Stay with the Listening

This world deserves a kiss on both cheeks
on the way out of the door
and you have to let people see you do it.

Failure to do so becomes —
you are just another advocate
but not much of a practitioner.

~ Stephen Jenkinson

Since arriving home in Michigan one month ago, the yet-unanswered questions include: am I going to reopen my practice and if (or when) I will see a friend who went from a daily contact to essentially a lack of contact over this past winter.

Of course, there is a much deeper structure than the surface of these (and all) questions.

It has taken me days to be able to listen to the entire conversation with Terry Patten and Stephen Jenkinson — an episode titled: “Overwhelming Beauty — and Being OK, Dying.”

On his 70th birthday, Terry was informed that there is a probably metastatic cancer in his lungs.

The talk is available on the State of Emergence podcast now.

Shortly after listening, a dear friend who is losing her hair in the current process of cancer treatment included this in her recent post about her hair loss: I made a common error…..I didn’t let my painful feelings have any air time. I shifted so quickly that there was no recognition that this particular development has impact. I’m aware where it ranks in the big picture ….. but it’s not meaningless.

I notice where the questions about my practice or the change in my relationship ranks in the big picture…. but they are not meaningless.

I appreciate my willingness to stay with the listening and to feel the painful feelings that were evoked by this podcast. To stay with the listening was not easy. The subject matter is not light. It was not pleasurable.

But it is meaningful and as I stay with the listening, I notice a bit more about what I found intolerable with my friend over this past year.

As I stay with the listening, Stephen’s words suddenly stimulate a whiff of clarity that sweeps into my being:

She is still selling comfort as the place to get to….

If you’re lucky, there are a few people who tend to your silence without asking you to break it….

I suspect it’s like war, in the following way. You come back from war, and there’s nothing to say for one of two reasons. Either the language has not yet caught up with the realities of war and so explicitly there is nothing to say that doesn’t digress. Or, there is nothing to say to anyone because they weren’t there and there’s no way to bring them closer to it, and if they were there, you’re not talking about it anyway….

The mother of gratitude is grief. It doesn’t come from being spared….

If you don’t die of this now, you will die of that then….

Terry’s stark honesty and his transparency of his not knowing pulls me back so I can stay with the listening:

We all have the terminal diagnosis. We don’t know the time or the contours….

The beauty of this life — the thing I don’t want to kiss goodbye — has made itself especially vivid and the fact that I am totally not in control makes everything poignant, tender, full of vibrancy….

You can’t kiss that goodbye except with tears and they’re not “unhappy.” They’re deeply felt, they are hardly knowable….

Jenkinson is the author of Come of Age: The Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble (2018), the award-winning Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul (2015), Homecoming: The Haiku Sessions (a live teaching from 2013), How it All Could Be: A workbook for dying people and those who love them (2009), Angel and Executioner: Grief and the Love of Life – (a live teaching from 2009), and Money and The Soul’s Desires: A Meditation (2002).