The Grace of the Fog

Threads of fog on these grey September mornings herald the end of summer, as they traipse along the grass to kiss the dew webs before they disappear.  Chimeras, we tell ourselves, as we turn to butter our toast, or discuss the headlines with our deaf cat.

Later in the day, the flies will go rogue, trying to escape the building heat by invading the house with the mail.  The little tin handle will snap off a can of black beans before you have it fully open.  The library will be unexpectedly closed for staff development, and the great puzzle of your life, which seemed so very close to being solved, will once again seem like the sand you somehow didn’t fully wash off the parsley, and which now adds grit to a disappointing salad.

I tell myself, as I spread a fine glaze of marmalade over my toast, that I should be grateful that I continue to love the fog.

There are worse fates than having unresolved struggles.

The fog that arrives before the day’s worries can dig their heels in, carries its witness of the provisional world, the world of shifting forms that, if we are open enough, suggest the possibility of seeing things anew.

I have several friends who would vehemently disagree.  They can’t help themselves.  Each time they knock on the door of my life they figuratively drop one of my grandmother’s porcelain tea cups.  Just the other day, a heavy dose of Advice (a.k.a. Judgment) appeared in my inbox from M.

After taking a deep breath I picked up the phone and dialed her.

I found her in tears over how misunderstood her well-intended remarks had been to the granddaughter who, stung and hurt by them, had now frozen her out.

It wasn’t her best day.

She can’t see how like the sand she becomes, or the flies, or worse, like the hot sun that bears down on the tender scarves of fog, scorching them, when what is wanted is quiet presence, so that we who may not have as yet fully awakened can sort through our own fogs and chimeras without tearing up the delicate beauty of a dilemma.

I could have shut her off, ended the conversation, and pulled away.  But before my self-protective instincts took hold, I asked her, “What does your heart most long for?”

She sniffled in a full dose of self-pity.  “I just want to be understood.”

I waited a decent interval before I asked,  “Is that really the deepest thing?”

She was quiet, and I could hear her blow her nose.

Finally, she managed, “No, I guess not.”

Then I heard her whisper, “I want to be valued.”

One person’s puzzle pieces can so easily crash into another’s.  In these days of mental torment over our political predicaments, the heartbreak of addiction and suicide, the unspeakable bundle of wholesale anxiety, it bears noting that often it isn’t our enemies who scatter the calm of the fog, and leave us exhausted in its wake, but our loved ones.

We could probably call this the beginning of suffering.  The way we respond is a matter of life and death for the soul.

I have recently reread Victor Frankl’s classic, Man’s Search for Meaning.  It is the story of his spiritual awakening while he struggled to stay alive in Auschwitz.  Frankl came to believe that as long as we struggle to create meaning, every day — as long as that we wake up and see our struggles as the raw material of a more evolved and expansive consciousness — the spirit cannot perish. Even unwanted and uncontrollable suffering such as his own and that of his fellow prisoners, he believed, can become the source of compassion, wisdom, and strength.

While the fog is still fresh, before we open our emails or read the paper, or venture onto Facebook, or judge others, Frankl tells us that we need to commit to creating meaning, and that we do so more effectively by looking deeply into the images and the provisional nature of our dreams and chimeras than we do in our frontal assaults on the sources of our suffering, by telling other people that they are wrong, by adding more grit to the salad.

Gandhi called this “non-violence resistance,” but I prefer Frankl’s precursor to action, the intention of making space in our hurried mornings to lose ourselves in the possibilities of the fog.

When my heart is open, I am better able to listen, and to honor the beauty of dilemmas for their quirky one-of-a-kind qualities.  Even, on good days, for their spiritual challenge.  Fog heals before the sun appears.

I got off the phone and made myself another cup of coffee. If only M. could offer the same thing that she so passionately desires for herself, I thought.  If only she could greet the fog as a friend.

In the meantime, as a beloved woman who was like a second mother to me used to say with great frequency,  “You’ve got to eat a peck of dirt before you die.”

To which, bless her memory, I say:  Achoo.

And, amen.