What Remains When Certainty Is Gone

Tomorrow is the Autumn Equinox, that brief point of balance when day and night meet as equals before the dark begins to take up more space. I usually think of this season in terms of harvest, what has ripened and what we are gathering after the long light of summer. This year, though, I find myself thinking more about what has carried me, because this has been a year of being carried.

Earlier this year, I injured my back again. There was surgery, a lot of pain and uncertainty, and a body that suddenly couldn't do many of the ordinary things I had taken for granted. For a while, I was completely dependent on other people. And I mean dependent. I needed help with the basic architecture of a life: rides, meals, my dog walked, things lifted or retrieved from places I couldn't reach. All those small acts we barely notice when we can do them ourselves.

I've always thought of myself as a grateful person. I've had a gratitude practice in one form or another for years, but this gratitude felt different. It had weight because it was so specific. It came through the door carrying groceries. Friends rearranged their schedules to drive me somewhere or sent funny, loving, and distracting voice notes when I was lying there hurting and bored. People checked in and then checked in again. There is something about needing people that changes gratitude because there is no abstraction left in it. You know exactly what has been given to you, and you know you could not have done it alone.

As my body has slowly begun to become my own again, even as I look toward another surgery on my hip, I keep thinking about how extraordinarily fortunate I am. When I needed people, they came. I am very aware that this isn't something everyone has. There are people moving through illness or disability without someone nearby who can bring dinner or stay close when things get frightening. I have probably used the word community thousands of times in my life, especially in spiritual spaces, but I don't know that I really understood it in my bones until this year.

Community, I understand now, is a lived practice of belonging to one another. It's the relationships where we can need and be needed without keeping score. Care moves back and forth over the years, unevenly sometimes, because that's how life is. There may be a year when I make the soup and another when I am the one lying in bed waiting for someone to bring it. That isn't a debt to be settled. It's a relationship.

And I am thinking about community in a larger sense too, because it is impossible for me to look at the world right now and pretend that my own uncertainty exists by itself. I think about trans and LGBTQ people I love living through a time when their bodies, identities and basic freedoms are being argued over and legislated. I am queer, so none of this feels far away. I think about families living with the fear of ICE raids and detention, and about people in Nepal who have lost family members, homes and whole communities in catastrophic flooding. There are so many people living with kinds of uncertainty that are not chosen and are not philosophical.

I don't want to compare those things to my own losses. But they do change the way I think about what community means. Maybe this year has made me understand, in a very small and personal way, how much we need one another when the ground becomes uncertain. And that feels important to remember now. Community isn't only where we go for comfort. It is one of the ways we keep each other alive and remind each other that we belong here.

The strange thing is that while I was discovering the depth of this kind of community in one part of my life, I was losing another kind entirely. During this same period, I experienced the devastating loss of a spiritual community and teacher. I am still finding language for what happened, and some of it isn't mine to tell. What I can say is that the experience has forced me to look closely at high-control spiritual environments and what can happen when hierarchy becomes intertwined with devotion and belonging.

Perhaps the most difficult part has been asking myself why I was susceptible to it. I want to understand what I was longing for and what I believed someone else possessed that I did not. I have thought a lot about reverence and the ways it can gradually become obedience without our necessarily noticing the moment when something shifts. The question I keep coming back to is: When does devotion stop opening us and begin making us smaller?

I have spent much of my adult life in spiritual practice, so these aren't abstract questions for me. I still believe there can be enormous beauty in lineage and apprenticeship, and I believe deeply in approaching traditions with respect. There are practices that come from particular cultures, communities and lineages, and I don't think everything is simply ours to take because we find it meaningful. I care about the difference between receiving a practice through relationship and simply claiming it for ourselves.

At the same time, I am beginning to see how the very real concern about appropriation can be used to create fear and enforce control. When one person or a small group becomes the sole authority on whether your relationship to a practice is legitimate, questioning them can begin to feel like a moral failure. The fear of doing harm or taking something that isn't ours can make it difficult to recognize when legitimate boundaries around a tradition have become entangled with a demand that we not question the people enforcing them. Those are not the same thing, although from inside a community they can be difficult to distinguish.

I think this can be especially hard to see when you have been brought close to the center of a spiritual community. Proximity to a teacher can feel like trust, and access to teachings or conversations that others don't have can deepen the sense that you have been entrusted with something precious.

And, if I'm willing to look at myself without flinching, there is something else there too: it can feel good to be chosen. It can feed that very human part of us that wants to feel special, seen, or somehow closer to the source of things. That desire is not difficult to manipulate.

The sense of being chosen can quietly become part of what keeps us loyal, because questioning the person who chose us may also mean giving up the identity and belonging that came with being chosen. It also means that more of your spiritual life and sense of belonging can become tied to that inner circle. By the time you begin to question what is happening, there can be an enormous amount to lose. Leaving isn't simply leaving a teacher. It can mean losing an entire world that has grown up around them.

All of this has created a crisis of faith. Practices I once trusted feel different in my hands. Words that once meant something specific to me have become unstable. Ideas I have taught and lived inside for years have had to be taken down from the shelf and examined again. I don't yet know what I will keep, and I am trying not to decide too quickly.

This is why the Equinox feels so potent to me this year. It is a moment of balance, though balance in the natural world is always moving. The light is already changing and soon the leaves will begin to fall. I feel something similar happening in my own life. I am weighing things again. Some of what once seemed unquestionably true doesn't anymore. Other things feel more true than they ever have.

Gratitude and grief are sitting together at the same table for me this year. One form of community fell apart while another revealed itself as more sacred than I knew.

There is a teaching within the elemental practices I have worked with for years that feels newly alive for me now. Resilience, in this framework, is the capacity to come back into presence. I have taught that for years, but I understand it differently now that I have had to live it.

I find myself wanting a spirituality sturdy enough for the actual world, one that can live alongside a body that breaks and a friend who comes over with food. And by the actual world I mean more than my own life. I mean this beautiful and brutal world we are living in together. I want a spirituality that helps me stay present to it rather than retreat from it, that makes me more capable of caring about what happens to other people rather than less.

I need it to have room for the terrible vulnerability of needing other people and for the fact that sometimes there simply isn't an explanation that makes what happened okay. I also want a spiritual life in which my own connection to Source is mine, direct and intimate, rather than something mediated through another human being. A teacher may help me recognize that connection or deepen my capacity to listen, but they cannot own it, grant it, or stand between me and it. I think we have to be careful whenever another human being begins to position themselves as the gatekeeper to the sacred, especially when access to them, the teachings, or the community depends on our willingness to conform and not question - or learn or sit with other teachers.

Sometimes the holiest thing in the room is the person who says, I can come. What do you need?

Perhaps that is part of what I am harvesting this year: a less glamorous or exclusive understanding of the sacred, with dirt under its fingernails. A sacred that drives you to the hospital or does the laundry because you can't. A sacred that shows up for the people who are frightened or being pushed to the edges. A sacred that reminds us that none of us makes it through this world alone.

I don't know yet what my spiritual life will look like on the other side of all of this, and I'm trying to give myself time before rebuilding it. I have lived long enough to know something about crises of faith, and I have learned to have a certain amount of faith in the crisis itself. There are things I can see now that I couldn't see while the structure was still standing.

So this is where I find myself as we move toward the Equinox. I am extraordinarily grateful for the people who carried me, even as I grieve what has been lost. I don't know yet where all of this leads.

For now, that is enough.

Thread One ~ What I'm Reading

Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

I'm rereading Care Work, and it is landing very differently than it did the first time. It's a collection of essays about disability justice and interdependence, rooted in communities that have had to create ways of caring for one another in a world that often treats needing care as failure. After months of relying on other people for some of the most basic parts of my life, I'm reading it from inside an experience I didn't have the first time.

I have spent much of my life assuming independence was the goal. I wanted to carry my own weight, and I've always been more comfortable being the person who helps. Then suddenly I couldn't be. Piepzna-Samarasinha's idea of care webs gives language to something I have just lived. Care moves between us over time, and it doesn't necessarily move evenly. There are seasons when one person needs far more than they can give. If we are fortunate, the web is strong enough to hold that.

I've also been thinking about the book's framing of access as an act of love and what it might mean to build our lives around the bodies people actually have, especially when those bodies change. I don't know yet what my body will allow in the coming years, and there is grief in admitting that because there are things I desperately want to return to.

Care Work is helping me think differently about adaptation and about how deeply the idea of independence has shaped the way I understand myself. Now I sit with a different question: How do I build a life around who I am becoming? I suspect I'll be living with that one for a while.

Thread Two ~ What I'm Listening To

PODCAST: The Nature Of with Willow Defebaugh

I have been listening almost obsessively to The Nature Of, a podcast from Atmos hosted by Willow Defebaugh. These conversations have been restoring something in me. I think the closest word for it is wonder.

Willow is the cofounder and editor-in-chief of Atmos, a climate and culture publication devoted to re-enchanting people with the natural world. The podcast occupies territory I have always loved, where ecology meets art and science. I especially love the spaciousness of Willow's interviewing and the willingness to let mystery remain mysterious. When your understanding of the world has been shaken, the urge to find another set of answers can be powerful. These conversations remind me that I don't have to rush.

The conversation with Maria Popova, “Turning Matter Into Meaning,” has stayed with me because of the way they talk about uncertainty and wonder, and what it might mean to loosen our grip on certainty enough to be astonished again. In “Uncovering the Holy Ordinary,” Terry Tempest Williams talks about attention and the living world, including the kind of noticing that can become prayer.

I also loved the conversation with cosmologist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, which travels outward into dark matter and the edges of what we know about the universe. Something about listening to very smart people talk about how much we still don't know feels particularly good to me right now.

After a season in which spirituality has become complicated for me, The Nature Of has given me a way back into awe without asking me to decide what any of it means. I can look more closely at the world and remember how enormous and strange it is.

I can wonder.

Thread Three ~ A Poem

Still, Each Other

The light is changing again.

I notice it first on the porch,

late afternoon coming through the windows

at an angle I haven't seen since spring,

and in the fields next door beginning

to give themselves back.

My body knows something about this.

There are seasons when a body

will not carry you where you want to go,

when the distance between the bed and the door

is enough country for one day.

I learned this year

how quickly the life you thought was yours

can become unfamiliar,

how strange it is to live inside a body

whose terms have changed.

I have mistaken other things, too.

I have mistaken the altar for the holy,

the keeper of the flame for the flame,

devotion for the silencing

of the small voice inside me

that knew something was wrong.

There are things I cannot unknow now.

So let autumn come.

Let the leaves loosen

without making a lesson of them.

Let darkness arrive

without asking it to heal me.

I am not asking this season

to make me whole.

I am asking for enough quiet

to hear what remains

when certainty is gone.

And I am remembering

that certainty has never been promised

equally to all of us.

There are people I love

whose lives are being made more precarious

by people they will never meet.

There are families waiting

for someone to come home.

There are people gathering

what can still be gathered

after the water has torn through.

What remains then?

Sometimes, each other.

A hand reaching for another hand.

A meal carried across a threshold.

Someone standing beside you

when standing alone is too much.

Maybe this is part of what community is:

not certainty,

but something we make together

when certainty isn't possible.

I am asking to know the difference

between surrender

and abandoning myself.

Maybe the sacred has always been this close.

Not somewhere above me.

Not held behind a door

I need another person to open.

Here.

In this bruised body.

In the cooling earth.

In the hands that carried me

and the hands reaching for one another

everywhere I look.

In whatever still speaks

when I become quiet enough to listen.

And in whatever it is

that still makes me turn toward the world

and want to know it.

Weaving it All Together

I suppose all of this is changing the way I think about being held in the world. Being cared for has changed my understanding of community. Care Work is giving me language for interdependence, while these conversations about nature and the universe are helping me remember that uncertainty doesn't have to be filled immediately, or ever.

I'm learning to let myself be cared for and to live with questions longer than I used to. Somewhere in there, wonder has begun finding its way back in. And perhaps hope has too, although it isn't the kind of hope that promises everything will be all right. It is much more ordinary than that. It looks a lot like people refusing to abandon one another.

As I move into autumn, I want to stay close to the people who show up and be someone who shows up for them. I want that circle to keep widening. I want to pay attention to what I know in my own body without becoming so absorbed in my own life that I stop noticing what is happening beyond it. And whatever I call Source, the sacred, mystery, or the living world, I want to remember that my relationship with it does not need another human being standing between us.

That feels like plenty for one season.

With so much love and gratitude,

Tara

P.S. for local folks: I have a Restorative & Yoga Nidra Class coming up next Monday, the 28th at Evergreen Healing Arts, with a few spaces left. You can learn more and register here.