how (much) to feel
blue batik, spiritual bypassing, and watching fascism on a phone screen
“Enlightenment is intimacy with all things.”
—Dogen Zenji
I’m sitting at my dining room table, which is covered in a blue batik sarong we use as a tablecloth. 19 years ago, backpacking through Indonesia, my husband and I wandered into an alley in Yogyakarta and came upon a batik artist’s studio. The artist invited us in. A huge cauldron was boiling in the low-ceilinged kitchen — finished pieces were dipped into it to boil off the wax. Sarongs and table runners and cloths of various sizes hung on clotheslines in his cinderblock-walled yard. On a shelf, folded stacks of his work, in deep indigo blue, or a combination of deep brown and blue: traditional Indonesian batik colors.
He smiled and talked with us a while, then brought out a stack of folded cloths for us to look through. Right away this one was my favorite. It is an intricate assortment of imaginary animals: birds and beasts and strange plumed creatures that blur the boundaries of species. This is not a traditional design, geometric or floral — it is something unique, each being hand-outlined and dotted by the artist’s own imagination. We set it aside, the one thing we were sure of. Kept looking and eventually narrowed it down to a few other batik pieces we also loved and purchased, but this one: this one was the clearest yes, the unequivocal.
I loved it.
I was sure of that.
This piece of cloth has come with me through moves, across time. It outlived and outlasted the house where we lived for 11 years in South Philly, where my daughter put her little mouth against it at the table’s edge and teethed on it as a baby. It has one small hole, a few unremarkable stains, but it is mostly intact.
Which sometimes feels like more than I can say for myself.
What is it to be intact, to be whole?
Especially at a time when the world as we knew it is so rapidly fracturing and collapsing?
What I have noticed is that sometimes I am living outside myself these days.
Maybe we all do this, to one extent or another. We walk around wedded to the past, navigating by an outdated roadmap for what we ought to believe, how we ought to behave, built by some self who thought the world would be different than it is.
Or we walk around head in the clouds living in the future, spooling scenes of what could be, without any tether to knowing how to get there from here.
Or maybe we walk around unbound from linear time, in some quantum field that senses the multiverse of possible futures and lives already semi-entangled with an evolving understanding that it’s all just energy. (If you read that and were like “WTF are you talking about,” that’s cool. If you read that and were like “OMG same” maybe message me and we’ll talk?)
Meanwhile — and this is what I’m reckoning with — we sit and stare into the brightness of our phone screens watching government officials get handcuffed trying to protest unwarranted ICE arrests. We watch a mother collapse to the pavement screaming and hyperventilating as her young child looks on at her getting pulled into a white van. We watch armed battalions of cops fire tear gas and rubber bullets into throngs of protesters.
Then — if we’re among the still lucky enough to have homes — we lift the gaze from the screen and try to look at our own life. Our own tablecloths.
With eyes that are forever altered by the fresh round of horrors we’ve witnessed.
What I notice is that sometimes I stop knowing how to love things.
I mean everything feels neutral. Just — there. I stop caring.
What I mean is that yesterday morning I sat at this table and looked at this cloth which I have loved for 19 years and felt nothing.
It was as if some part of me had already detached. Accepted that everything we love we will lose. As if I have already unhooked myself from caring too much about anything that is temporary, mortal, or impermanent. Perhaps as a means of living into a future self who has made peace with changes my current self cannot yet fully fathom?
Sometimes it all feels sort of spiritual, the detachment — like: yes, it is deeply true that everything is impermanent, and that if we try to make too solid a home in that which is temporary — a job, a house, an ego identity — we will only suffer each time it changes. True freedom comes in a sense of deep presence that contains the knowing of this.
And as the world is rapidly changing, building our capacity not to over-identify with things that are out of our control or things that are changing does feel like a form of sanity — but I could feel that in me it was going too far in that moment, tipping out of balance, toward spiritual bypassing.
I could sense that it felt like some sort of somatic protection. An old familiar avoidance. If you don’t care, it can’t hurt. I could recognize the mistake inherent here, even if I couldn’t find a way out of it yet. I knew this was not the correct way to feel. Or — correct, incorrect. Probably there’s no such thing.
I knew it wasn’t how I wanted to live.
I want to feel.
I want to care.
I want to love.
I have been trying to understand how to live in a body in these times.
How tender can I allow myself to be, and still stay functional?
How much feeling spirals me into a churn of despair and fear I can’t emerge from? How much vastness and spaciousness pulls me out of accessing the compass of my most heartfelt compassion?
How can I stay passionate enough to pour myself into the work of helping, resisting, building, channeling the better world I still believe is possible into existence through the sheer force of ferocious mother-tiger wild love that courses through my veins sometimes, when I’m not too numb to feel it?
I know it requires having a body.
This morning I sat down at the tablecloth and I started to run my fingertip over the outline of an animal, tracing its edges.
Touching each tiny dot, one by one, slowly, with presence. As if to connect across time with the moment in which the artist first touched tiny drip after tiny drip of wax to cloth. To let my heart open to the remembering that all that exists — Everything! I mean every fucking thing! — only exists because we made it, breath by breath, moment by moment, action by action.
Some feeling started to return.
I felt flooded suddenly with tenderness for the artist and his efforts, and for the labors of love that have allowed each of us to exist.
And I got fucking angry and sad and tender and passionate not for the tablecloth but for the lives. The lives. The whole entire lives that are being desecrated and lost to every act of violence, small and large, whether that violence is physical — masked men or bombs — or neglectful — healthcare funding slashed, education budgets decimated, climate policy hurtling us faster toward an unlivable planet. Fuck, I could actually feel it again.
How every child who dies of starvation in Gaza is the sum total of thousands of moments: meals prepared by parents’ hands, grain grown in earth and nourished by sun, songs sung in a mother’s arms, the bodies of ancestors that got us here. Every house that burns down in warzone or climate-induced wildfire is the sum total of thousands of moments and a lifetime of love. The fucking sacrilege of not protecting what we love, when I let myself feel it, is sometimes overwhelming, but when we digest it into our bodies and hearts, held in a vast unconditional love, it can become fuel.
It can become fuel.
Again and again.
We have to feel it so we can use it, so we can channel it, so we can face it, so we can change it.
When I’m not numb to everything, every single moment of every single life feels precious again.
And then I want to fight for us, to protect us all.
“Enlightenment is intimacy with all things,” said Dogen Zenji.
A tall order. To look at every moment through eyes that truly want to see.
To feel every moment with a heart that truly wants to love.
To understand that yes, things change, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t love them fully and completely exactly as they are right now, while knowing they’re disappearing before your eyes.
I’m finding this to be the practice I need.
To see something horrific on the phone screen and then pause, and put the phone down, and feel my own body.
Not to avoid the work of caring for the world but to do it from a place that is real, and tender, and mine.
If you too have been finding it hard to feel sometimes — if you’re overthinking, numbing, distracting — you could try it too if you want. Slow way down for a moment. Trace a fingertip over the shape of something you love. A photograph of your grandparents. A beeswax candle. The painting that hangs on your wall. Breathe deep, and open your heart to your own love first. What you love, what you grieve, what you hope for. What you’re scared to lose.
Hold yourself in your own arms. Go get hugged as often as you can.
From this place of feeling, I find I can reach out with more tenderness for others.
Including you, now, reading this.
I’m holding you, and anything you’re feeling — anything you’re living through, struggling with, wanting, fearing — in so much love.
Boundless, and real.
My body to yours.
The spirit likes to dress up like this: ten fingers, ten toes, shoulders, and all the rest at night in the black branches, in the morning in the blue branches of the world. It could float, of course, but would rather plumb rough matter. Airy and shapeless thing, it needs the metaphor of the body, lime and appetite, the oceanic fluids; it needs the body’s world, instinct and imagination and the dark hug of time, sweetness and tangibility, to be understood, to be more than pure light that burns where no one is— so it enters us— in the morning shines from brute comfort like a stitch of lightning; and at night lights up the deep and wondrous drownings of the body like a star. – Mary Oliver –