A Liminal Space

What do you need today to best take care of yourself?

This is the question I asked myself this morning. So much feels heavy when I open social media. So much chaos in the world. But my own needs don’t stop just because the world is in a mess.

How much can I hold? What do I need to let go of? What do I need to set aside so that I can get the things done that I need to do today and have enough energy left for myself?

We all have different needs. Sometimes we need to open our hands—to reach out, to ask for help, to let others in. Sometimes we need to close them—to protect our energy, to say no, to hold our boundaries. It depends on what is happening in each of our individual lives in any given moment. Because they are our hands, we are the only ones who get to decide.

Do you know it’s okay to open or close your hands today in whatever ways you need to? No one else gets to decide what you need. And it’s okay to tell others what you need.

So many times I find that I get stuck because I’m taking everyone else’s needs into consideration when I’m deciding what to do. And it’s okay to meet others’ needs in ways that you have capacity for. But it’s not okay to put your own needs last. Because as the old saying goes, no one can pour from an empty cup.

This morning, I’m turning to words that have helped me understand this dance between opening and closing. Francis Weller says in his book The Wild Edge of Sorrow.

The thirteenth-century Persian poet Jalaluddin Rumi offers us an elegant image of the creative tension between intimacy and sovereignty in his poem Birdwings.

Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes. 
If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralyzed. 
Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding. 
The two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birdwings.

Rumi’s image reminds us to listen and stay attentive to the minute alterations in what is being called for.

It is a fluid state asking for our finest attention. Many of us struggle with having anyone near us when we are in pain. We push away gestures of comfort, preferring solitude, either from feelings of unworthiness or because we worry about how our vulnerability will be met by those around us. Others of us flee from being alone with our suffering. We fear the loud echo of our aloneness and struggle to find our way into a measure of distraction. We stay busy or spend hours on our computers or in front of our televisions. The truth is we need both the vital exhalation of community and the renewing inhalation of our interior lives for our grief to move and change over our long walk with sorrow. Our healing is in ‘every small contracting and expanding.

I love that he says our healing is in every small contracting and expanding. Sometimes we close our hands to protect what’s tender. Sometimes we open them to receive what we need. It depends on the need—our need to open or to close, to reach out or to draw in, to say yes or to say no.

Whatever you need for whatever you are going through, it’s okay.

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