November Newsletter: Gratitude

I have a recurring nightmare of clams. I’m on the beach, walking into the ocean, when suddenly I find my feet pinched by thousands of hard, painful objects - a seabed full of shelled mollusks, sinking their hinged jaws into my flesh. These creatures have always revolted me, those unmistakable signs of life from what seems more like an object than a creature awakening a primal dread within me. Their existence seems to imply the existence of life without beauty, without gentleness, without the slightest glimpse of anything a human would value in life.

The other day during meditation, I suddenly realized with a shock - I am that seabed. That mass of pinched-off, blind sea creatures I encountered in my dreams was not a reflection of external life, but of my own nature. I am a complex of closed-off, ossified nuggets of life. When I receive something good, I close it off, turning it into something to be hoarded and protected. When I receive something bad, I close it off, calcifying it into a grudge, a black mark of resentment. When life enters, as it does day by day, it encounters a bed of these pinching mollusks, who divide the spoil among them. 

The “dark night of the soul” is a phrase that comes from St. John of the Cross. His teachings tell us that every soul must pass through a dark night, stripped of comfort and solace, encountering horror and hopelessness, before it can be united with God. The source of the horror is the dawning realization of our own weakness, our impotence and fallibility. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I have never liked the sound of such a spiritual philosophy. I steer my life away from pain and fear - why submit to a map of reality that promises these things in abundance? Yet this is, undeniably, reality: pain and fear exist, and we encounter them, pass through them. Everyone travels through darkness. In a thousand little ways, I have shut myself off, refused to accept darkness: the limits of my own knowledge and of others, the world which lies beyond human limits of understanding. I have always wanted to know the answer right away, to skip to the happy ending, for everything to be good, fun, untroubling and wholesome. In these thousand little turning-aways from the difficult middle, I’ve infested my seabed with biting, half-dead mollusks. 

My process now is in training these mollusks to open up, one by one. For the past month I have been letting go of more and more. I travelled to Portland for the weekend, and ate much less than normal, the result of the typical ebb-and-flow of travel on a limited diet. In the past this would have affected my mind and mood terribly, as I clung onto a belief that any disruption of my routine was an insurmountable challenge. Instead, I remained open, and had a great time. I’ve also been cutting down on screen time, limiting myself to doing work on the computer, not idling on my laptop or phone to try and get pleasure. After a week or so of persistent thoughts that what I was doing was worthless, I noticed that my interactions with other people were getting much more vivid and pleasurable, and charged with almost none of the intense social anxiety I was used to. In breaking open habits that I formed to help cope with fear, I had started to break down the fear as well.

I also started a daily gratitude practice, naming things I am grateful for. This is another practice that my brain has always told me is worthless. I’m discovering that one of my oldest, hardest-baked clams is the “Poor Me” clam, an inner narrative that I have been given an unjust burden of unendurable pain, and that no mortal kindness can alleviate it or make up for it. As long as I was unable to accept darkness as a part of life, I was likewise unable to accept the bright spots as the blessings that they are.

Now, I’m chipping away at that clam with conscious practice. For the month of November, I’ll share essays throughout the month on things I’m grateful for, as they surface day to day. The more I open up, the more I discover that life is not devoid of beauty, gentleness, and value, no matter how dark it looks from the outside.