And sometimes when I move
at the edge of a greatness—
a lake or a sea or a mountainside—
my insignificance thrills me
and the largest of my sadnesses
dwindle smaller than the space
between grains of sand
and in that moment,
knowing my place,
comes a love so enormous
I can love anyone, anyone,
even myself.
by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
I love and completely recognise the experience Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer describes here – how the perspective between the greatness of nature and the smallness of me can be both healing and freeing.
But I think there is something to watch out for when making that shift away from my habitual focus on Me and My trouble to what Mary Oliver pointed to when she said ‘Meanwhile, the world goes on‘. There can be a sense of disconnecting or abandoning ourselves in that shift, a kind of detaching to make the difficult stuff more manageable. A very human impulse of course, and actually an attempt at compassion (alleviating suffering) in itself, but if there’s a disconnecting involved, it’s a move away from wholeness and healing and so it will at best be a temporary assuaging.
So instead, can there be a reconnecting with the truth of that greater perspective, that lovingly includes our own stuff? It’s not about denying of our humanness or ‘the largest of my sadnesses’, but seeing what else is true? And there’s a subtle but important difference in the two…
Of course it may not always be easy to access a ‘lake or a sea or a mountainside’ when you need one. Luckily, our imagination can be a powerful ally and we may access that greatness through the porthole of our memory. And the sky is a powerful greatness in itself, even if we can only see a small piece of it in between big buildings…
Let’s practice accessing that love so enormous that we can love anyone, even ourselves!
PS one of the contexts for practising a change of perspective and loving anyone, even ourselves, is in the standalone weekend of Compassionate Imagery For Resilience…
Photo by Khatam Tadayon on Unsplash