Meditations on Pain

Poem + Reflections + Audio-recorded prompt

I am ringing in the year with fireworks
of pain, explosions
across the sky of my shoulder.
I gasp at sudden red, sudden white,
how they fall in lines of light
to my arm,
my wrist,
my fingers.

The show keeps me
awake.

Pain is only an inch from awe—
alertness, sharpened
in a body, scaled down to size. 

Pain is barely an inch from rest—
nowhere to run,
nothing to do.

The instinct of pain:
to find a way out.  
All I can find
is a way in, 

like this pain is a cliff edge
from which to fall
into strange, new wholeness,
into holding darkness and holding light—

holy things
that cannot be held
apart. 

The holidays have been a time of quiet, of slowing down, and of letting go for me. That wasn’t the plan, but it’s how it worked out. I was sick for five or six days over Christmas, and in the past week, the shoulder pain that has nagged me for over a month revved from constant ambient noise to overpowering roar. The ways I often self-soothe—rock climbing, playing guitar or piano—are largely out of reach. Typing is difficult, and I can only stay at it for short stretches. My sleep is fragmented by pain. And as if all of that isn’t enough, I can’t aeropress my coffee.

I know this sounds like a pity party, but it’s actually not. Because the strange and lovely thing is that this experience has felt wrapped in a sense of peace and curiosity. What are you here to teach me? I keep asking my pain.

In case you’re concerned, rest assured that one answer my pain offered up is that I should, you know, maybe go see my doctor, so I’ve done that, and I have a few hopefully helpful referrals, but I think this pain can teach me about other things, too.

About a year ago, I was standing on a beach in impossibly high winds, sand rushing like a river through the air, and I found myself turning into the abrasion, opening my arms into wings, and praying for the wind to scour everything away that wasn’t love. To just take it all, to strip me to bedrock, and polish me down to what’s true. (For me, love is the truest thing—bedrock beneath all the sediment I accrue.) This prayer has come back to me many times since then. I pray it in wind, I pray it in rain, I pray it in the scorching sun. But lately I’ve been laughing at myself a little because do I really think I need literal weather to find my way to bedrock? To soften down into the solidity of love?

Anything can be wind. Everything can be wind. This is what I was thinking to myself, and then the illness and the pain and an assortment of other personal challenges arrived, as if in a single gust. Wind—all of it. Here to strip me of some of the clutter that gets in the way of love. Love and aliveness—those are the two values and longings I return to over and over. Pain is a doorway into both.

Yesterday morning (I wrote everything above in the two or three days preceding that), the doorway became still more acute. I got up early to go to the doctor but passed out from the pain of removing my pajama shirt and ended up in the ER instead. I don’t like this wind. This wind sucks. (It seems the wind is a pinched nerve in my neck, in case you’re wondering.)

I didn’t try to let the wind scour me of everything during the hours I spent in the ER. I just focused on getting through it. I am taking things one ragged breath at a time. But sometimes, sometimes, when the pain rises to a fever pitch, I turn my total attention to it. I come back to that question from Rilke: “What’s it like such intensity of pain?”

Staying there, feeling the pain all the way and with all the curiosity I can muster, I sometimes find it shifting into a dark hole on the back of my shoulder (or arm or wrist or all of the above). I imagine myself stepping inside it. And there I find a network of pitch-black tunnels leading every which way. I imagine these tunnels connecting me, through my pain, to every other being who is experiencing pain in that moment. I’ve felt love reaching through this black opening and down a long tunnel to sit with a frightened young woman in labor. I’ve felt love tunneling through the darkness to be with someone in the fresh and terrifying aftermath of a car accident. Then to an amputee in Gaza. Then to a parent who has just lost a child. Then to someone, anyone, who feels entirely, excruciatingly alone.

These visualizations may be self-serving. For brief, beautiful flickers, the pain shifts from a constant scream to a beating pulse, and what I feel pulsing with it is connection. Pain-connection-pain-connection—drumbeat of body and soul. The “good” feelings do not negate or permanently erase the “bad” ones. I am still scared about passing out again. I’m anxious about how long this pain will last. I gasp aloud at the difficulty of the most basic tasks. But having this bright thread of beauty and connection and meaning weaving through the thick darkness lets me be alive, rather than merely surviving, even in this humbling-scary-oh-so-ouchy here and now.

A few other sources of comfort, just to make it clear that I’m not some sort of guru treating this entire experience as a prolonged meditation: talking with loved ones on the phone, receiving tasty food drop-offs, listening to music, very slow and careful walks on the farm, and lying in bed on my good side, watching old episodes of “Shrinking.” I’m also starting a course of steroids today, which I hope will help.

I wanted to share a writing prompt with you, but this has gotten quite long, and typing is really hard for me, so I’m offering you an audio prompt instead.

I hope your year is off to a beautiful start, dears. And if you’re finding it rather windy, then I hope that wind gusts you more deeply into whatever it is you value most. Please feel free to share your poems, reflections, experiences with pain, current wind conditions, pep talks, or favorite lines from “Shrinking” in the comments thread.