A ghost on a quest for beauty
A ghost on a quest for beauty
A missive in which I consider the value in embarking on a mission to seek beauty when I'm struggling to see beauty at all.
Our suffering is impermanent,
and that is why we can transform it.
And because happiness is impermanent,
that is why we have to nourish it.
–Thich Nhat Hanh
It’s 1:30 pm on Monday, after some days of uncharacteristically cool July weather in Fargo-Moorhead, the temps are rising and I am a ghost. Processing trauma and triggers, a regular practice these last couple of years, on overdrive since February. Is it exhausting? I suppose in the moment, but more and more I feel I’m moving toward a kind of freedom I could never have imagined even three years ago.
And so I went to update my tabs. Everyone's a ghost at the DVS. It felt good for half an hour to sit with my fellow ghosts and not have to be anything else. I’m the type to listen to sad music when I’m sad, I wouldn’t call it moping or wallowing, though it may appear that way. What I’d say is, the first step in any mood, is to feel and understand that it is valid. Allowing it to be, acknowledging it’s there with compassion and loving-kindness, not pushing through it.
After, I received the intuition or inkling to walk by the river. I was so close. Maybe I could find some beauty there and feel, for a moment, more solid. More corporeal. Beauty can, sometimes, maybe have that effect.
But, if you know anything about being a ghost, you know that beauty can smack a ghost in the face, say in the form of a pointed-to resting Monarch on a leaf, and the ghost just shrugs. Blasé about butterflies we are.
I had been reading Thich Nhat Hanh's The Art of Living and I think it was Thay, as he’s called, urging me to go, so I went, at minimum with the intent of walking slowly and breathing and noticing; camera (in the form of a shitty phone) at the ready. Maybe it could find the beauty if I couldn't.
I wandered down a ramp to a floating dock used by the kayak and canoe rental folks, but admittedly, even on a good day, the Red River and its banks seem to lack in majesty. Maybe it's better from on the bridge rather than under it. There was, however, a butterfly fluttering above me through the bridge beams, so I carried on.
Heading north, back toward my car and the Hjemkomst Center, where two men played catch with a baseball, lazily tossing it back and forth, chatting lightheartedly, the ball landing comfortably with a small thud into each glove over and over again. (How is such endless monotony pleasurable?) After many tosses of easy throwing and catching, my ghost energy caused the ball not once, but twice in a row, to bypass the man nearest me forcing him to run after it.
I do believe that ghost energy is this strong.
He chased the ball and I found these cottony plants and purple flowers all clustered together. And this tree and hydrant forever mated. And I focused on my breathing as I knelt to find the desired angle:
Breathing in, I am aware of my body.
Breathing out, I am aware of my body.
–Thich Nhat Hanh
If I can’t make beauty or feel beauty, capturing something that I know I’d have found beautiful on a different day, seems like the next best thing? And if not beautiful, maybe interesting or out of place or weird. Stopping to notice literally anything is an imperative tool to support a ghost feeling… well… anything. But the choice has to come from within. It has to be an intention made. And it cannot be rushed.
It’s a cycle, this thing: a ghost may not see beauty, as it is, at every turn, but if she seeks beauty out, however distant it still may feel, she will, with time and when her inner conditions have become amenable, begin to see it at every turn. Like Thay encourages, a watering of certain elements (like kindness, presence, compassion) of our inner garden so that they may grow, while leaving other elements (anger, fear, resentment) untended.
Of course, had I been smacked in the shin with the loose baseball, it would have been the universe’s lighthearted attempt to force me into noticing; a stopgap from the internal spiral that had me in its grips.
I might have continued on, but the mosquitoes I disturbed capturing the unlikely lovers were annoying me, so I moved back toward my car, which was never out of sight. Not far did I have to travel from it to find a bit of beauty. When I was clear, the baseball once again attempted to chase my energy.
Maybe the men were just getting tired of their own game.
In the end, there wasn't a cosmic shift in energy (or maybe there was, imperceptible to my ghost body), but something did begin to move and continued to move through the day into something else. Something more present.
Energy is like that, it’s always moving and nothing is permanent. I’ve taken great care to support and strengthen my nervous system, something I now understand I’ve been doing for some years through inconsistent yoga practice, mindfulness, learning about, and being able to identify my emotions. And am more recently, like, within the last few weeks, very interested in learning more about how to permanently regulate.
Or, understand, if anyone does, how and why these tools do cause permanent shifts in the regulation of the nervous system so that those of us who are or have been stuck in flight-fight-freeze mode might come out, so that we might be triggered less frequently, AND so that we might shift the trigger and trauma response more easefully when it does happen, rather than be stuck there for days or weeks.
I’ve been wondering if, all this slowness I’ve been chasing, is exactly that: a deep desire to fully move away from the emotional dysregulation we neurodivergents, empaths, and highly sensitive people tend to experience for one reason or another.
The things I’ve read about it don’t tend to offer insights into whether emotional and nervous system dysregulation is a permanent part of our characters or if it’s something caused by the trauma many of us experience living in this world that wasn’t created for us and that doesn’t offer the tools for any humans to understand, manage, and move through emotions, and therefore our nervous systems can actually be permanently, and more easefully steady without suppression or masking.
Maybe more permanent shifts in nervous system regulation are a new understanding in the collective consciousness, and it wasn’t until now that many understood it as something possible to attain.
Is now the time for many of us to be free, if we so choose? Free from nervous system dysregulation, mood swings, overwhelm, burnout? I don’t know, but if so, it’s a path that requires attention and intention.
It takes a commitment to oneself that, it seems, is the most difficult step, trained as we are to neglect ourselves. Trained as we are to believe that if we commit to ourselves, we’re being selfish and those we love will suffer. Trained as we are to dedicate our lives to the mindless daily grind.
We should not be afraid of suffering. We should be afraid of only one thing, and that is not knowing how to deal with our suffering.
–Thich Nhat Hanh
Thay writes that ‘when conditions for suffering [within us] come together, suffering arises. We feel it; we experience it. And when conditions are no longer sufficient, suffering ceases.’ Suffering, like all else, is impermanent and, being an inter-being connected to all things, it is not ours alone.
Practicing mindfulness, we, like the Buddha, as Thay points out, learn how to suffer, which is not the martyred experience of my Catholic great-grandmother previously mentioned with her moans and groans and despair and fear of her great-grandaughter (me) walking down the street 530 feet to a friend’s house at dusk in a town of 4000 people. A journey that she could have watched me complete from the driveway.
It is feeling through our suffering compassionately and gently, it is making choices that, don’t suppress it, but stunt its growth, transform it, transmute it. Making choices that allow other things to grow: love, kindness, understanding (mostly for ourselves!).
Suffering is difficult in presence. Noticing stunts its growth. And the practice of noticing over and over again every day makes noticing easier. And it’s far more pleasant than being hit in the shins with a baseball, which the universe will do with increasing velocity until one takes notice, I personally, like to get ahead of it if I can and avoid the bruises, but you’ll have to go at your own pace.
Be on your own journey.
With love,
Invitation for Reflection
Stop now and look around. List the things you see. Pause and really look at one of these things. Describe it in detail. Is it animal, plant, mineral, or manufactured? What’s its shape, weight, color? Where does it exist in relation to you? Does it move or is it still? Does it have sound or is it quiet? Practice this over and over again every day.
Go for a walk, camera ready, and look around. Don’t aim for anything beautiful if that bar is too high, just look at things and shoot them. Choose the fine detail and texture of things you wouldn’t normally give a second glance to (cement, flooring, a corkboard).
Get up close and personal with the nuances of your neighborhood, the details of your apartment building. Shoot a leaf or a blade of grass. The key here is to choose to notice literally anything and look at it for a bit. Make it an object of study, preferably without judging its value. It just is as it is.
(I realize identifying anything as beautiful is a value judgment, let’s just let that one go, shall we?)