Pushing Through!
“You be the master: make yourself fierce, break in: then your great transforming will happen to me, and my great grief cry will happen to you.”
In a broken-hearted world where ‘might is right,’ seems to be the order of the day many of us feel ourselves to be increasingly bewildered and powerless in face of the devastation all around us.
The other day, in a conversation with a friend living in the Middle East, he spoke of the pain of putting his small twins to sleep in an underground shelter every night so that they might be safe. Feeling into his pain I found myself moved to share Rilke’s poem with him.
Pushing Through
It’s possible I am pushing through solid rock
in flintlike layers, as the ore lies, alone;
I am such a long way in I see no way through,
and no space: everything is close to my face,
and everything close to my face is stone.I don’t have much knowledge yet in grief
so this massive darkness makes me small.You be the master: make yourself fierce, break in:
then your great transforming will happen to me,
and my great grief cry will happen to you.~ Rainer Maria Rilke
Pushing through rock is what it feels like, this powerlessness - we can’t go back, we can’t go forward and the pushing is exhausting.
Somehow in feeling it and talking about it together the rock started to feel less solid and we got to thinking about the kind of power that we have in the small, ordinary moments of our lives, like the birthday party he was planning for his twins that evening, a daring celebration of love in a fear filled village, a moment of hope and humanity, a micro-dose of love to heal our ailing hearts that ripples outwards underground giving another kind of shelter.
Later that day I started remembering some of the most transformative and powerful souls,I’ve ever met… Unlikely leaders, often invisible in the margins, who reveal to us the fierce and immense power of LOVE hidden in our shared beautiful and vulnerable humanity.
It’s a delight and a privilege to share one of those memories with you here.
A Morning with Edith
I arrived at La Forestière in late 1987 with a broken heart and little or no French.
It’s a small house in a forest behind Trosly-Breuil, north of Paris, home to people with profound disabilities.
I thought if I worked with people in deeper pain than mine, maybe my own sorrow would quiet down. I was wrong.
Edith was tiny, mostly invisible to the world at large, but she hit hard — not with fists, but with presence.
She had a way of dismantling anyone who thought they were in control — a sly twist of her body, a mischievous glance — as if to say: Let’s see what you’ve got.
I thought I knew what to do… after-all I had lots of experience of being with people with high care needs! And I HAD COME TO CARE - She had other plans!
She didn’t want a carer. She wanted a companion.
She pushed every limit in me until I broke open.
One morning, after yet another battle trying to get her diaper on (the previous twelve had ended up in the bin), I crumpled on the floor, sobbing with frustration, impotence and of course homesickness!
Tears streaked my face. My “franglais” faltered into hiccups and snot.
Here you are. All of you.
When I finally stood up and looked at her, she smiled — crooked, radiant, mischievous, not a victory smile - a smile of recognition and relief - we were finally ‘the same’. Just two women finding each other in a world that hurt.
Laying on her bed, I held her head in the crook of my elbow, my hand steadying the sippy cup so she could sip. In the relief and peace of surrender, we just drank; she sipped and I drank from my ‘french’ bowl of UHT milky coffee, gagging slightly at the taste of long life milk!
And in that messy, bodily, ordinary moment, everything shifted.
I realized she needed me to welcome my own exiled, anguished, resistant parts if we were going to be friends.
My polished, protected, competent self would not do.
Only the real, broken, teary, hiccuping me could meet her fully.
Breakfast with Edith
Morning after morning, breakfast became the most precious part of my days.
Beside her my heart opened and spoke of it’s grief at the leaving of a lover, and the stories of my life tumbled out unedited.
Edith listened. She didn’t speak words, but her gurgling, mewing sounds, and the tip of her tongue touching her nose — those little gestures were language enough.
She saw me fully, even when I couldn’t see myself.
My broken heart, my grief, my snot and hiccups, could be enough.
The ordinary became extraordinary, and the world felt, just for a breath, like it could bend toward love.
The homeopathic drop
Over time, I watched this tiny woman, confined mostly to her bed, transform the lives of everyone around her.
Volunteers arrived, carrying their own unspoken griefs and fears, and one by one, those grief cries found a home in her.
Edith was the homeopathic drop in the ocean of humanity — small, ordinary, invisible, yet able to heal and transform hearts.
She didn’t need to speak. She didn’t need to perform.
She simply was present.
Love → Come → Love → Go →
Meditating Mark 12:28–34 yesterday morning I thought again of Edith.
In “You shall love your neighbour as yourself’ I realised that there is no ‘should’. Loving is not a duty or an obligation - but a promise that if we come - we shall find Love here already waiting for us and we shall enter its flow.
Love’s ‘great transformation’ shall happen to us and our great grief cry shall happen to LOVE.
Edith embodied that.
Love called, I came, and love returned — messy, human, imperfect, playful, and real.
And that crooked, mischievous smile — the tongue to the tip of the nose — that was her signature.
A little reminder that even in the sacred, there is playfulness, audacity, and delight. There is REAL.
She demanded we come as we are, and in doing so, transformed the world, one heart, one tiny micro dose, at a time.
Not you being healed or me healing, but Us - healing together.
An ocean healed becoming a healing ocean.
And Edith — tiny, immense, playful, fierce — in every drop.
Thank you for being with Edith and me today… I like to think that together we are homeopathic healing in our wounded world.
That was a powerful lesson with Edith.