The Poverty (and Strange Kindness) in Pain

+ an Announcement: Save the Date!

I find it difficult to express how much I feel at home in precisely this world of electrons, nuclei, waves, and what a sense of plenitude and comfort it gives me. The Consistent, the Total, the Unique, the Essential . . . the vast cosmic realities (Mass, Permeability, Radiation, Curvatures, and so on) through which the Stuff of Things is disclosed to our experience in a form which is patient at the same time of being indefinitely reduced to elements. . . .¹

©Renée Eli

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Dear Friends and Family,

There was no letter last Sunday because I was sick. I’m feeling fine now. And ordinarily, I would move on. But Teilhard’s passage from August 1 (above) was embedded in the flesh of those sick days, disclosing something at once patient and indefinitely reduced to the elemental. A portal opened into this month’s theme of simplicity: the body.

I ate something I should not, not knowing when I ate it, and for hours without pause what felt like a stone with a tourniquet for a tail circled my belly like a lingering birth contraction. I was not writhing in pain. I was vertiginously stilled by it. The stone soon appeared inside my skull and pounded around as it scattered across the rest of me; air on the skin an agony. When mind could stay just this side of mind itching to run wild, the intensity was unparalleled serenity. When I could get a little closer to the unbearable, there came breaths strange with reverie. That this was so suspended me in inquiry into the goings on of the body, the body that, at the same time, was holding ‘me’ hostage.

Of course, the body and ‘I’ are not two but one. Language circles a gap between what we have no words for and what we suppose we do. Somehow, you and I understand what we mean. We understand because, at the most elemental and altogether profound level, you and I are life experiencing a mode of being we call human. That mode of being is bodily. And we recognize through the body itself that our embodiment is shared.

But it’s not as obvious as it could seem. To say body is to recognize life unseen has seen expression when it has matter woven into the force of it. Body is what life looks and feels and smells and sounds like when all those elements come into dynamic communion. When they do, body is what life experiences.²

I would have wished to bring you into the experience of those hours—not the pain but the strange kindness—to offer this body as the ground of experiencing a poverty that is at once a tenderness. Moments so robbed of anything other than I am here dust away the cobwebs that dim the light of pure being and float us, if briefly, in the primordial womb. They leave a gap between what is happening and what has no words. That gap, too, is a poverty—a tender emptiness.

©Renée Eli

Are we ever as emptied as we are when we are in pain? And are we ever as full? Any pain. When we say we are broken-hearted, we mean the biological heart hurts so much that it feels broken. Like physical pain, sorrow has a certain physiology the will cannot overcome.

Next time you feel a sorrow, let your tenderness fall on the drumbeat in the center of your being. Let the rivers and streams of you feel the pool of blood that has slowed. You just might melt into a psalm, a night melody not unlike that of a loon, naked to the shooting stars of reverie.

. . .

We have said we are exploring reflections on poverty and plenitude for this month's exploration of simplicity. And we have said we are beginning at the beginning, the body, the bare immediacy of being, coming as we do into the world unclothed and uncluttered. We are referring here to voluntary poverty as a pathway, not involuntary poverty forced by socio-ecological ills. The two are related.

I leave you with Hermeticist reflections from Valentin Tomberg.

Poverty is the practice of inner emptiness.³

Poverty is the possession of “everything at once.” ⁴

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Forthcoming: Save the Date!

At the close of the Awaken Wonder course this past winter, we wondered about a place-based gathering. After mulling and more conversations, and the tremendous support of Doreen Tanenbaum who has come forth graciously as Retreat Coordinator, Beyond the Comfort Zone will have our first in-person gathering.

Entering Unknowing: Inner Pilgrimage for a Time between Worlds

December 4–8, 2024 at Valle Crucis Conference Center, deeply rooted on sacred ground Banner Elk, NC. 

We live in complex times, a time “between worlds.”⁵ In the imaginal cells of the collective human psyche, a profound shift seems to be cocooning. We are called into the wild depths of soul.

The ancient, sacred tradition of pilgrimage invokes an embodied way of nurturing the spiritual depths of our shared human becoming. On pilgrimage, we are together alone, every step a surrender to the sacred ground that unfolds the way, every step shared with those who came before, those who walk with us now, and those who are to come. We journey on behalf of becoming, leaving behind a known world, drawn toward a way and world unknown. A pilgrimage is a promise revealed.

This gathering will be an intimate retreat in co-presence and contemplation. All are welcome. We will invoke a four-day pilgrimage (in place), entering unknowing in periods of silence and solitude, shared exploration, Earth walks* on 450 acres in the Blue Ridge Mountains of the Southern Appalachian Range, sacred ground of the Cherokee, and conversation by the fire at the Inn in the evening.

Bring your walking shoes*, your journal, and your open heart. . . .

More details will follow.

Reply to this email or email Doreen at tanenbaumd@gmail.com to save your place.

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*real or metaphoric walking shoes. Earth walks are optional.

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Next Gathering in Silence: Sunday, September 1

1. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Heart of the Matter (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978).

2. For more, see “Let Us First Ask: What Is a Body?” If you cannot access the letter, please let me know in comments, DM, or by replying to this email.

Let Us First Ask: What Is a Body?

3. Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism, trans. Robert Powell (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1985), p. 124.

4. Ibid, p. 137.

5. “between worlds” intimates shifts not only in perspective but more fundamentally, at the level of perception and modes of being.