Elephants ambling along the path they created (South Africa).
I hope that you have been enjoying the beauty of autumn and that life has been good to you. Thank you for reading my weekly newsletter and a warm welcome to all the new subscribers!
Today I want to explore what Stephen Harrod Buhner refers to as "the most important thing in life" in his amazing book Ensouling Language, On the Art of Nonfiction and the Writer's Life. He calls it "the invisibles." What does he mean by the invisibles? Read on to find out!
Importance of the Invisible: Living a Passionate Life
In the Garden Where Everything Matters
Recently, I've been inspired to appreciate parts of myself that I had felt I needed to suppress. My hero and mentor calls himself a barbarian, and he is a writer to writers, Stephen Harrod Buhner.
In his book Ensouling Language, On the Art of Nonfiction and the Writer's Life, he writes, "a human body just dead looks very like one still alive, yet something invisible has left it. In writing, as in life, it is the invisibles that make all the difference. Do you get what I mean here? Just as the most important thing in life is that invisible thing, the most important thing in writing is that very same invisible thing." (p 40)
"The more awareness you have of these distinctions, the greater the potential impact of your craft, for if you are aware, you can create with intention, you can touch with subtlety, you can shift the awareness of your readers by working with the depths of them in ways that their conscious minds will rarely notice directly. But to begin with, you must be willing to feel, to allow emotions to arise in response to your feeling, to have strong and deep feelings. These things can all be described as aspects of a passionate life. They belong to the human who fully engages the world, senses alive, to those who have reclaimed the response of the heart to what is presented to the senses. It generates writing that 'burns the blood like powdered glass.'" (pg 61)
Awareness. Intention. Subtlety. Consciousness. Feelings. A passionate life. We have much in common though he uses words in a different context for a different audience. If he is a barbarian, then I am too--a female, Chinese, Utah-bred, holistic-psychiatrist barbarian.
As I pondered his words, I remembered times when I was told "you talk too much," or "you can't be a good psychiatrist because you're too emotional." The passionate, expressive part of me learned long ago that it wasn't acceptable. So, over time, I put away pieces of myself for the sake of self-improvement.
During residency training, I was taught to keep my face expressionless during therapy, according to the Freudian, psychodynamic psychotherapy approach. In one class, the attending and residents scrutinized my approach since I was the weekly presenter (for that year) of an ongoing psychotherapy "case."
I tried my best to apply what I learned in training. But the patient (of the case) told me, "You seem to have grown colder over the course of treatment." I didn't feel colder. I was simply getting better at being expressionless. She was kind and gave me a mug at the conclusion of our work together. Leaving the building late that night with her mug, tears arose as my heart filled with gratitude, compassion, and joy when I thought of her—feelings that I never allowed myself to show.
Buhner's "invisibles" reminded me of an experience I had at the Red Butte Arboretum over three decades ago. I was living at the Medical Towers next to the Arboretum, nestled in the foothills of the Wasatch Range. As a medical student, I had been studying all day, memorizing facts from a stack of textbooks. The inhumane pace of unrelenting studying, punctuated by frequent tests (crafted to thwart my intellectual efforts), had reduced me to something shriveled and dry, a heartless mental-machine.
I needed the garden, its light and beauty, to bring me back to life, but I arrived too late. Night had already fallen, and it was hard to follow the path beneath the moon. Everything appeared in shades of gray in the silent garden, as I walked alone, feeling sad and bereft of the intangible, essential part of me that once made me feel alive.
"This is a waste of time; it doesn't matter," I thought.
Then softly, another thought entered my mind from somewhere beyond me, accompanied by a feeling, a realization, a connection, and a shift. The thought said to me, "Everything matters." Every moment matters. And you, in the garden, searching for yourself matters. At the same time, I felt accompanied, within my being, by a Presence that felt alive and dewy with freshness. Through an incomprehensible shift, its subtle arrival made the moment matter.
I continued visiting the arboretum throughout medical school and felt its beauty create a space for the invisibles: sensitivity, softness, creativity, curiosity, and openness. Most of all, a space for my feelings. I did not know, at the time, how important being with the garden around me and the garden within me would be. Most of what I memorized in medical school is now irrelevant, but the arboretum remains luminous and beautiful still.
Protect the invisibles within you. They are the sacred Life-affirming heart of you. Remember the passion you felt as a child living life, fully alive to your senses, and let your feelings "burn the blood like powdered glass." Keep asking questions that "have patiently waited for you, questions that have no right to go away." (David Whyte)
Buhner quotes Nick Cave, "those songs that speak of love without having within their lines an ache or a sigh are not love songs at all but rather Hate Songs disguised as love songs, and are not to be trusted. These songs deny us our humanness and our God-given right to be sad..."
I share this quote because I feel that psychiatry, at times, suffers from a similar sickness as the rest of society--ignoring our humanness and our God-given right to be sad—numbing feelings that make us alive, labeling and medicating them as biochemical imbalances. How can an approach that eliminates feelings lead to real healing? Why does psychiatry still elevate pharmaceutical interventions when natural approaches can support recovery with less harm?
Life is meant to be a love song and not a Hate Song disguised as a love song unworthy of our trust. In my years of living as a human being and service as a psychiatrist, I have experienced both sides and heard from both perspectives; the line that divides the sane from the insane often depends on which side you are on—and whether your heart holds the invisible things that matter the most in life.
Sharing a poem I wrote about my experience in the garden:
In the Garden Where Everything Matters
It’s too late now to see color at the Arboretum,
only the moonlight in a dark and silent world
of trees, sage, flowers, stream, grass, and mulch.
I walk among the labeled specimens, a shadow of myself.
I have been studying all day, all week, all month,
then tested and retested, until I am filled with fear and loathing.
Anatomy, biochemistry, physiology, immunology.
Information: I am buried beneath it.
Medical training is the line that drags me, gags me, tags me,
like a fish caught on a hook, gasping on the dock.
I have been running—a duck among leopards—
straining to keep up, my wings forgotten.
What has become of me?
I have died and no one cares.
But tonight I return to pay my respects,
to the tender part of me that is gone.
I knew this garden once when it glowed in the sunlight,
and breezes blew through cherry blossoms and rippled the stream.
I watched the bright koi swim among the clouds reflected in the water,
and the rhythm of my heart felt as tranquil as my breath.
Can the dead recreate life's tapestry with just one thread?
I am wasting my time. This doesn't matter.
Then a thought arrived as if it were my own:
Everything matters.
A bolus of awareness fills me, and i vanish.
I become this Presence and am its knowing.
It lifts me and the moment out of space-time
and illuminates my soul with solace and peace.
Over time, the rigors of training transform
many doe-eyed healers into tin soldiers,
marching smartly in line, doing what they're told,
stoic under stress and numb to feeling.
I visit the garden to wander through who I am.
Its fragrance, beauty, and peace shelter me
and nurture the sacred within my soul,
where sensitivity and creativity grow.
Decades pass, and yet I cherish still
the space the arboretum saved for me:
a place where everything matters,
and the invisibles flourish and flower.
Alice W. Lee