Private Pain

"Everybody's private pain: in Korea once, in a mountain pass,
a carved placatory shrine, a figure of a couple copulating,
and underneath in hangul: we beget joy, we beget suffering."
--Robert Hass


I know my body releases some of what it stores when, lying on my back in Shivasana, after yoga, in a quiet, dim-lit studio full of students, all strangers, I don't want to cry, but do. I can't help it: it happens without me.

I think about seeing a friend a few years back who was having a hard time. Tapping her foot with mine, I asked "are you happy?" She tried to fight the tears, but couldn't. "Ninety-nine percent of crying is self-pity," she said. But I didn't believe it then. It isn't that simple. Is it?

Coming home from yoga class, I see the news images of oil-coated Pelicans in the Gulf. Terns migrating north, caught in the sludge, their bodies immersed in the toxic goop, heads struggling to lift from its glue, barely discernible as a bird but for the beak stabbing helplessly for a breath of air.

What is private turmoil compared to this? Overwhelming to think of the ecological devastation, the ruined communities, human and non-human. How many displaced families? How many suffocating turtles? How many barrier islands, breeding grounds for birds, that will lose their grasses and network of roots, will erode and sink into oil-slicked water? In forty-six days of spewing oil (and still counting) a way of life, a culture, an ecological history that dwarfs human time, has all become threatened with extinction. What right do I have to sit here, considering my personal loss?

There is obvious value in taking responsibility, or trying, for my private grief. But here I make it public. Why? I don't know. I can justify it by admitting that no one is reading this, which is not self-pity but belief in fact. That doesn't resolve the problem. All I know is that the imagined audience is a strange comfort, a prompt to write, a possibility to be heard, to find shared meaning, even if I risk vulnerability and seem too self-centered. Maybe it's ridiculous, but it works for me now: I'm writing. And I can't seem to write much else (poems).

Another justification: because we are all inextricably linked, there is possible universal substance in private pain. And communal pain has to be reckoned with, at least in part, privately. How many of us sit in living rooms, watching helplessly as the events in the Gulf progress? We breath and hold that communal grief into our bodies, lock it in our tissues, make it personal, private, our individual experience. We carry it with us. And in our body, the line between private and public is not made. We hold, we hurt, no matter. Sincere attempt to release it, to let it go, on the yoga mat or otherwise, inspires understanding and compassion for the bonds we all share. The wisdom which unites.


Robert Hass:
"Private pain is easy, in a way. It doesn't go away,
but you can teach yourself to see its size. Invent a ritual.
Walk up a mountain in the afternoon, gather up pine twigs.
Light a fire, thin smoke, not an ambitious fire,
and sit before it and watch it till it burns to ash
and the last gleam is gone from it, and dark falls.
Then you get up, brush yourself off, and walk back to the world.
If you're lucky, you're hungry."