What Lies Beneath?

Lughnasa                                                                 Lughnasa Moon

Clearing out files this morning. When I came to a group of dog related files, vet records, 1000P1030765pedigrees, lure coursing material, I got stopped for a while. In Sortia’s file, our second Irish Wolfhound, a black bitch that weighed 150 pounds, I found a letter from the University of Minnesota Veterinary Hospital. Sortia was euthanized there against our wishes during an overnight stay.

(Rigel and Vega taking the sun on our new deck)

Though the care our dogs have gotten at the U was usually exemplary, this event prevented us from saying good-bye to Sortia. Reading this letter about the incident brought it back to me in a flash. A wave of sudden sadness and deep grief gripped me for a moment, so strong that I had to put down the file and sit back while I stabilized. This feeling surprised me, came up strong from dead stop.

I also had an unexpected response a few weeks back while watching How To Train Your Dragon II.  In a reunion between the lead character, a young man, and his mother whom he thought dead, a wave of yearning swept through me. I wanted my mother to hug me. She’s been dead 50 years this year and I can not recall a feeling this strong about her in decades.

Here’s what I’m wondering. Do these strong feelings lie waiting for the right triggers, somewhat like PTSD? Or, do they swim around in the neural soup, always this strong, but engaged in another part of our psychic economy? How many of these knots of emotion exist within us, still tied to their original sources, and what significance do they have?

I may not be saying this well. As a general rule, I’m not in the grip of strong emotion unless something political is going on or I haven’t had enough sleep. Politics taps into something primal, as if a god within wakes and demands action. (I use this analogy with some reservation because I don’t believe my politics are divinely inspired, but it gives the right tone to the depth of my political feelings.) Being sleep deprived makes me irritable and far from my best self, so anger comes more easily then.

Now, maybe strong emotion could ride me more often.  Maybe I’m missing out on some part of life that flies those colors with some regularity.  But as a white middle-class guy, educated and with northern european ancestry, friends and spouse of the same, my emotional range is muted and these events, like the ones I describe, are rare.

No conclusion here. Only questions.

 


2 Responses to What Lies Beneath?

  1. This runs deep for me. It’s a territory which has visited itself upon me suddenly and without warning way too often (at least as percieved by the experiencer; perhaps not often enough for the soul’s need to learn and feel). Sometimes the trigger is functionally unknown, and the ensuing feelings come as though to a victim of a senseless universe. At other times, like you today, I find myself unexpectedly trapped in a briar patch I’d thought long ago overcome.
    There are feelings which come at those times which harken back to my flying days, metaphorically, and I truly wonder if I will be able to pull out of this dive without ripping the wings off. It used to be common for the descent (and concomitant fear) to last days… or more. It seems more available to soothing by aged reflection these days.

    But why… and how? It has come to me a couple of different times, upon the occasions of witnessing glaciers calving, that that unspeakably large release of stored energy which was born of events hundreds or thousands of years before chose this seemingly random time to release, in my witnessing, the enormity of the cold secret held for so very long. Clearly, that became an over worked metaphor, dear reader, but thev ultimate learning or elevation of awareness seems rooted in the same experience. To be willing to bear witness to that which has a need to calve itself from our interior, and to hold that process in awe and love, may be the very simple gift we are given.
    In the end, we are unknowable even to ourselves. To bear witness, then, to this inexpicable phenomena is to bear witness to ourselves. And in that is to embrace the heartache of being human.

  2. I love the bearing witness to ourselves notion. Matches my experience and perhaps is enough since, as you say, we are unknowable even to ourselves.

    The calving metaphor, too, resonates. A difference from it or an extension to it is that these emotional calvings don’t dissolve in the ocean of our interior. Rather they continue to float there, making it possible it to bump into them again. And again.