviors were precisely the last iota of self-respect she had: not willing to say that it was laudable to her that something and someone else would lead to the diminishment of and poor treatment from this former King who was no longer anywhere near such. That was the one self-abasement and self-negation too far – a stamp of approval for treating her like garbage. Something that leads people to be worse versions of themselves is not deserving of respect, especially at one’s own expense.
The last of this was separation followed by brief reconnection and an unwillingness to even take accountability to the extent of accepting that he no longer had or deserved her trust and that he had lashed out at her for her last grasp on self-respect, for her struggling to make sense of his slowly escalating self-righteousness. He twisted events into self-righteous dismissal and told her she was obsessive and lost in her own mind, while also lecturing her on topics she had studied for years and he had not studied at all. Even when the lightest of points were made that she no longer trusted him after such behavior, he puffed up and acted as though the need to rebuild trust was ridiculous and beyond the pale. He cut ties with an act as though their friendship’s ending deserved some sort of joyous funeral pyre and as though such a sentiment of joyous festivity would clearly be shared by her.
All of this left her questioning her feelings, her care, her intuition, the time spent, her openness to compassion and understanding, and most of all her ongoing connection despite being told she was wrong, confused, stupid, and lacking emotional depth. In short, she felt like she was mad – she not only didn’t trust others anymore, she didn’t trust herself – her mind, her read of others, and her own emotions.
The ongoing sharp pangs of this deep existential wound were why she decided to move into this moment of pulling out her sword of truth: cutting out the blackened heart of despair within herself. She screamed as she cut through her breast, bleeding everywhere, but she still reached into her destroyed chest to pull out her heart and passed out on the ground.
The Empress is a great being – one of abundance, of the ultimate power of love, not just romantic love – but the loving energy of life, of maternal nurturing, of the life force that loves to exist, grow, and flourish. As such, even cutting her own heart out may have ended her in a sense, but it didn’t really result in a final ending. Death, from her 3 to the 13, was a moving forward of the wheel of fate into an evolution, a transformation into something new.
She gradually, over the course of extended time, pulled herself off the floor, the hole in her chest fused closed again, and the doubts, creeping thoughts, and self-dismissal slowly faded, as the taint of the rot of a corrupted love, an addiction, passed out of her system. First, she gained her self-worth again fully, recognizing her own excellence and working again on growing it to its fullest. She lost her cares of worrying about outcomes or attaching to any intentions of trying to control. Rather, she began to flow with life again – the power of yin, rather than the selfish and short-sighted application of yang. Her doubts were last to fade, but in her healing growth, she eventually blossomed again, a lotus in the muddy waters – recognizing that she didn’t need to trust other people or seek their love again. No matter what, she was pure abundant joy in and of herself. She could give her compassionate love to others without clinging to them or to any story that dimmed her light or limited her.
Perhaps some day she would find an Emperor, balanced, giving, kind, empowered, and insightful, rather than a self-centered, power-based, controlling, egoistic king, but in truth, she knew the rarity of such a person, and would sweat not a single drop worrying, waiting, or even desiring that outcome. She would give her energy to herself, to the world, and to others – fostering compassion, patience, nurturance, and growth in all that she encountered to the best of her ability, listening and caring while no longer allowing anyone to diminish her.
She no longer sat in meditation, rest, and healing from her wounds. She stood up, walked out of her castle, gracefully strode down to the sea below, and rode off into the moonlit night on a giant turtle that surfaced in front of her as her feet touched the sand, her chariot to traverse the depths on her journey forward.
This post was originally on my other blog about exploring spirituality and philosophy through post-rock music. I share many of the posts from that blog when I write them, as they fit in well here too. This one is about the emotional power of music and the panacea that a spiritual path represents, for instance. At the beginning of the year, I wrote a post on the best albums of 2021 in post-rock, and I’ll be writing another for 2022 in the next couple days, so I recommend checking that out if you find the music in this post interesting.
The emotional associations we have with music can be profound. We can tie pieces of music to places, people, times, feelings, or likely other aspects of human experience that aren’t coming to mind right now. Music has been depicted as speaking to our emotional depths since ancient Greece (Plato’s Republic comes to mind, and Nietzsche rehabilitates the Platonic concern around this emotional impact in his Birth of Tragedy with the conclusion at the end of a Socrates coming to his senses in his final days and making music). In other words, it’s long been seen as something that speaks to the soul, so to speak. I’m struggling to write this, in fact, because phrasing anything about it as a concept or a cultural history feels too weak, as it feels like a simple and undeniable truth that music speaks to and influences us emotionally.
For myself, the strongest versions of this emotional association to music are when I’ve associated it with a person and then have had that relationship end. It’s been nearly impossible to return to emotionally charged songs after breakups in different times of my life. I actually wrote about an instance of this years ago in another post. Facing emotional associations with only the resonance of something beautiful that has been lost is hard to sit with mindfully in any way. It’s hard to sit with at all.
For me, reclaiming the positive experience associated with music like this is a crucial part of the healing process. In a way, that’s a far more accurate description of the healing process done mindfully than “time heals all wounds” (which I’ve critiqued before as an incredibly poor metaphor); just moving on by diving into some sort of river of Lethe or, even worse, revising history – isn’t really healing. It leaves wounds unaddressed and open for more festering or vulnerability that could lead to defensiveness and other ego shittiness if challenged at all about what really happened. True healing is about finding meaning in loss, facing it authentically, and reintegrating the shards of a broken heart with new meaning and accepted vulnerability. It’s about authenticity, meaning-making, acceptance, and reintegration. This means that for something like previously loved music, it’s about finding your way back to it, and if it still feels beautiful and inspiring in some way once you can get past negative reactions, reclaiming it as part of your life – authentically facing the difficulty of this being part of your story, finding new meaning in it, accepting everything that happened and your struggle to get past it, and reintegrating it back into your life with that new meaning. The healing of an authentic, engaged, mindful, spiritually driven life is one of kintsugi.
With this in mind, I’ve recently been returning to a band I have more or less ignored existed for some time, even though at this time 2 years ago, I listened to their second album roughly non-stop, becoming one of my most listened to albums of 2020 despite discovering it only in the last few weeks of the year. That band is Silent Whale Becomes A° Dream, and the impetus for this return to encounter is that they remastered their first album, Canopy, recently. The album I was hooked to previously was their second album, Requiem, but this lower bar for reclamation feels more doable.
I was surprised to find in returning to this masterwork that any concerns about pain were completely washed over by just how unbelievably beautiful this album is. This band is one of the most amazing and most overlooked post-rock bands out there. They take the orchestral sound that Mono is either loved for or passed over for and take it even a step farther. It is magnificent, multi-layered, and epic. Furthermore, it is incredibly poignant. The second album has a description (I’m not going to quote it because its long) about looking out from an oceanside cliff on the ocean and feeling the pull of existential angst – that Sartrean idea that I’m free to jump off – and combining it with the sublime desire to merge with the beauty of such a moment. It’s the pull of that existential feeling as well as the loss of the ego in identifying with this beyond oneself, the power of the sea. That may sound dramatic, but this level of sentiment is within their music. It can shake you deeply.
Their first album is just as moving, and the final song caps it all off in full intensity, and fittingly enough, it’s titled “Panacea” – the miracle cure. In this song, we can feel the miracle cure of healing by facing our fears, our angst towards death, and the painful limitations of our ego’s stories which try to protect or cover over while perhaps avoiding the truth of things. This can all be overcome in a music-induced moment of kensho where body and mind fall away, and in returning, “you” are changed. Ironically enough, it is the perfect song for the spiritual endeavor of reclaiming and the reintegration that is healing. It is truly a symbol of that panacea that is an authentic spiritual journey if we’re open to the aspect that is the Untergang, as I spoke about in a recent post. I highly recommend you open yourself to the experience and listen to this song. I’m glad to have returned to it and reclaimed it for my own journey.
This post was originally on my other blog about exploring spirituality and philosophy through post-rock music. I share many of the posts from that blog when I write them, as they fit in well here too. This one is about Nietzsche’s philosophy as an inspiration for an energetic/emotional stance towards life, for instance. At the beginning of the year, I wrote a post on the best albums of 2021 in post-rock, so I recommend checking that out if you find the music in this post interesting.
During the last couple nights, I’ve posted some philosophical discussion recordings (which I call “philosophy riffing”). In my last, I spoke about many things, but one topic was struggles with reconsidering my concepts and experiences of love, including the extra layer of emotional/existential difficulty of wondering if it was all in my head for reasons which I’ll keep to myself.
During the time of dealing with these kinds of thoughts and feelings, I’ve returned to the two songs here a few times. It’s interesting that they both resonate with these issues but also stand as great examples of how vocals can be used in post-rock to great effect. I’ll include the lyrics at the end of this post but will also post links in the discussion so you don’t have to scroll up and down.
As a general overview, lets contrast some aspects to begin to preemptively load the discussion upfront. The first of these songs is more of a standard rock vocal style, where the inimitable A. A. Williams agreed to a collaboration with Mono. As such, it’s a fusion of their styles – the fullest, emotive chamber music flavor of Mono backing and strengthening the soulful voice and lyrics of Williams. The second was a request from Russian Circles to collaborate with the also inimitable Chelsea Wolfe after touring together. This song hangs as a coda to the album, taking up the refrain from the first and previous songs and transforming it into something both confused and poignant; yet unlike Mono/Williams, the vocals are also dreamy and confused. You’ll feel the emotion of it as another instrument of the mix, but you’ll almost certainly have to look up the lyrics to make out the precise words. So, in one, we see a harmonizing strengthening of the vocals and words to their most shining, lifted up by the instruments behind. In the other, it feels almost more like a post-rock song utilizing a sample, to where the vocals are infused into the instruments, making the haunting, emotive quality not reliant at all on understanding each word: getting the feel of the grief, loss, and doubt without being able to hear the concepts at play.
Now, let’s look at each of these two songs on their own. First, “Exit in Darkness” by Mono and A. A. Williams is precisely that. There’s a deep set of emotions that speak of loneliness, finding a matching presence in someone else, and the struggle of loss and moving on. Honestly, from the lyrics, I’m never completely sure with this song who has left who in the separation (although it seems likely to be the singer), and there’s also the sense that there’s not a clear break in the separation – that the singer keeps the other either merely in mind or is still contacting the other person, as she says: “I can’t let you be alone” over and over. For me, this song has resonated deeply with a being apart because of the issues of the two in the connection while also speaking to how difficult this is because of how strong the connection is. I point out my own reactions because I was a bit surprised in hearing another friend’s reaction to the song. She described it as a song to her about shadow work: going through healing and processing of unwanted and difficult emotions that have been repressed from the relationship or negative patterns that need to be addressed to grow and heal. I can see this take, as the loneliness and tension of some sort of disorganized attachment style of wanting someone but pushing them away but wanting them, over and over, feels like a red flag of something to be reworked, processed, and addressed. There is some sort of growth that needs to happen within singer and/or the other party in order for this connection to grow back together or for them both to exit from this darkness.
I need you to know You make me whole And I can’t let you be alone
Mono/Williams – “Exit in Darkness”
Whatever the meaning, it’s hard to deny how touching this song is. It ranks highly as one of the most emotional rock songs I’ve ever heard.
Russian Circles’ Memorial is a beautiful song of grief, doubt, and the edges of madness. It caps off the album, repeating the riff of the first song, with just the slightest shift, that had also been reintegrated in a much more massive, heavy way in the immediately previous song. This refrain – the theme of the album as a whole – is now fleshed out from it’s ghostly emotional exploration with the voice of the living, a grieving vocalist considering loss and doubting her relationship to that which she has lost. Her words feel like an existential grief as well – she grieves some part of herself that has died in this connection, and furthermore, she thinks not only on her own death in this transition but ghosts of the past that make her question what she did, who she was with, and who she is now.:
What sang in me sings no more. Where stood a wild heart stirred no more. There stood wild heart. And I have been slain. Head full of ghosts tonight. Have I gone insane?
Russian Circles/Wolfe – “Memorial”
There’s been few times that a song about sadness has really fully captured all the layers of doubt, pain, and rumination I’ve felt. This one captures much of what I have felt in a few lines, and it does it in a voice that feels weirdly stable and logical, yet dreamy. It intensifies the feeling that these reactions are a haunting certainty that stands before us in life’s moments such as this that cannot be escaped. There is no “Exit in Darkness”, only an “Exit through Darkness”, one which challenges your very conceptions of who you are and what it might be to be with other people in the future. In some ways, this is reminiscent of the stage of a spiritual path that is depicted by the Moon card from tarot.
I can go through the lyrics and ideas, as I’ve done, but I can’t emphasize enough how much these songs are examples of post-rock’s style. The vocals are treated as instruments of their own in the mix in both of these songs and handled differently to work with this, and although I started with a brief description of this, I’m going to link the songs now and suggest you listen to them to hear the full effect I’ve described. The lyrics will also be block quoted below the song links.
How long have I been underneath? The weight of all I’m carrying For all my life, I’ve been the one
Who abandoned everyone
But I need you to know You make me whole And I can’t let you be alone
How long have you been hiding there In all the shade and all the empty air I could have sworn in you I saw myself And all the questions that I ever asked But I need you to know You make me whole And I can’t let you be alone
But I need you to know You make me whole And I can’t let you be alone
I need you to know You make me whole And I can’t let you be alone
I need you to know You make me whole And I can’t let you be alone
I need you to know You make me whole And I can’t let you be alone
I need you to know I need you to know I need you to know
But I need you to know You make me whole And I can’t let you be alone
Mono/Williams – “Exit in Darkness”
I cannot say what years have come and gone I only know the silence – it breathed on and in What sang in me sings no more Where stood a wild heart stirred no more There stood wild heart And I have been slain Head full of ghosts tonight Have I gone insane? Was it wrong to go down To want you to stay? Head full of ghosts tonight Have I gone insane?
I wrote this a few weeks ago for a friend. I can’t recall the prompt or challenge, but it succinctly captures some experiences and ideas I’ve explored on this blog in the last year – love, loss, remembrance – while riffing on a lot of references including posts I’ve written over years without any sense of name-dropping. In a way, it’s a short, poetic expression of my first intentionally recorded philosophy riffing post on my birthday last year (my most joyous birthday present to myself). I had a sense that my friend would never listen to that much longer description, and I think this poem did a decent enough job of capturing the same experience from a slightly different perspective now.
I honestly wasn’t going to share this poem, but I’m currently getting better from COVID, and I saw it on my computer randomly a couple days back. The words took me aback. Something about the feeling of growing onward into health and flourishing makes me feel like it’s an affirmation to share it, even if I doubt my own stepping out of the Moon card into the Sun card will be anything like the experience described.
Synchronicity, resonance in time An abstract word Until our heartbeats entwined As though from plan designed Ideas absurd But doubting the experience – a crime
Together was a new understanding Of life, of love An explosion of heart And the sense of flying high Wings spread on the warm wind, Gliding along, Companionship of brightest warmth Of greatest power
I held her once Lying in the dark, listening to a chorus Frenetic frolick of froggy frenzy Spring’s promise
My heart-mind fell away My body ceased to be Universal presence Hyperabundance – no longer her and me No us, no separation Just everything: love loving itself The lightning bolt of flashing into being
The night was the most chaste No kissing, fondling, or exploring erotic arts And yet An intimacy more profound Than many ever experience
From time to time Sounds – frogs, the wind, laughter, birds’ chirping Resonate And synchronicity momentarily returns The beautiful sound of hyperabundant love Playing the heartstrings for a few fleeting seconds
I’ve wanted to explore the topic of heartbreak and healing through a spiritual lens by riffing on a few of my favorite spiritual texts and trying to make them into some heartfelt poetry. This will be an attempt at that.
Form is emptiness. Emptiness is form. Form is nothing other than emptiness. Emptiness is nothing other than form. Love is nothing other than heartbreak. Heartbreak is nothing other than love. The arising of love is the flux that also flows out into its absence. With gain is loss. With attachment is separation. All such dharmas, every dharma, the entirety of the ten thousand things, Each, no more substantial than dreams. Each as empty – impermanent and without a Self, an identity that lasts. As such: “Slogan 2. Regard all dharmas as dreams”. Each can pop and be gone in the blink of an eye. Even a life can.
The pulverized heart – pulverized: something crushed into powder: pulver. It is perhaps the greatest emptiness. A flux of confusion, hurt, memory, despair, hopelessness, And perhaps, the last reverberations of a beat: A small echo of the past and a yearning for it to grow back into life. None of it solid. None of it stable. Complete emotional rawness. Potential opening for vulnerable wisdom – a being-here to sit with.
Form is emptiness. Emptiness is form. There is no love. No heartbreak. No connection. No rupture. No gain. No loss. No joy. No grief. No healing. No hurt. No learning. No forgetting. No path. No resolution. All of it, gone, gone, beyond gone, completely beyond the concept of gone.
And yet… Form is form. In each moment, just this – the entire universe is this present moment. Emptiness is emptiness. The goings and comings are being-time; time-being. We misunderstand them because we don’t understand the beat of time. For love to last, effort must be put in – the consistency that is accomplished through change. Be water, my friend.
Seeing clearly is sitting without attachment. It’s cutting through the grasping onto form, emptiness, and any arising. It’s severing the ties that hold us to our devils: all being creations of mind. When heartbreak arises, cut through the narratives, justifications, and demons of ego. When love arises, cut through the narratives, justifications, and demons of ego. As should be remembered: “Flowers fall even though we love them. Weeds grow even though we dislike them.”
Just this.
For reference, this free-form poetry is riffing hard on The Heart Sutra, Dogen’s Genjokoan from his Shobogenzo, some ideas from Mahayana Buddhism in general, particularly the 8 worldly concerns (gain and loss being two of them), The Tao Te Ching, the 52 slogans from the 7 points of mind training (Lojong) in Tibetan Buddhism, and Machik Lapdrön’s The Great Bundle of Precepts (the founder of Chöd and an absolutely radical female monk from the Middle Ages – highly suggested reading).
To end, I’d like to quote three poetic passages from Addiss and Lombardo’s as well as Red Pine’s translations of The Tao Te Ching, as I find them absolutely beautiful and inspirational, and I feel they speak to this problem of duality in experience and how to behave as a Sage who gets to the fundamental aspect of doing well without getting caught in the self-involved pain of trying to jump only from gain to gain to gain to gain.
Recognize beauty and ugliness is born. Recognize good and evil is born.
Is and Isn’t produce each other.
Hard depends on easy, Long is tested by short, High is determined by low, Sound is harmonized by voice After is followed by before.
Therefore the Sage is devoted to non-action. Moves without teaching, Creates ten thousand things without instruction, Lives but does not own, Acts but does not presume, Accomplishes without taking credit.
When no credit is taken, Accomplishment endures.
Tao Te Ching – trans. Addiss and Lombardo; chapter 2
7
Heaven is eternal and Earth is immortal the reason they’re eternal and immortal is because they don’t live for themselves hence they can live forever sages therefore pull themselves back and end up in front put themselves outside and end up safe is it not because of their selflessness whatever they seek they find
8
The best are like water bringing help to all without competing choosing what others avoid they thus approach the Tao dwelling with earth thinking with depth helping with kindness speaking with honesty governing with peace working with skill and moving with time and because they don’t compete they aren’t maligned
Lao-Tzu’s TaoTeChing – trans. Red Pine; chapters 7 and 8
I recently have been attending a Buddhist dharma talk weekly session through a local Buddhist temple. One of the monks reached out to me to chat and get to know me better. She asked me about my difficult emotional states I’ve brought up when we’ve shared in class. I rattled off some straightforward description with some points about how I’ve been too attached to certain ideas of partnership and love and that I just need to reevaluate and come to terms with the possibility for a different narrative, understanding, and path for myself. I thought I would get some sort of agreement or pat on the back, but the actual reaction I got surprised me and made me understand my treatment of myself differently. Instead of just seconding such a tough approach to my situation, she paused and told me that it makes sense I would be grieving and struggling with all the transitions and restructuring I described. I realized in that moment that something some friends tell me is right: I don’t have a lot of compassion for myself. I strive and push myself hard to be better, to understand deeper, to stand taller, and to be stronger. When I fail, I tend to focus on how I didn’t do well enough and have to be better next time. As such, recent transitions have been tough. I tend to think of myself as weak or stupid rather than as working through legitimate issues. The fact that a monk who is well-versed in the phrasing and concepts I used basically indicated that I should pause and grieve with grace, accepting those feelings as legitimate, was quite the message to me.
Then, today happened. The last few weeks have been hard in general in that there’s flashbacks to a year ago and shared moments, as well as shared intentions and aspirations. We had talked at some point during that time about spending holidays with her family – helping her cook and enjoying the time. So, the loneliness of today, being alone, facing the existential shifts of looking at no partnership, no family, no fatherhood in the future as quite likely outcomes (No, I’m not being dramatic – it’s going to be difficult to find a match who is not settling for my sense of compatibility; such a person will be rare. That’s a statistical certainty.) has been incredibly painful, much more so than regular recently, and regular is wishing that my heart would stop, daily.
I’ve sat with all the feelings and tried to muster up the energy to just focus on other things that need done. That’s kind of my Zen of heartbreak: chop wood, carry water (as I’ve spoken of before). However, it was difficult, and I tried to focus on being patient with precisely that process.
One key focus for that was to go on a Jingle Bell Run – a family tradition of running in the Christmas Eve darkness with bells for the kiddos to hear. I didn’t have any bells though but took the idea up in spirit. I haven’t been able to run for months until recently, so doing this particular run was quite meaningful.
As I left, my heart continued to ache with all the feelings. I turned on a live album by my favorite band as the running vibe. The soft nuances and crushing crescendoes of electric energy really jogged my heart and my mind as my feet moved along as well.
Somewhere in the middle of the run, I realized – “Why am I so worried about these future concerns and the loss I feel from the recent past? So what if I won’t end up in a partnership, as a father, or with a family? I can take the extra time and independence to invest in myself, to become smarter, stronger, and deeper. I can mentor others in a variety of ways, find opportunities to be helpful, compassionate, and involved, and help children in other aspects, perhaps volunteering. I can dedicate the love I felt for another in new directions, expanding my heart to hold and help others in the various ways they cross my path. So what if relationships have never left me feeling seen or valued? I can value myself better than anyone else ever will be able to.”
In recent months, tarot and I Ching have time and again counseled me to find strength, insight, solace, and equanimity within myself. Find and strengthen my inner light of truth has been the counsel, and let it shine — the Hermit card.
I’ve tried, but I fall away from it time and time again, as I’ve wanted love. I’ve wanted partnership, but honestly, it’s time. It’s time to accept the path of solitude from a place of strength and empowerment.
I was challenged at one point that the feelings of connection I had with my person of heartbreak were all stories in my head. They weren’t. That’s not how I exist or engage with life. I don’t get lost in stories that I create. I push myself for insight, truth, authenticity – as said above, and sometimes, I’ll even sanity-check with other people just to make sure I’m not getting lost in a bias. They were intense experiences. I didn’t get lost in my head. I got lost in my heart. It may be the closest I ever get to unconditional love for a romantic partner. The best I can describe: I saw the other person fully, even with all their myriad flaws and darkness, yet accepted them and would have challenged them to grow and get stronger – as they did me. Seeing our future together brought images of two birds flying together to the treetops and beyond, soaring in accompaniment. It doesn’t matter that the other person didn’t feel the same. That doesn’t invalidate this as a true experience that I had, and I’m certain that evaluation of what we could have been is absolutely true, although it matters not. I was reminded of this again tonight, however, as the music at one point felt like it expressed that soaring, and fittingly enough, it’s a song called “Halcyon”.
To return to the events of tonight: I came home drenched. The rain tonight was steady and pretty hard. This too was somehow uplifting. In thinking of the Hermit’s Way, I remembered all the times I have had runs just like tonight: running through the wet and cold alone in the dark with so few people in life I could even describe such an experience to, nonetheless with whom I could share exactly what it feels like. I realized though that in some ways I always struggle with and resist this process but also always end up feeling enlivened and sometimes exhilarated by the sheer wildness of facing wind, rain, and cold for miles with nothing but resolve and a pair of shoes. Introversion and self-reliance have always been some of my greatest strengths. They’ve acted as an engine for many of my endeavors, even writing this blog right now, as well as learning many of the things that I reference in it all of the time.
In any case, I think it’s time to trust the process and move past the pain of struggling with being alone and the grief of losing a great love. It matters not that I’m pretty certain I won’t have anything like that again. It matters not that that certainty is bolstered by having looked through 100s of online dating profiles. I’ve played the field or cast my nets, and it was just what I expected. The path forward for me is one of investing in the Hermit’s Way, and I will do so with the strength and sure-footedness of someone with light feet. As I wrote in a creative project for school long ago:
12) Healing thyself. As Nietzsche said: “Everything good is instinctive – and consequently light, necessary, free. Effort is an objection, gods and heroes belong to different types (in my language: light feet are the first attribute of divinity)”. Light feet as divinity – a revelation! Feeling the weight of heaviness keeps us from running, dancing, flying… We encounter the suffering of others all the time, but we are more than just vessels for suffering. Staying healthy requires a lightness of foot, mind, and soul, rather than the heaviness of disease; it requires a quick, easy readiness to laugh! Remember that to heal oneself is a dance with the abundant radiance that is in oneself, in the Other – “You”, and in the world. Light feet…
Writing mine. Quote from Nietzsche: Nietzsche, F. (2002). Beyond Good and Evil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Honestly, that’s an aspiration that’s hard to live up to. I’m sure I will struggle with accepting this still, but I felt bolstered tonight with a lightness of foot that I haven’t felt in quite some time. Whatever the case, I will aim to take up my hermit’s lantern and shine.
May this help others find their own lightness of foot and inner truth as they struggle to grieve and grow.
I return to the heartbreak topic one more time to just speak through some personal experiences regarding change and “healing” (I put healing in quotes to point to some difficulties in the concept which I will talk about below). I bring these topics up out of some frustration and insight in my own process and discussing with others. I can only hope that sharing these words here will make some others feel seen, understood, and accompanied on their own path.
Even before I was fully cut off from the person behind my heartbreak, I spoke to her and others about how dating others held little interest for me and how I knew it would be really difficult to find someone else who is what I want for a long-term committed partnership. She and most everyone else have challenged me, but when I really present my perspective, there’s not really any counterarguments to be made.
Here’s the thing. I have a couple decades of long-term relationships and dating women as experience. Furthermore, I have a background in psychology and data analysis, meaning I’m used to thinking of problems like “who is in the dating pool?” in terms of metrics and demographics. Over the last couple years, I’ve thought about what I would like in a future long-term partner, and for me, that means a high degree of compatibility. I have a solid list of what kinds of interests and personality traits I see working well with me in a way that I would feel excited to commit to, especially in ways that I see as being easier to work with than the problems I’ve had with previous partners. That being said, many of them are more like “open to my way of doing x”, not so much – “you have to do x too”, so they aren’t fully rigid, and I’m big on being a compromising and supportive partner as well.
It’s quite clear to me that a few of my marks for compatibility dramatically reduce the number of good matches to something like less than 10% of heterosexual/bisexual women in general out of the gate, and that’s not even factoring in aspects like age, location, availability, etc., and yet, people just tell me to do things like “cast my nets”, as though randomly trying with others will make them compatible or in complete ignorance/dismissal of what I know from my heart and a couple decades of experience is what I want for myself moving forward.
The funny thing in that is that in challenging a particular friend with a very logical, data-driven breakdown, she couldn’t argue, as she’s quite data-minded as well, but she replied that although she agreed, she found it incredibly sad because it’s a perspective where I likely don’t get a happy end.
However, that’s the thing. We’re told time and again that we will. That there’s “our person” out there, etc. That’s a very long-standing desire. It’s almost fundamental as an existential counterpoint to feeling your identity as a person in the world with the needs for connection, sex, understanding, and companionship. There are colorful versions of that deep in mythology across cultures, not to mention Aristophanes’ poetic depiction of it in Plato’s Symposium.
Here’s the other thing. That’s an existential security blanket. There’s no guarantee that there is such a person out there. There’s not even a guarantee there’s a great match out there. Furthermore, even if there is, there’s no guarantee they’re nearby, a good match in terms of age, or that they’re currently looking for a partner too. It’s tough to hear, but there’s no guarantee of a happy end for any of us. Truly, if you speak to many about their lives, it becomes clear that life is complicated with a variety of ups and downs and unforeseen circumstances in relationships. If anything, the guaranteed happy ending is a fairytale, just like we know that term really implies.
This mental shift for me – focusing on what I want, pushing myself to avoid stepping into a relationship where I just begin compromising so greatly out of the gate where I immediately end up sacrificing my wants to someone else’s, and enforcing boundaries to uphold this idea that “single > settling” is a big move for me, and it’s one I’m committed to. I’ve even tried to challenge my hypothesis by looking through hundreds and hundreds of dating profiles for my area online. Absolutely none of them have changed my perspective regarding how much of a needle in a haystack such a match would be – my sense of demographics and what I want is even probably more accurate than I initially realized.
Here’s my point, ultimately, with this post. This is a big change for me, and it’s one I intend to further, even if for the rest of my life. I’m trying hard to think of myself in a new light, a new role for my future. I’m trying to reimagine what I might end up having and how I can sit with it in the years ahead. I keep my heart and mind open to being surprised along the way, but I’m not going to run towards anything just out of the desire to not be alone. Even though that’s really hard for me and this is the most depressingly lonely time of my life (and seems to look out on a wide horizon of more of the same), I would much rather that than being in a relationship where I feel alone and unvalued with a person sitting right next to me.
Now, in relation to “healing”, I’ve received some critiques that my position will soften over time or that I will find the right person when I heal and go back to the old me. Honestly, I hope not – for one, because then all this insight and one of the only two big, meaningful experiences I’ve pulled from this time (perhaps I’ll write about the other sometime soon) feel empty, dramatic, and histrionic. That’s not my jam. Personal and spiritual processing for me has impact, it builds, and I ingrain such changes into my life. They’re not passing seasons. Maybe aspects of them lessen or wax and wane, but something remains to grow or be challenged moving forward. Ditching these insights for my old paradigm seems both against my more general approach to life and a step backwards into really unhealthy patterns. If anything, others should be hoping along with me that I don’t move back into that.
The problem with “healing” as a concept is that it’s often used in just that sense: some recovery of function that returns to the old. Sayings like “time heals all wounds” illustrate that idea. However, wounds can heal improperly. Function can return, but not the same as before. For instance, I sprained my ankle at 19, and it still bothers me from time to time. That ankle works well enough for the day to day, but it is not and will never be the same as before. Other physical injuries I’ve had are the same. If anything, healing over time isn’t a return to form, it’s an adapting to changes of the system to keep going on well enough. Granted, some wounds do heal by fully disappearing, like a scab on the skin, and an indication that there’s still an issue there shows a problem that hasn’t healed. The wound is still there, festering. This applies to not getting over animosity and hate or an inability to build trust again with someone who makes every effort to build it in clear good faith. I say such things with no judgment. Some psychological wounds are the absolute hardest to truly “heal”, and the best that can be hoped for is a moving on that works around the pain somehow.
In any case, a change into a different worldview about love and relationships and what I want from them doesn’t indicate that I have some sort of temporary bleeding wound that will scab over and disappear. There’s something to be said, valued, and appreciated about this kind of change and how it’s actually a healthy move forward, not the opposite.
May these words make others feel accompanied and understood in their own developing heartways.
Words have power. We seldom think about it. We throw them around as expendable–of little to no worth. Yet, if there is a magical element of the human being, it’s our ability to express the world through words. Words communicate. Words depict. Words create. Sometimes, words cut–like a weapon. This can leave a wound that festers like no other.
Some things that were said to me in the last conversations of my relationship have remained as wounds. Others recommend to let these things go, but if there is one thing that I have learned in meditation, such things cannot be forced. Whatever comes up, comes up. I can simply sit through it. Pushing thoughts and feelings away is engaging them with energy just as much as grabbing onto them and spinning them around in analysis. No. Letting go is relaxing the hand of the mind and letting the thoughts simply stream out of it. It is tender, and it is brave. It is the way of the awakened warrior.
One cut that has passed as a thought time and again is the moment in which I was blamed for her emotional reactivity. I was depicted as the cause of all negativity. Supposedly, no one else had this impact on her, and hence, I was some sort of emotional cancer–a tumor to be excised from her life in order to be healthy. Otherwise, according to her, she would never know peace. My mind reeled with the bizarre logic, unkindness, and completely victimizing unfairness of such an assessment. My counterexamples were batted away, and it was clear that nothing could be said to her in her dreamy haze of certainty.
Part of why this lingered is that I never fully shared this mind-crumbling bend of a moment in its complete emotional intensity with anyone else. In part, I didn’t because I didn’t want to spew blame and vitriol upon her to others. In part, I didn’t because I didn’t have the words to share such a moment at all, especially from a space of sharing without blame and aggression. I mentioned her words to friends, but the telling didn’t express the emotional nightmare of such a moment (like I said: I lack the ability to fully express)–the person you love the most in the world tells you that you are the cause of all negative feelings in her, and it’s implied that there is nothing good that you offer to your relationship with her.
I think that because of this inexpressibility, something remained held onto on a deep level–aching deep inside. No one could reassure me that that moment was completely whacked. No one could fully agree that those statements and ideas about emotional reactivity were hopelessly lost in the contrivances of a warped narrative. Instead, her words were taken at face value to some extent, and I was left wondering if I really was as horrible as she said I was. There was no one who could hear me and recognize me on the level of my own experience. From my therapy background, there was no one who could share my “felt sense”, and because of this, this sense stayed unfulfilled.
Last night, I was reading about meditation and lucid dreaming. I found unexpected recognition and release from this unlikely source. The book was talking about our perceptions and emotions. The book talks again and again about our “projections” on experiences–that the world we experience is always our interpretation of it, never the world in itself. My experience of the world is always mine, not the one that the world gives to me. I read: “Emotional reactivity does not originate “out there” in objects. It arises, is experienced, and ceases in you.” * I almost cried. Someone understood, and someone said the niggling feeling that I couldn’t quite put into words. Simple as it may be; I couldn’t say it, and the book said it for me. The feeling shifted, and my experience–the kernel of pain in that wound–unfolded.
Sometimes, to relax and let go of the thing that hurts, to allow the swollen inflammation of pain to subside, and to wash away a piece of ego, the thing we need most is to feel heard–to feel that “I” am not crazy. The feeling of an insanity that only affects myself leads to the grasping onto story and analysis of “me” more than anything else. It’s an isolating loneliness that makes a sense of myself distinct in contrast to everyone else. In being recognized, you can let go of those wounds that hurt so deeply, knowing that you are not alone.
May you feel seen, heard, understood, and recognized. May you find peace, love, and happiness. May you not have experiences that create wounds, and if you do, may you find the ability to express them and a person to listen authentically (if needs be, please post below. I’ll listen).
For the benefit of all who read this.
Gassho
*From “The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep” by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche and Mark Dahlby, Kindle Edition
I recently had a tarot reading to get insight into my life outside of the perspectives of friends and family, beyond the spheres of people who already know me. My reader, a middle-aged black woman with thick dreds, was an interesting voice to hear amid the many others in my life. She did several spreads to see where I am at and how to overcome my current difficulties. I initially was pretty quiet and vague, but as what she was saying touched on several layers that she didn’t know about/talk about, I opened up to her.
Her initial message, and it remained the most stressed throughout, was about my job and how to regain some personal autonomy in relationship to career. She said something about it that really struck me: I’m heartbroken about my job. She clarified that heartbreak can occur in more than just our romantic lives, and many never even think about heartbreak with a job.
As she spoke, and more so after the reading, I realized how heartbroken I am right now. I have heartbreak related to love, job, home, family, and friends. Everything seems to float without stability, path forward, or clarity for the greater flow of my life. So many things I love have been cut out of my existence, have been dramatically altered, or have consistently done me ill while claiming to do me well. How do you move forward through such miasma? I have by the only way I know how: nurturing myself. Hence, I have been writing so much, meditating, and exercising. I have been talking things out with friends, and I’ve even been developing my intuition more by using the I Ching and tarot as oracles to broaden my perspectives about my life. Finally, beyond my usual self-care in times of difficulty, I’ve tried to improve my situation. If I’m heartbroken, particularly about my job, let me remedy that.
A few weeks ago, I did a meditation. Although not intended, it too was about heartbreak. I sat on the floor and breathed deeply with my hands over my heart in the shape of a triangle. I felt the energy pulse out of these three sides, throbbing out and reaching into the world around me. After some time, I put my hands down and asked myself: “If my heart were planted, what would it grow into?” I saw a vibrant blue flower open up, both beautiful and melancholy, filling my chest. When it opened, a personal object (I’m not willing to share this detail here) was dark and lifeless in the flower’s center. It felt like the culmination of a sad message, emphasizing my separation and loss of love, indicating the death of a deep connection. Then, the object shattered and bright, spiky, red petals burst forth, making the flower vibrant and hopeful. However, this did not seem like an erasure of the old, rather a rebirth from/of it. Like the phoenix, the new grows from the ashes of the old. The object shattered and reformed a few times, telling me that the break offers the possibility of growing into something more beautiful, powerful, healthy, and alive.
As for all of you, I’ll let you make what you will of such a meditation, but to me, it says one thing about heartbreak: even when things are very painful and it all feels meaningless, the possibility for change, growth, and rebirth lies hidden within that experience. It may be hard to see it, and it may be even harder to continue onward towards that, but it’s there, somewhere, just waiting for the moment to burst forth.
Something new could pour forth from that hole…
This reminds me… I recently read a friend’s linked article about how we should court heartbreak to grow; we should break up and leave relationships behind when they become difficult because we’ll grow towards something better, and we’re doing ourselves a service. What I’m saying here does not support that at all. One thing that’s become clear to me in the last few months is how deeply we get caught up in our stories about ourselves. Some of my other posts touch on this. Leaving relationships, courting heartbreak, for personal growth, for pursuing your own narrative can be quite a confused and lost approach. Perhaps there could be value in this, but it is something that should not be taken lightly and certainly should not be presented as a hard and fast rule. It should be something that is examined through work with a therapist, someone who can challenge and disentangle the bad faith of the stories we tell ourselves, the things we refuse to see about ourselves, and the difficulties for personal growth in our relationships that we are unwilling to show up to and face for our own improvement. The problem with the stance in that article is not recognizing the opportunity in the difficulty of interpersonal dynamics to grow and change for the better. Breaking away is not what presents the room for growth; it’s the challenge of facing change that presents it. You can either own up to your place in a relationship and ask your partner to do so with you, working together for growth, or you can throw that all behind for “my growth”, “my story”, “my truth”. I’m not saying that the second option is always confused and self-involved, hardly, but I think there is a much greater likelihood of that being the case than that path being an authentic, examined, and clear engagement with all of the issues I’m presenting here. The point: heartbreak, when it comes, can be an opportunity for growth, but you shouldn’t seek to break your own heart in order to grow towards something “more authentic to you”. There is already authenticity in your connections; otherwise, it wouldn’t break your heart to leave them (not that I’m saying it isn’t hard to leave relationships that are bad for you; of course it is, but there is at least something good in the ones that really break your heart down to the foundations–real heartbreak, not just loss), and if your connections are that meaningful, there’s something to be gained from them if you are willing to dance with your partner and they are too.
This post has become a much longer meditation on heartbreak than originally envisioned. Let’s summarize what I would like to share about heartbreak. 1) you can be heartbroken about many more things in your life than just romantic relationships. 2) if you are going through heartbreak, do what you can for yourself to survive and eventually thrive. If you can work toward changing your situation, do it. Be your own healer, and remedy yourself. 3) heartbreak does not mean the end. There is possibility for new growth in the death of the old. 4) don’t throw things away from a willingness to break your own heart out of some simple idea of it being your story. Really think about relationships and how to grow in them. They hold potential if you are willing to dance with your partner and love together.
A great and famous writer recently told me to experience heartbreak in order to improve my writing. He said that going through heartbreak would offer the opportunity to process things and write better. Whether that’s true or not, I’m definitely doing that now, and I thank you all for sharing in that process. I hope that this post gives you your own insight and inspiration, especially if you have your own pained heart to heal.
I know… The heart chakra isn’t directly about what I’m discussing here, but maybe your growth lies in this aspect of your relationship with All coming into a healthier alignment. Maybe your heart needs healing in more ways than one…
On the Way 
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