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2004
Fall
The Monkey
and the Shark
Donna
Hardy
Monkey lives on a tropical island. Each morning she picks fruit
and goes down to the beach to look out over the sea while she eats
her breakfast. Each morning a shark, searching for his food among
the fruits of the sea, sees Monkey enjoying her breakfast.
"I'm
so sick of fish," he says to himself one day. "I will
ask Monkey for some fruit." Monkey, glad for the company, shares
her fruit with Shark, and from that day on they breakfast together.
One morning
Shark asks Monkey if she wants to go for a ride on the ocean. Curious
and delighted, she does indeed. She climbs on the shark's back and
they go to the deepest part of the ocean-where he turns to his new
friend and says, "The king of the ocean lies in the deep here.
He is very sick. He needs the heart of a monkey to make him well."
"Oh,"
says Monkey, "I wish I had known. I left my heart on the island."
Shark turns to rush Monkey back to the island so she can fetch her
heart.
Monkey hits the sand running and gets quite far up the beach before
she turns to wave goodbye to the shark. When Shark realizes she's
not coming back, he swims way.
Clarissa Pinkola
Estes told this story a couple of years ago at a San Francisco conference
on violence and terrorism. We did not get the 30-page explanation
we might have found had it been one the stories in Women Who Run with
the Wolves. She left us on our own to go over the story again and
again, figuring out what each character and each action might mean
in our own lives.
Monkey, for instance: friendly, generous, curious, adventurous, and
clever enough to live to tell the story. She's basking on high ground
for now, not interested in going to the depths to learn what ails
the sick king. Shark can't get her. She is safe. She doesn't worry
that in every mythology when the king is sick the whole structure
is in trouble, doesn't worry that the sea itself could come after
her.
The king needs a monkey heart, surely a healing image, if he is going
to live. Monkey is not going to give it to him. Would you? Would you
plunge into those depths? Offer your heart? Go to the aid of the sick
king? Let's say you do immerse yourself-darn near drown yourself-and
then come back like Parsifal, with no idea of where you've been nor
a clue to the meaning of the story you tell. If you live to tell a
story. Or say you do come back and you do understand. What can you
do?
On the day of the Columbine High School massacre, Estes-hearing the
news on the radio-walked back roads from her home in Littleton to
the school. For the next two years she immersed herself-as psychologist,
healer, and community member-in the ocean of that massacre. She had
proximity, means, skills, and the courage to do that, to set aside
her agenda and offer her heart to help a community through a crisis.
From that experience she tells us this: there is healing in the stories
of bravery that lie at the heart of every tragedy.
We mend the world soul, Dr. Estes says, by mending ourselves. In case
of loss of cabin pressure, secure your own oxygen supply first. It
makes for the greatest good for the greatest number if we don't expire
while fumbling to help someone else.
In case of bad news overload, put on you own face mask. Turn off all
media. Extinguish all flammable voices. Delete all emails that are
addressed to more than three people, unless the message is from your
writing group. Head for higher ground, away from the sea of awfulness
out there.
But, after a week or two of this, think of Monkey sitting on her island,
eating alone. Think of the king lying sick at the bottom of the sea.
Think Shark. Then speak out. Demand your inalienable rights, or someone
else's rights. It's all the same. Speak out for justice, charity,
a tolerance of difference, generosity. Say what you think; say it
to the right people. Listen. Change your mind. Reach out, share your
fruits. Go to your own depths. Go to the polls. Seek a new heart.
Stay smart.
The
Therapist's Journey - Spring 2004
A New Song
for a New Year
After you've
done
what you wanted to do ,
were expected to do,
were talked into doing,
did without thinking,
achieved consciously,
unconsciously,
by accident;
after no one expects you
to do much more,
wants you only to
be content, age well,
die gently, but not yet:
What is it
you still want to do
with this one precious life?
--Donna
Hardy
I knew her well,
liked her a lot, envied her a little. She was old enough to have done
her major life work: marriage, children, grand children, a career,
the care of aging parents. She was young enough and healthy enough
for us all to agree, had we even thought about it, that she had miles
to go before she slept.
It was in July when I saw her last. She was off for a long summer
holiday; she would call when she got back. When the call came it was
from her husband to tell me she had died in an accident overseas the
day before. She had just turned 60.
This woman had family and friends all over the country, all around
the world, and she traveled often to them and they to her. I told
her she needed more time to herself, but that was more about me than
about her. She needed to be involved with people; she needed to love
what she loved.
"What is it you want to do with your one wild and precious life?"
Mary Oliver asks in her poem, "The Summer Day." I suppose
a lot of what we can know about what someone wants to do with this
one precious life is to look at what that person is doing with this
one life.
If I were giving advice here it would be to suggest that this New
Year's Day, or prior to it, rather than make resolutions, keep for
a week or a month a detailed diary of what you do. Not what you plan
to do, but what you do. Scrutinize it as closely as the poet Rilke
observed the Bust of Apollo in the Louvre. Your diary may tell you,
"You must change your life."
On the other hand, it may ask you to think more about what you say
you want.
An early death reminds us: if we want to have some sense of control
of our life, we must measure our days in content, not duration. Most
of us do not decide how long we will live; we only choose how true
to our ideals, our desires, our comforts we will live.
If the Fates give us a long life, we will each have to decide again
and again how we want to live in our changing circumstances. Always
we must choose a life that has meaning for us, not what someone else
tells us we need.
At those times in every life where we have, or feel we have, no choice,
then we still can choose-to live what is with as much grace as possible.
"Teach us to number our days," the Psalmist tells us. Naomi
Shihad Nye reminds us of this phrase as she suggests in one of her
poems that when someone invites you to a party, "remember what
parties are like before answering."
"Feel like a leaf," she continues. "Know you could
tumble at any second. Then decide what to do with your time."
Poet Denise Levertov tells us to pick our song--line by line--from
the uproar around us, and then to throw back our head and sing it.
Think you can't sing? So write a poem about it. Live it. You never
know.
2003
- The Therapist's Journey by Donna Hardy
The Field
Sometimes one
plus one equals two. But if we're doing the math of a friendship,
one plus one might equal three. The idea is that out of the meeting
of two grows the third, an area of betweeness that some psychologists
obfuscate with complex explanations and others clarify by naming it
a field.
Ever on the side of simplicity, I think of The Field. If you saw the
film you will remember how that small expanse in the Irish countryside
stood out rich and green and deep against the surrounding land. You'll
also remember how the fierce old man who cultivated that field was
willing to give his life for it. A good friendship is like that.
A good friendship, like a good marriage, needs field work. The field
holds the relationship in an ongoing dialogue that gradually changes
all three of you. In fact, the self-help rules of relationship boil
down to caring for each other so the field will thrive and then nourishing
the field that in turn sustains the friendship. We may not consciously
create the field, but once it is there it is ours to honor or ignore
as we might honor or ignore a dream or a talent given us.
In using the image of field we have a picture of boundaries, of containment.
Go back to a scene where a boy is breaking a horse to the halter.
Or go to a rodeo. A lot of wild energy can be contained in a defined
field. Try to tame a wild horse on the open prairie and when the beast
breaks lose the first time it will be gone, as surely as an acquaintance
will disappear on the first confrontation if the two of you have not
yet built a field.
I was ticketed to go to the San Francisco opera on the October afternoon
of the great anti-war rally. Anyone aware of the potential parking
space shortage took alternate means to get to the opera that day.
My husband and I parked a mile away and walked to Civic Center. When
finally at the opera house I saw two fiftyish women emerging from
a rest room. They were met by a third woman who greeted them with,
"Hi. How are you going to get home from here?"
"I don't know, we just got here," one of the women replied
as she walked on with her companion.
"What did she want?" her companion asked.
"She wanted to know how we're going to get home; I told her we
just got here."
"We just got here" was not an answer. I wondered if the
two women hurrying to their seats were friends, and, if so, would
they later talk about this snub of the third woman. I imagine the
one saying something like,
"Boy, I hope I never find a time when I have to ask you how you're
getting home."
"Well, she is not you. I've told her in a hundred different ways
that I am not interested in her friendship."
"I met her once at your house. I liked her."
"I'll give her your phone number."
"Never mind. If you don't like her, I don't like her."
"It's not about liking or not liking. I just don't have time."
They can go on from there to talk about the woman, about insecurities,
about junior high, about the stress of never having enough time. The
turf needs tending.
I hope the other woman got home to a field of her own and was able
to say to someone there, "Let me tell you . . . ."
Field work is about talking and listening. Then it's about noticing
what one doesn't want to notice, forming thoughts one doesn't want
to think, finding words to speak what doesn't want to be spoken. It's
about admitting loneliness that goes way beyond the afternoon your
friend is telling you she cannot fill. It's about admitting fears
that have been covered over with anger; owning jealousy that has been
clothed in fabricated interest.
If we are afraid to go toe to toe with a friend at times of difference,
if we can not or will not find and share our most honest self with
the other, then the friendship will lose its zest and a blanket of
blandness will settle over the field. Ho hum. If we won't dig in and
turn up the dark soil, the field won't produce growth.
What field work gradually reveals is how complicated we are. Each
brings to the friendship the experience of mother, father, siblings,
girl friends, boy friends, best friends, spouses, partners. Each brings
a history of betrayals, abuses, disappointments, triumphs, tragedies,
successes, failures, the whole catastrophe.
We can share a thousand and one stories with a friend or partner and
yet never make the connection that perhaps this sticky behavior keeps
happening because something that happened in quite another relationship
a lifetime ago laid the ground for never expecting, never trusting,
never assuming, never revealing, or never asking.
Your friend is not there to probe your unconscious process, but the
field is there for you to mine until you dig up the cache your psyche
hid there one day to protect you from just such moments as this.
One does this work in conversation, in pondering, in reading, in journal
writing, in prayer, in therapy. It can happen dramatically with a
break-through dream or a mountain top revelation; it's more likely
to happen gradually, like an old woman hoeing a field and turning
up a gold ring she lost a long time ago.
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The
Therapist's Journey by Donna Hardy
Fall
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