A Box Full of Darkness

Looking for the light.

I didn’t write today’s newsletter in advance. I’m writing it in the air, as I’m on a flight to Pennsylvania where I’ll speak at Penn Women tomorrow. As providence would have it, I’m sitting next to Diana Nyad, who is also speaking. We weren’t supposed to be together but seats were mixed up and here we are. Of course we are.

My new best friend, Diana Nyad.

For those who don’t know Diana’s incredibly story, at the age of 64 she attempted, for the fifth time, to swim from Cuba to Key West, a feat that she achieved without a shark cage. (You can watch Annette Bening as Diana in Nyad—and read her story in her memoir, Find a Way.)

We conferred about our talks tomorrow—8,500 women are gathering in Philadelphia—and resolved that our talks might not actually need to change. While it feels like a wildly different morning than yesterday, we are still standing on the same ground. Our work is much the same.

I don’t have much to offer this morning—I’m still processing last night, as uncertain as the rest of the country as to what is to come.

In the comments of last week’s newsletter—Time-Traveling with Oprah—a few of you mentioned the story I recounted below as a balm for this moment. So I’m reprinting this newsletter from 2022. It includes my favorite Mary Oliver poem, “The Uses of Sorrow,” which feels exceptionally hard to hold in moments like this.

Here’s what I know: America voted, and America decidedly voted in favor of many candidates who were not my choice. Such is democracy. The American people have spoken. We may not like what they have to say, but that does not recuse us from listening. Here is what I hope we can do in this election’s aftermath: Not make each other bad. Not morally exclude. Not blame and shame. We will hear a lot about who is treasonous and who is at fault for this election in the coming weeks: White women, Latino men, Black men. All men. If life were only so simple that we could identify the “problem element” and eradicate it. But we are not problems to be solved, and the world is not ours to sanitize. Life certainly doesn’t always abide by our preferences—often, we get circumstances we do not want and would never choose. It’s what we do next that matters.

This cycle of repression, suppression, and projection is showing up in our lives with increasing insistence. All the bad feeling has to go somewhere—“someone else is to blame”—but we are simply recycling it in the collective and blowing it up, sling-shotting it around. We have to stop doing this. The enemy we want to find “out there” is in us too. We have to take responsibility for ourselves in this moment because that is the only thing we can control. We must take all of our feelings and process them— send them into the ground and not at each other. Otherwise, we become that which we profess to hate—intolerant, distrustful, venomous.

In the coming days, months, and years, we have to lean in—and, to use Diana Nyad as inspiration, keep swimming. We are in open water and it may feel that sharks are circling, but we can get to the other side. We must. One stroke at a time.

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Rethinking Bad Luck

In Estelle Frankel’s The Wisdom of Not Knowing: Discovering a Life of Wonder by Embracing Uncertainty, she tells a folktale you’ve likely heard before: 

A peasant had a beautiful white horse. One night the horse ran away. When the neighbors learn of his misfortune, they come to offer their sympathy saying, ‘We are so sorry for your bad luck.’ They are surprised by their neighbor’s response when he says,‘Could be bad luck; could also be good luck. You never know.” The next day the peasant’s horse returns together with a beautiful stallion. The neighbors come to congratulate him, saying: “You are so lucky. Not only has your horse returned, you now have two beautiful horses.” Again the peasant’s reply baffles them when he says: “Could be good luck; could also be bad luck. You never know.” The next day the peasant’s son is thrown off one of the horses while riding and he breaks his leg. The neighbors again come to comfort the peasant, saying: “We are so sorry to hear of your son’s bad luck.” Again, the peasant replies: “Could be bad luck; could also be good luck. You never know.” The next day officials from the government come to the village to conscript every able-bodied young man to go fight in a senseless war. All the young men of the village are taken except for the peasant’s son, who could not serve in the army with a broken leg. In the end he is the only young man in the village to survive the war—all because of his bad-good luck.

I promise I’m not drawn to this story because it’s about someone who falls off a horse and breaks something significant. I had actually just read this same folktale (I believe in one of Rabbi Leder’s books) when I came across Frankel’s retelling, which made me feel like there’s definitely something in here that I’m supposed to heed. And so I’ve been meditating on it for weeks, turning over this concept of luck and how quick we are to apprise it without any context of time. As this story conveys, who is to say whether something is good or bad in the moment—even when something seems truly terrible.

In one of my earliest conversations with my dear friend, the incredible Intuitive/Medium Laura Lynne Jackson (author of two of my favorite books: The Light Between Us and Signs), she told me how our teams of light on the other side can interfere in remarkable ways to protect us, even if it feels like unwanted interference. (Speaking of broken legs, at a dinner once, LLJ told another friend that she had broken her foot to save her from a worse fate.) Just because we don’t get what we want in a moment—or get something we very much don’t want—doesn’t mean that either outcome isn’t for our highest good. We are all playing something of a long-game.

As Frankel writes, “Like the neighbors in this tale, we tend to judge and label all our experiences in life as good or bad, desirable or undesirable. This is a manifestation of our fixation on duality. Most of us have a running commentary going on in our brains that either approves or disapproves of everything we experience. When things do not match our idea of how they should be, we often feel distress. We are rarely willing to just take life as it comes and wait and see what happens. But, as the story suggests, good and bad are not absolute categories, nor are they readily predictable. Nondual consciousness takes us beyond these absolutes. Light can emerge from darkness, and good can come out of seemingly bad luck. A dark night of the soul may open us up to a realm of light and unforeseen possibilities; the unfortunate things that happen in our lives may conceal great luck.” (p. 72-73)

Clearly, we live in a society that is somewhat fixated on a growth curve that is up-and-to-the right—everything must be constantly improving and getting bigger, more, more, more. But as I’ve come to understand, we all need dark nights of the soul: Growth requires death. (Just as a garden requires compost.) Death of ideas, relationships, jobs, identities, wants and desires, and sometimes even people. It’s not necessarily what we want, but sometimes it is what we need in order to push us into a process of resurrection, where we have to get down on our knees until we learn to stand again.

Frankel also surfaced one of my favorite Mary Oliver poems, The Uses of Sorrow:

Someone I once loved gave me

A box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand

That this, too, was a gift.

May we learn to take each thing as it comes, without judgment, but instead as an opportunity to find the lesson—or more importantly, let the lesson unfold, over time.