Grace Between the Unstoppable Force and the Immovable Object

I walked naked into the arms of the sea without too much thought. I hadn't intended to. It was a cool April morning on the far northwest tip of the Washington coastline. I had only meant to go for a short walk, inhale my morning tobacco and coffee with a view of crashing waves and towering rocks while the sun began its relentless march up the sides of the sky and before I had to begin mine up the sides of a cliff and back to the van. We were leaving that day, I had been leading a grief ceremony all weekend, and the group was back at camp packing up for the soggy trek back to civilization. I had responsibilities.

I felt vaguely guilty. People were working and I was walking toward the water with my coffee, taking time I hadn't announced or justified.

It couldn't be helped, her pull was so strong, Great Grandmother Ocean, her waves formed miles and hours away in some unknown storm. The wave forms reach this particular strip of sand and great craggy sea stacks and reef and they change. Crashing into each other, wrapping around tall rocks with great exhalations of sea spray and foam, pulling deep around the ankles and hiding deadly sodden logs.

The northwestern Pacific coast is not exactly a friendly place. It has almost swallowed me whole more than once: a rogue wave nearly turning me and my giant backpack into a poor imitation of a selkie, king tides lapping at my sleeping bag late at night, slippery rocks threatening to break every ankle regardless of how rugged the tread of one's boot might be.

I had spent the previous day holding space for other people's grief. Without much conscious awareness I knew I needed to be held by something bigger than myself, even just for one cold wet moment. Not to escape, but to be nourished, to be cleared of what wasn't mine to carry home. It wasn’t a running from but a surrender to an embrace of something old and powerful (that maybe wasn’t trying to kill me this time).

So off came the thick wool layers and the damp socks and in I walked, bracing for a cold that never really came, feeling the unstoppable force of the waves tug at the very movable object of my body as they swirled against the immovable object of the shore.

I felt myself pushed and pulled around by these fundamental geologic forces, the relief from aching muscles, cloudy morning thinking and any guilt or anxiety lingering in dark crevices of the mind was immediate. By placing myself in the unruly liminal space between two ancient lovers I was temporarily relieved of my perceived burdens and just simply was for those moments.

This felt like grace.

This body is not an easy one to live inside. For many reasons it has endured more pain than many and been left a bit twisted and marked and hot, sometimes so hot that the only thing that can cool it is the icy waters of the North Pacific or the glacial silt-filled river that rushes past my home. Some of the reasons for this have been beyond my control, sneaky bacteria wreaking havoc in my brain for years, weird accidents, sudden deaths, a traumatic childhood, physical abuse at the hands of those who were supposed to love and protect me.

Those experiences, however painful and valid they might be, can calcify into stories of victimhood. An identity is built around who we are that is based on the fact that we suffered and will continue to suffer. Sometimes that identity protects us. Sometimes it limits what feels possible next. Then we start to make choices that confirm that belief system. I could choose to put different substances in my body that would not irritate and further inflame, I could choose to go to sleep earlier and offer my body more of a chance to heal and yet, frequently I don’t and sometimes what, in hindsight seems like a choice, does not feel that way in the moment.

This is especially true of addiction (as defined by any behavior where a person finds relief from suffering but there are negative consequences from repetition).

A few weeks after that morning, I was leading an outpatient addiction group. The topic was difficult emotions. We started with grace because some folks were late, and I noted that I'd like to extend them some grace for their tardiness.

Most people could name a time when they received grace from an outside source. They had stories of extending grace to others, too—forgiving sometimes extreme harm because the person was young, or confused, or wasn't thinking clearly. In addiction treatment, those who survive are there because someone or something forgave them enough to get them sober enough, even if just that day, to make it to the meeting.

But when I asked about self-forgiveness, the extension of grace to oneself, the room fell silent and some nervous coughs let me know this was a tender subject. These same people who could articulate exactly why someone else deserved compassion could not locate that same logic when the object was themselves. Even though they knew addiction is a disease process, even though they could name the extenuating circumstances, they still seemed to believe they deserved whatever suffering they experienced because ultimately it was seen as a choice, however influenced by broken brain wiring, to put the substance in their body. When they received grace, they felt guilty about it.

And is it really a choice? When we reach for whatever behavior or substance that can mitigate (however briefly) the pain activated by trauma pathways are we truly making a choice or are we simply following directives of a brain that doesn’t know that pain and suffering are not the same?

It’s seems that it may be both at once, and where does that leave us with how to proceed in life? Removing shame does not suddenly create capacity, but drowning in it seems to collapse whatever capacity is there.

I could feel the resonance in myself, the choices I make that contribute to my suffering and the difficulty finding grace or self-forgiveness for those choices, it’s not an easy thing and I had to learn it through extremes and experiences that showed me that, at times, when it was irrefutable that there was not a choice involve, something about the suffering shifted.

My son is named for the herb of grace, “Rue”, an important Mediterranean protection plant in old magick and folklore. It's also the plant that covered my body in third-degree chemical burns.

The reaction is called phytophototoxicity. Sunlight interacts with the plant oils on the skin, and within hours the skin boils. It moves so fast you can almost watch the blisters rise like bubbles in a pot of water reaching 212 degrees. Many layers of skin are destroyed overnight. There's a reason burn patients get morphine drips.

There was no morphine in the middle of the Amazon jungle. Not even ibuprofen to pretend something could help. Three days wide awake from the pain, having no clue what the cause of the blistering was (we wouldn’t know for sure that it was Rue burns till I made it out to a medical clinic), sitting in sparkling shallow streams shared with caiman, stingray, butterflies, and curious fish, trying to cool the heat.

What I learned in that stream was that there could be a difference between pain and suffering.

When I accepted the pain as inevitable, when I stopped arguing with it, stopped waiting for it to end, stopped believing it shouldn't be happening, and maybe most importantly, accepted that I hadn’t caused it, something changed. The sensation didn't cease. I still couldn't sleep or even sit still unless I was in water. But I became, somehow, ecstatic. The jungle around me turned vivid in its beauty and aliveness. The pain was still there, but I would not have called it suffering anymore, I was full of joy and gratitude and unutterable awe for the jungle and my life. 

This doesn’t necessarily mean that suffering is optional, just that it is possible, in some circumstances, to differentiate it.  This also does not mean that I didn’t need medical treatment, or that I should just let bad things happen to me without regard for safety, but it made it easier to wait and easier to make clear choices about what the next steps were to get treatment.

This felt like grace.

This experience would visit me again about two years ago, when my husband died. Sudden. Traumatic. Ugly and tragic in ways I still struggle to hold and comprehend. A rare and aggressive cancer that could not have been predicted, an unstoppable force that no amount of medical intervention or prayer or magick could so much as nudge in a direction other than the one it was hurtling towards, rushing against the immovable object of life plans and family.

As a community we became the shore, we couldn’t stop the waves of death and destruction but we could let them wash over us and change us and we could construct elaborate and beautiful rituals of grief and goodbye and love and in turn the experience of the force was changed by us.

His dying was traumatic, the nights in hospital watching what seemed like a fatal car crash dismembering a beloved body in slow motion, deliquescing from the inside faster than I could catch my breath. But the death itself was mitigated in its trauma by how it was met. By being put, without choice, in the middle between life and death and being broken and melted by the pressure, something was allowed to open.

A crackling supernova of aliveness where my heart had been.  I believe this was allowed to happen because of how tenderly and thoroughly I was held by my community (the human and non-human). During periods of acceptance, ecstatic intensity and overwhelming beauty would mix with the pain. I don't mean I was happy. I mean I was alive in a way that included the pain rather than being entirely organized against it.

This felt like grace.

It could be said that then the lesson is thus: grace arrives when we stop believing we caused the burning, when we accept what is happening (or happened).

This feels a little to neat and tidy though, to far from most lived experiences, not nearly as messy as the actual experience of sitting in the liminality for pressure and force and immovability that has allowed for these tastes of grace.

Sometimes we stop blaming ourselves and still suffer. Sometimes we cannot stop blaming ourselves at all. Sometimes the nervous system opens anyway, and sometimes it doesn’t.

Heat is generated by friction. The unstoppable force meets the immovable object and pressure becomes temperature.

The unstoppable force may be the long story of our soul, over many lifetimes, it may be love or death or biology or randomness. The immovable object may be individual capacity, old belief systems, institutions of power and extraction, or simply the limits of a body at a given moment.

And neither the force nor the object are truly fixed. The waves are changed by their constant lovemaking to the shore, the rock and sand weathered and altered by the constant pounding, and in this tidal liminality new forms of beauty sometimes emerge from the froth.

And maybe grace isn't the cooling itself, that's just relief, so is it the impulse to walk towards something that could just as easily offer relief as crush and drown us and finding that we, against all odds and hope, have perhaps survived?  That our heart is still beating, our lungs still breathing, that somehow, we still are.

I walked naked into the sea that soft April morning, without thinking, and it wasn't even cold. Placing my body into the liminality between two ancient lovers, I was temporarily cooled, nourished, cleared of what I had been holding for others. To stay too long would have been harmful. But to stay the right amount was what I needed to return to my responsibilities resourced instead of depleted.

The guilt I felt walking toward the water was gone by the time I walked back.

Not because I had earned the right to rest and nourishment. But because something in me had shifted enough that the argument about earning it no longer held the same weight.

It’s tempting to tie this all up in a nice little consumptive package that says something clean and definitive about suffering and pain and grief.

That suffering ends when we stop resisting. That grace arrives when we release self-blame. That there is a way to stand between the force and the object and be changed but not broken.

But those statements do not play out as truth, they are sometimes true and there it is, the grace is the unbidden, the unrepeatable, the sometimes.

Sometimes resistance makes things worse, and sometimes it is the only thing keeping a person intact. Sometimes acceptance changes the quality of pain, and sometimes pain remains exactly what it is. Sometimes we have choice, and sometimes the field narrows so completely that choice barely resembles itself.

And sometimes, even in the presence of monsters, dark forces and unbearable pain, something opens anyway.

image credit: Gianluca