“Stressed out. And terrified.” That was the response I received to asking a family member how she was doing recently. I sat with that text for a good while, not sure how to respond. This person has a one year old baby and her husband has been laid off. As a single woman, I can’t imagine the stress of being a new parent much less trying to be a decent parent and provider during this pandemic.
I told myself I wasn’t going to respond until I had something truly helpful to say. I went about my day feeling my own waves of emotion rise and fall. Then the word “Pray” came to me. I knew it was for me, but later realized it was for her too. So, I sat down, put my hand on my heart and said “Great Spirit, Ancestors, this is too much for me. This is too much for all of us. I’m lost. We’re lost. I don’t know what to do. So I’m handing it all over to you. I surrender.” Then I stumbled to my bed and cried deep sobs of everything I had been tightly holding and clinging onto or trying to manage and control in my life. I let it all go. I laid there feeling an excruciating vulnerability of being cracked wide open, exposed, without any defenses. I felt my most basic, raw, human self lying there. I’d experienced this hollowed out place only a few times in my life— once during my divorce, once before I left city life and moved to the woods, and again in 2017 after 3 traumatic events left me with PSTD. I knew this feeling and that it was a threshold place. Every other time I’d experienced it, the few previous times in my life when I fully completely surrendered control, my life changed dramatically afterward.
This time, as I lay there resisting the urge to contract, I felt a deep peace come over me. This time I didn’t feel horribly alone or that the road ahead was going to be a lonely one. This time, I felt the presence of many. With my eyes closed, I could feel the presence of a multitude expanding around me. I knew I was being surrounded by thousands of relatives who had lived and died during past pandemics, wars, natural disasters, and famines. I cried knowing that they knew exactly what I was experiencing and far worse: the fear, anxiety, uncertainty, rage at an ineffective, uncaring governments, and grief. I could see the tears of compassion and understanding in their eyes as they looked at me. I felt deeply loved. There was SO much love. I felt connected to something so great and vast, a belonging to a long resilient, and resourced lineage.
As I lay there, I began to feel a warmth and a new feeling of strength rising outward from the core of my chest— the same place I’d been feeling a collapsing tightness for weeks. I began to feel resourced in a way I’ve never felt. I could see that I was on the front lines of a lineage that KNEW how to survive everything humanity has ever faced. I had access to ALL of that knowledge and wisdom. It was available to me. It is available to us ALL! In that moment, I knew it was only a request away. So I closed my eyes, placed my hand on my heart and prayed again. “Please, show me the way. Show us all the way out of this in the most healing way possible.” Another wave of grief washed over me. I laid back down and wept a good long while. Afterward, I pulled myself up feeling emptied, lighter. The weight of all I had been carrying was gone. My prayer had been answered in that simple act of allowing myself to fully grieve, as my ancestors had done while they were in bodies, and to feel their eternal loving presence around me.
There are no quick solutions to our world’s problems. There are no easy answers, but we can always allow ourselves to feel, and in doing so, we honor our deeply feeling selves that care and love our world so much.