Tag: Jeff Brown

Friendship

As friendships grow closer, conflict becomes more difficult to avoid. And this is often a good thing. Because the closer we get to each other’s hearts, the more triggers rise into view. Because you can’t fully know someone until you ignite each other’s fire. Because you won’t know if a connection has legs until it has been tested by conflict. And when it is, there is a choice to be made. Walk away in disgust or walk toward it in effort to deepen the connection. Conflict isn’t the adversary of connection. Fear of confrontation is.

Jeff Brown, Hearticulations

This is a deeply vulnerable topic…for me and I’ll presume many of you, particularly my women readers. It’s one of those areas that so deeply affects our lives and yet when friendships go sideways, fall apart, dissolve into thin air, we seldom if ever talk about it. I’m certain I’ve read somewhere from someone whose opinion matters to me, that breakups with friends can be as devastating as divorce, if not more so. And so it is, with the encouragement from a friend, I write this post to begin to illuminate the often shadowed dynamic so essential to our lives and well being.

I included the above quote in a letter I recently sent to a friend. Sensing our relationship was wobbling, for weeks – months even – I pondered reaching out to enquire of her. And then in a bout of insomnia several weeks ago, compelled I sat down in the dark of my writing studio to craft a letter. Several revisions later, coupled with my self doubt and courage that waxed and waned, this quote arrived last week. It both perfectly described my thoughts on friendship in general, and framed the intention and context specific to my letter to her.

It’s not the first time I’ve written such a letter to a friend, or initiated the conversation. And always the self doubt. Always the courage to reveal, to make myself vulnerable by asking, “Are we OK?” I think we’ve all seen how as we grow closer to another – a friend, a partner, a professional colleague – anyone with whom we’ve made an investment of time, care, attention and regard – that conflict is bound to arise. Paradoxically, our differences surface and grow in the very container of similarity and safety provided by the initial attraction and energy of the relationship. This is particularly so of marriage, and why it holds the potential for the healing of its partners, as old wounds come to light. But avoid naming it, fearful of our own vulnerability in the face of it, self doubt and shame grow, projection and denial thrive, and relationship languishes or collapses.

Friendships – like my self doubt, courage and insomnia – wax and wane. As the saying goes, they come for a reason, a season, or a lifetime. This and the analogy I’ve adopted – one of the astrological arrangements of stars and planets moving closer and then apart – help restore perspective. Given my nature, in those periods of waning and moving apart, I’ve found myself wondering “why?” In the absence of clarification, I’ve defaulted, sometimes distressingly, to a habit of mind cultivated in childhood that says, “I’m to blame.” That same childhood source of those triggers that get touched when I get close to another’s heart and they inadvertently say or do, or don’t say or do, and hit the target. When I do the same to another.

…Something in you knew
Exactly how to shape it,
To hit the target,
Slipping into the heart
Through some wound-window
Left open since childhood.

John O’Donohue, “For Someone Who Did You Wrong,” in To Bless The Space Between Us (2008)

With a child’s naiveté and cultivated by societal norms, I’ve believed in the possibility of, even yearned for a “bff” – that one girlfriend who, through thick and thin, over the ups and downs of life, would always be there. (But truthfully, when I consider my own life and its continuous unfolding, I’m not sure about it – except for Oprah and Gayle, perhaps.) Implied is a depth of trust and consistent connection which can be a displacement onto or substitute for what was missing in our earliest relationship with mother. Jungian analyst Marion Woodman writing about the “Death Mother” together with Daniela Sieff and Toko-pa Turner, and contemporary writer Bethany Webster on “The Mother Wound,” are each identifying an archetype arising from patriarchy with its pervasive damaging impacts for girls and women, and their relationships with self and other. I’ve felt deficient and heart broken when friends for whom I cared a great deal, loved even, despite efforts to make amends, broke up with me because I had hit their heart target. Even today, the memory is a tender ache.

…Meanwhile, you forgot,
Went on with things
And never even knew
How that perfect
Shape of hurt
Still continued to work.

John O’Donohue, “For Someone Who Did You Wrong,” in To Bless The Space Between Us (2008)

In relationships that matter to me, where the heart is touched, it’s the absence of clarification I’d find most troubling. It’s why I’d ponder for days and wake at 3:00 am to draft a letter. Muster the courage and allow myself to be vulnerable to enquire. I rest a bit easier now, in a solace knowing it might simply be a change in season, no longer the reason, that the planets have shifted. Why what was once close is not quite so, or any longer.

…Now a new kindness
Seems to have entered time
And I can see how that hurt
Has schooled my heart
In a compassion I would
Otherwise have never learned.

John O’Donohue, “For Someone Who Did You Wrong,” in To Bless The Space Between Us (2008)

I’ve said to friends who have mattered along the way, when you feel something is amiss between us, please don’t waste precious time, energy and sleep trying to figure out if it’s you or me, foolish or worthy of your attention. It’s most likely all true. So please bring it to the friendship so we can work on it together. Walk toward me for clarification, and deepen the connection. Please.

Or don’t. I’m learning to be OK with that choice, too.

…Somehow now
I have begun to glimpse
The unexpected fruit
Your dark gift had planted
And I thank you
For your unknown work.

John O’Donohue, “For Someone Who Did You Wrong,” in To Bless The Space Between Us (2008)

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

True to Path

“You can’t measure your success by the number of
people who follow you. You measure it by how
true you are to path. Because if you aren’t true to
path, no amount of societal success will ever
gratify you. And if you are true to path, the way
that the world receives you is of little significance
because you have already found your way home.”

Jeff Brown, Hearticulations: on friendship, love and healing, 2020


Hmmmm…ideally, in principle, I know this to be true and appreciate Jeff’s reminder. Though right now, during the cinematic and music awards season, witnessing the unabashed joy, honor, respect, humility, and bewilderment experienced by winners, and too, by those who didn’t win (let’s step away from the binary), I do think such acknowledgement of one’s being “true to path” is important. Perhaps even vital.

I sampled such sweetness when after several submissions over the past two years, and a couple of honourable mentions, I received the email this week announcing my poem had been chosen by the judges of Off Topic Publishing’s poetry contest. Last week another publisher wrote back in response to a submission that my three poems were “fabulous.” Had I not erred in submitting them simultaneously, often an acceptable practice but in this case forbidden, they’d be published this spring. A trifecta of success when the Edmonton Stroll of Poets selected one of my photos for the cover of its 2023 annual anthology, and too, a poem. A bit more remote, though nonetheless rewarding, is that my editor secured an international publisher for the education anthology she oversaw, for which I wrote the foreward and poetry for each section.

Do I feel joy, thankful, affirmed for my efforts? You bet I do. Emailing a friend, I wrote that the angels had given me just enough to nudge me on in this new calling. While I’d already lived the lesson of leaning into rejection and mustering perseverance – one I know will come again and again – after hiding in a cave for a couple of months upon taking way too seriously an off hand remark from an established local poet, I somehow found my way back to path by editing, writing and preparing over twenty submissions, including another send out of my collection, during the first two months of this year.

Now to wait and see…and finish packing for my return to Morocco, where for three weeks I’ll revisit a land that enchanted, enthralled, and inspired one of those “honorably mentioned” poems. I won’t be posting here this month. And while I’ll be photographing, I’m uncertain about posting on my Facebook and or Instagram accounts.

In the meantime, I wish you, dear friends, the uplifting joy in spring’s arrival together with much love and kindest regards.

Bravo to We Who Are

“When you reach a stage when you can have a very
dark and difficult experience, without having to look
on the “bright side,” then you know that you have
made progress on your healing journey. Because one
significant measure of our emotional health, is our
capacity to tolerate all of our experiences without
jumping to reactive reframes. You reach a stage where
you can stretch to accommodate the truth of your lived
experience. You have enough light inside, to own the
shadow. And enough shadow inside, to own the light.”

Jeff Brown, Hearticulations: on friendship, love and healing, 2020

Taking a step sideways from my usual posting of a Friday poem, I found this quote scrolling on my Facebook feed this week, something I’m doing only occasionally these days (that might be a story for another time). Posted on a friend’s timeline, after reading the comments I was reminded that decades ago I had read something Shakti Gawain of creative visualization fame, wrote about positively thinking herself into a psychosis. At a time when a heavy theme within the new age thought movement was espousing “think positive and manifest thus,” her words left an indelible mark. In that same era, I read Ken Wilber in an issue of the New Age Journal calling out this same tendency, particularly with reference to blaming those suffering with life threatening illness, as his wife at the time was dying of cancer. (Wilber, having created the brilliantly deep and expansive Intergral Theory, is who Fr. Richard Rohr describes in a recent podcast with Brene Brown, “the wisest philosopher of religion on the American scene.”)

I received the gift of insight a few weeks ago, during an interview with a fellow doing a Masters degree in Tourism, studying the transformations experienced by we who walk “secular,” non-religious inspired caminos. In response to his final question, “What in 3 or 4 sentences would I describe as the main lessons learned from my camino?” and as I wrote here last week, after several moments of quiet consideration, searching for the most accurate words, I said that I am developing an embodied, visceral familiarity with what it means to live in Life’s messy, inchoate middle, engaging with, partnering with, Life living itself.

Bravo to we who are so fiercely tender and tenderly fierce in our refusal to only live on the bright side of life, ignoring its necessary, organic, abundant mess. Life needs us to be so.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.