Sideways Stick

A Strange Feather

All

The craziness,

All the empty plots,

All the ghosts and fears,

All the grudges and sorrows have

Now

Passed.

I must have inhaled

A strange

Feather

That finally

Fell

Out.

(Hafiz, translated by Daniel Landinsky)

It felt caught in my throat like a sideways stick, this swallowing of shame that’s not mine.

So I spilled it onto paper the other night, holding nothing back. With the passion of rage flaring inside, I read those words aloud to a friend... it felt good. And in that release, the stick softened into a strange kind of feather. I shared it again, with another friend, then read what I wrote again and again... it felt good. And in that release, the feather softened… the feather softened, and it finally fell out.

Used to be I would swallow that shame and work hard to keep it down. I think a lot of us – maybe most of us – are conditioned that way. “If you can’t say something kind….” and “Let a smile be your umbrella.” And if we are naturally empathetic and sensitive creatures, our compassion is drawn immediately toward a desire to understand the other perspective when we get hurt. It's a tendency to have compassion for others, not matched by practicing compassion for ourselves. Rather than expressing my own hurt, sorrow or anger, I would turn others' pain onto myself, and swallow it part and parcel. For me, that kind of swallowing settled into deep depression more than once, as well as three-dozen extra pounds or so that I used to carry around.

So, that declaration of words with their hard-edged sounds did feel good. It moved bilious energy out of me and into the atmosphere, where the universe knows how to absorb wrath expressed in a healthy way. In that process, as if by miracle, rage was transformed from a stick to a feather, and finally drifted out into big, fat bubbles of laughter and mirth…

And a sense of standing ever more surely in my own ground.