Caravan of No Despair

by Mirabai Starr

  Maybe. But probably not.

  What she’s going through is a really rough time, and it might make her grow and galvanize and appreciate life more. But this is not what John of the Cross was talking about when he coined that term five hundred years ago.

  What John was referring to is an intensely personal—often invisible—spiritual crisis that actually turns out to be a great blessing. It may at first mimic a state of existential angst, when life drops its disguise and religious beliefs seem inadequate to address the nakedness, but it is also infused with a quality of yearning, a quiet resonance with the deepest chords of the human condition. It is a gift that can only be given when we get out of our own way. This ability to surrender is in itself an artifact of the kind of spiritual maturity very few of us ever reach. This doesn’t mean we “earn” our dark nights through our own efforts. What it means is that we have allowed our cup to be shattered, and that the Holy One may (or may not) come along and restore it with light. It means that we have said yes to annihilation, without any expectation that we will be resurrected.

  See if this sounds familiar:

  You have been on a spiritual path for a while now. You have developed a yoga practice, attended meditation retreats, cultivated centering prayer. You have read sacred texts and self-help books and the poetry of the mystics. You chant kirtan or Taize or sing in the church choir, assist the priest at the altar or fast on Yom Kippur. These practices have reliably opened your heart and made your spirit soar. They have connected you to a felt experience of the sacred, and these holy moments have hooked you and gotten you through the times that weren’t quite as juicy. Everywhere you turn you see evidence of these higher realities. You are bombarded with magical coincidences: a favorite friend calls just when you are thinking of him; you dream of your long-gone grandmother, and she tells you exactly how to handle a troubling relationship with your teenager; a flock of wild geese lifts off from a snowy field, and you glimpse the perfect order of the cosmos in the pattern of their flight.

  Then, gradually or all at once, all these ripe spiritual fruits dry up and turn to dust. You cannot meditate your way through the emptiness. Chanting starts to sound silly in your mouth. You find the holy books to be almost unbearably pedantic. What once filled your heart now leaves you cold.

  There must be something wrong with you.

  Or so you conclude. Erroneously.

  What’s happening here, says John of the Cross, is that you are becoming an adept. This is good news! The Holy One sees that you have grown and that She can begin to wean you from the Divine Breast. It’s time for Her to put you down and set you on your wobbly feet. She is offering you “the crusty bread of the robust.” And what is your response? To throw a spiritual tantrum. John says that this is exactly like the time the matriarch and patriarch, Sarah and Abraham, held a party to celebrate the weaning of Isaac. The adults were having a great time eating figs and drinking wine, but baby Isaac sat in a corner and wailed.

  This is understandable, John assures us. We are hungry for what we have grown out of. Like the Israelites crossing the desert, who woke up every morning to a feast of manna covering the ground (which, John points out, contains the exact flavor each traveler loves best), we push away the divine food and demand the “meats and onions” we ate in bondage back in Egypt. But we can no longer access the connectedness to the sacred we had come to expect. This is the first part of the dark night of our souls: the falling away of attachment to the way the inner life is supposed to feel.

  And if this “Night of the Sense” was not harrowing enough, a certain intellectual emptiness creeps in and takes over. Now you can no longer even conceive of the Divine in any kind of a meaningful way. All the conceptual constructs you had erected as scaffolding to climb up to God—using materials you had inherited from your parents, perhaps, or scavenged from the religious organizations you joined in your youth—begin to crumble. The whole spiritual thing makes no sense anymore. This is the advanced version of the dark night of our souls, the “Night of Spirit,” when our attachment to any ideas we have had about God dries up and falls away.

  The best thing to do when the unraveling begins to happen, says John, is . . . nothing. This may seem counterintuitive. We think if we pray harder and sing louder and fast longer, we will get the spiritual high back. God’s plan will be revealed, and the universe will make sense again. But our efforts to rectify our brokenness only make it hurt more. What we need to do is drop down into the arms of the darkness, surrender to feeling nothing and knowing nothing. Then, John promises, an “ineffable sweetness” will seep up into our souls from the Ground of Being and fill us with a peace we have never known.

  Our only task is to stop trying so hard and simply be.

  John uses this analogy to explain things: It’s as if a great artist (the Greatest Artist Ever) were painting our portrait (because we are so beautiful and captivating) and we refuse to hold a pose. We keep moving and changing positions. “How’s this, God?” we say, cocking our head at a fetching angle. “Don’t you prefer my profile?” We would be disturbing the master, John says, preventing him from completing his masterpiece! Sit down and shut up, John says. (Well, he doesn’t exactly say that, but this is my “translation” of what he says. I’m a translator.)

  Here’s the other paradoxical and utterly wonderful thing about the dark night of the soul: it’s not really dark at all; it’s dazzlingly bright. The trouble is, we have not yet developed the inner eyes with which to behold such radiance. And so it blasts our perceptual apparatus, and we experience the divine light as darkness. Like Plato’s prisoners fettered all their lives in an underground cave, watching shadow plays on the wall and taking this for reality, when we finally break our chains and climb up and out into the real world, we are blinded by the light of the sun. It takes a while for our eyes to adjust. We must be patient with ourselves, John says. We must be willing to hang out in the darkness for as long as it takes to see the light.

  And so, as you can see, the way people generally refer to the dark nights of their souls has very little to do with the state of spiritual maturity John of the Cross was speaking of. It’s a misnomer to suggest that our ugly divorces and intimate losses—the ordinary components of life in human form—qualify as true dark night experiences.

  Or is it?

  When I began writing my translation of Dark Night of the Soul, I was a bit self-righteous and judgmental about this lack of understanding of the original meaning of the term, and also compassionate and determined to gently set people straight on the matter. By the time my book was published, I had a very different interpretation of these teachings. Tragedy and trauma are not guarantees for a transformational spiritual experience, true, but they are opportunities. They are invitations to sit in the fire and allow it to transfigure us. Who, you might ask, would sit in fire? Who would be crazy enough to do that?

  I guess that would be me.

  14

  A CONSTELLATION OF LITTLE STARRS

  The summer I signed the contract for the new translation of Dark Night, my mother and my boyfriend teamed up to help me meet my deadline. Mom released me from the reservations desk for the family eco-resort in Mexico and hired a real person to take my place, but she still gave me my monthly paycheck. Jeff overcame his anxiety about blending our families and invited Jenny and me to move in with him and Kali so that I wouldn’t have to pay rent while I was working on the book.

  My first task was to sit with everything I thought I knew about the Dark Night of the Soul and allow for the possibility that I did not really understand this text at all. That willingness to know nothing, as it turned out, was the very essence of the teaching.

  My own radical unknowingness had only just begun.

  Jeff made a point of having alone time with Kali and encouraged me to do things with just Jenny. Jeff would take Kali skiing or out for blue corn pancakes at the Taos Inn. Jenny and I would hike down to the confluence of the Rio Hondo and the Rio Grande and, sitti
ng on a blanket on the sandy river bank, she would fill me in on the books she was reading, the thoughts she was thinking, the emotions she was feeling.

  Although she had happily bonded with Kali, I could tell that Jenny did not yet trust Jeff, and she still pined for the years when I was a single mom and she was my only child (her big sister was off mothering children of her own). Jenny circled Jeff like a coyote checking out a human, and he responded by giving her space. Too much space, I thought. I wanted him to scoop her up and be the father she never had, but he wanted to let Jenny connect in her own way, at her own pace.

  When we all came together at the end of the day, I felt like a bee finally finding its flower. I perched on the lip of the blossom and drank. I prepared homey little meals of spaghetti and turkey meatballs, green chile stew and corn muffins, or fried tofu and veggies, and we ate together as a family. We watched videos or helped our kids decorate poster boards for school projects. Jeff and I tucked our children in, woke them up, packed their lunches, dropped them off, picked them up, and—for the first time in my life—I was at home in the world.

  Every morning after the kids left for school, I lit a candle at my desk in the bedroom I shared with Jeff and settled down with my copy of Dark Night of the Soul in its original language, a massive Spanish-English dictionary, and the only two extant English translations of the text (one by a professor named Edgar Allison Peers and the other by a priest named Kieran Kavanaugh), which I used for reference when I got stuck. I had never met anyone who had actually gotten through either English version of this book. Most people found the existing translations stilted and scholarly and, well, too religious.

  Page by page, I washed off the dust of the centuries so that John’s perennial wisdom could shine on the rest of us. While the teachings sent shivers of soul-recognition up my spine and the poetic language made me swoon, the project soon shifted from a literary exercise to an inner cataclysm. The outside of my life was a sun-drenched orchard. Inside, a quiet darkness was inexplicably dropping.

  Everything I had always wanted was coming true, and I was bereft. I felt like someone I loved had died, or was dying. Maybe it will be me, I thought. Maybe this work is my swan song, and when it’s finished, my life will be over.

  Jenny started her period. That helped to explain her recent unbridled brattiness, which had been darkening her world from horizon to horizon, leaving me feeling unaccountably guilty. Our hormones must have been insidiously mingling in the molecules of the air.

  “What is your problem, Dude?” I exploded one afternoon when everything that came out of my mouth was met with her disdain.

  “C’mere,” Jenny said, and I followed her into her room and sat beside her on the bed.

  When she told me she had started bleeding at school, I squealed and laughed and hugged her. I launched into a speech celebrating her entry into womanhood and praising the holiness of this moment in her life. I threatened her with a ceremony to be held in Jenny Bird’s kiva on the mesa. She groaned.

  When Daniela had started her period nine years before, I took her out into Miranda Canyon with a newly menstruating friend of hers and her friend’s mom. The four of us built a small fire and sat around it. The mothers gave special power objects to the daughters and offered prayers. I cannot remember the gifts now. Hardbound journals with batik covers, maybe, and special pens. Gourmet chocolates and woven friendship bracelets. We probably prayed that our daughters would become strong and happy women who loved themselves enough to be of service in this troubled world.

  Jenny took her rite of passage into her own hands. It was a Saturday, and Jenny rode her bike over to the Hanuman temple. I didn’t question her motive. Our girls often spent weekends there, weeding the garden, watching younger children on the playground, scrubbing pots or baking cookies for prasad (the food offered to the guru and then fed to the people as a blessing). We were happy that they wanted to hang out at the ashram drinking chai instead of scoring drugs at the park.

  Hanuman Das, the temple manager and a former hair stylist, seated Jenny in a chair on the lawn. Spontaneously, a small crowd began to gather around. Jenny was famous for the luxurious black curls that cascaded below her waist. With reverence, Hanuman Das lifted Jenny’s long locks and snipped them, then followed with the buzz of the electric razor. People gasped, laughed, and finally cheered. Then, in a moment of iconoclastic instinct, Hanuman Das went into the temple and emerged with a small vial of sandalwood oil reserved especially for the Hanuman murti, with which he proceeded to anoint my daughter’s head.

  When she rode into the driveway at sunset, I looked up from my computer and out the bedroom window. My heart thrummed in my chest. The seven seconds it took me to bound down the stairs and throw open the front door gave me the time I needed to collect my wits and greet her with the respect she deserved.

  “You look beautiful, Honey.”

  She handed me a plastic bag stuffed with her tresses. “Can we send this to Locks of Love, Mom?” Jenny said. “I want some kid with cancer to have my hair.”

  And we did.

  I would have liked to direct Jenny’s coming-of-age ceremony myself—or at least share in it—but all I could do was bow to her innate wisdom and dignity.

  There seemed to be another aspect to Jenny’s decision to shave her head. For most of her life, Jenny had lived in a nest inhabited by just the two of us. Daniela had left home when Jenny was only seven. My lovers had come and gone, and my mom and sister were always there for reinforcement, but the foundation of our household was consistently Jenny and me. Our stuff. My money. Solitary decisions. Though she had expressed a yearning for a whole family, I could see that Jenny had the impulse to assert herself within this matrix as independent, unpredictable, bold.

  Yet I also saw how much she still loved to be tucked in at night. To have her big bald head covered in kisses, just as I used to part her long tresses to kiss her ears. She still begged me to ease her into sleep with “the cloud”—a guided meditation I had used with her since she was small—inviting her to visualize herself climbing onto a fluffy white cloud in a clear blue sky and riding it like a magic carpet over mountains and pastures and beaches. I knew she still wanted to be woken in the morning by a mommy who climbed onto her bed and swung her own dripping hair in her daughter’s face to rouse her. How she appreciated being ordered to call by five p.m. when out riding bikes with friends. How deeply my new young woman-child still needed me.

  15

  INVISIBLE CHILD

  It was late July in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. We had borrowed a canoe from Jeff’s partner, James, strapped it to the roof of Jeff’s truck and headed to Heron Lake a couple of hours to the northwest. We drove along the shore as far as we could until the road was no longer passable, and then Jeff, Jenny, Kali, and I packed the canoe with our gear, hoisted it above our heads, and traipsed through the marshes to a remote campsite Jeff had scoped out among a grove of willows. We set up our tents, and Jeff took the girls for a swim while I arranged the kitchen and started dinner: bean-and-cheese burritos and salad.

  The frying pan was too small for the tortillas, and I’d forgotten to bring butter. I shredded my knuckles on the cheese grater and dropped the cheddar in the dirt. The sound of my family squealing in the snowmelt did not warm my cockles; it raised my hackles. Here I was in paradise with the people I loved most, and everything was vexing me. By the time they emerged from the lake, dripping muddy waters all over my neatly organized cooking area, I had fully fledged into a bitch. I managed to criticize Jenny’s manners, wardrobe, and attitude over the course of five minutes, which provoked her silent fume and set our most intractable patterns into high gear. The deeper she sulked, the more agitated and demanding I became. I couldn’t stop myself. Finally Jenny stomped away, and I crumpled in tears.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” I admitted when my daughter and I went for a walk after dinner to make peace and reconnect. We were holding hands.

  Jenny stopped, too
k my other hand in hers, and beamed at me. “Maybe you’re pregnant,” she said.

  “Ha!”

  All those times in my twenties when I longed to be released from the non-procreation agreement I had forged with the universe, I remained steadfast and stubborn. In my thirties, once I finally allowed myself to consider the possibility of pregnancy, the universe snubbed me. Now I was almost forty, living with the person who had quietly revealed himself as the true love of my life, and I had let the whole pregnancy fantasy go.

  Besides, when I had been with Michael Two and started taking birth control pills, my body had reacted to the invasion of fake hormones by building up a mass of uterine fibroids, which (according to the results of an ultrasound) had rendered the wall of my womb virtually impenetrable to sperm. I didn’t even think about pregnancy anymore.

  That night I writhed in my sleeping bag beside my lover. My fibroids were killing me. Whenever I turned over it felt like I was rolling on top of a sack of rocks embedded in my pelvis. That’s it, I decided. I’m having a hysterectomy. It’s time to get this thing out of me. I had tried every alternative remedy on the planet: acupuncture, herbs, diet, shamanic cleanses, and chakra balancing. The fibroids only seemed to be growing.

  I made an appointment as soon as we returned home. A pregnancy test is standard procedure at the gynecologist’s office, and so upon arriving I peed in a cup and placed it behind the sliding door between the bathroom and the lab. Then I was marshaled into an examining room where I waited for over an hour, trying to distract myself by analyzing People’s choices for the sexiest man alive.