love – Climb to the Stars

The Right to Grieve — And That Means Being Sad [en]

[fr] Avez-vous remarqué comme personne ne veut qu'on soit triste? La tristesse est néanmoins une émotion nécessaire, celle qui nous permet d'accepter une perte, d'en faire le deuil, et de pouvoir continuer à avancer à travers et au-delà de la peine.

Have you noticed how nobody wants you to be sad? Tell people around you that you’re sad, and immediately they’ll want to cheer you up.

Sadness is not bad. Sadness is necessary. It is through being sad that we are able to accept our losses and move on. That is what grieving is.

Our friends don’t want us to feel sad, because they don’t want us to suffer. But refusing to be sad and to grieve brings along a lot of suffering — certainly more, in the long run, than the pain of sadness.

Sadness is not depression. Unprocessed grief can lead to depression, though.

Sadness is the feeling of loss.

A person who is experiencing loss needs the courage to feel sad, and in a world which wants to shove sad under the carpet at the first opportunity, that can be far from easy.

What is valued is staying strong in the face of loss, grief, catastrophe. Not collapsing. Not showing how much pain we’re in.

But what we need when we’re sad and in pain, most of the time, is support so we can dare to feel all this. A safe place to be heard, recognised, and not judged. Love and acceptance that does not desperately want to save us from our emotions, but on the contrary, regard them as part of ourselves and our journey through life.

To grieve and to move on from all the various losses in our lives, all the nevermores, we need to be able to be sad. It is a good thing.

Eat, Pray, Love: Damn You, Elizabeth Gilbert [en]

[fr] J'ai aimé Eat, Pray, Love plus que ce à quoi je m'attendais. Le trip "spiritualité indienne sauce occidentale", je m'en passerais, mais il y a plein de bonnes choses -- outre l'écriture, que j'aime beaucoup. Pour plus de détails... lire l'article complet en anglais!

Damn you, Liz Gilbert. I didn’t want to like your book, but I did. I even like you (well, the narrator you). Yeah, of course I can relate: 30-something heartbroken woman finds peace and love. Which single woman in her mid-thirties wouldn’t?

It annoys me, though, that you found them through faith, because I can’t do that.

I don’t doubt that you had a life-changing experience. I’m not either against religious or spiritual paths journeys per se, as long as they actually serve to grow us as human beings. But like the friends you mention near the end of your India book, I *cannot* believe anymore — believing there is a God or some other power, personal or not, is too incompatible with my worldview. A part of me would *like* to believe, so that I could find the peace you found. But I’d be faking it, right? Because another part of me is *certain* that there is nothing up there — or in there, aside from ourselves.

To your credit, you do not proselytize, nor try to tell us that your way is The Only Way, and that we should all be doing it too. You bear witness of your own personal path, which involved a spiritual adventure in an ashram in India. I can appreciate that. But I have trouble relating to that aspect of your journey. (There is the Siddha Yoga issue too, which bothers me, but that I won’t delve into here.)

Also, whether you want it or not, your spiritual journey is coloured by a very specific — and modern — Indian school of thought (and by that, I don’t just mean Siddha Yoga). You acknowledge that, but in some respects you are blind to it, for example when you serve us truths about Indian spirituality or religions in general — you are talking from the inside of a specific religious tradition, not giving us access some kind of general truth. It’s a mistake many make, and I guess I can forgive you for it.

I personally believe that our conversations with God are conversations with ourselves. I believe we are much bigger than we think, and probably much bigger than we can ever know. And I say this not in a “mystical” or “magical” or “supernatural” sense, but in a psychological one. So for me, any religious or spiritual path is no more than a path within and with ourselves, using an exterior force or entity (“God”, “energy”) as a metaphorical proxy for parts or aspects of ourselves which are not readily available to our consciousness. Yes, it’s sometimes a bit complicated to follow for me too.

So what I can relate to, clearly, are your conversations with yourself in your notebook. I know I am a good friend. I’m loyal. I can love to bits. If I open the floodgates, I can love more than is possibly imaginable — just like you say of yourself. But I do not let myself be the beneficiary of so much love and care. “To love oneself,” not in a narcissistic way, but as a good friend or a good parent would. I know this is something I need to work on, I knew it before reading Eat, Pray, Love, but your journey serves as a reminder to me. It’s also reminding me that meditation (even when it’s not a search for God or done as religious practice) has benefits — and that I could use them.

So, thank you, Liz Gilbert. We may differ in our spiritual and life aspirations, but your journey has touched me, and inspired me. I didn’t expect it to. Thank you for the nice surprise. And damn you, because now I can’t look down quite so smugly anymore on those who rave about your book.

Sorting Through Grief [en]

So, in the process of coming to terms with Bagha’s death — or at least, moving forward in that direction — I’ve tried to identify what made him special and unique for me. You see, when losing a pet you’re as attached to as I was to Bagha, a lot of things get mixed up.

I think it helps to differentiate, for example, between the pain of being “petless” and the pain of losing this specific pet. Here are some of the levels I can make out:

what it means for me to now be living completely alone (ie, “petless” => by extension, what having a pet — any pet — adds to my life)
what made Bagha special, as compared to other cats (his personal caracteristics, pretty objectively)
what made Bagha special for me, in terms of the relationship we had and what he meant to me.

I made a pretty long list in the days following his death. One of the reasons I’m doing this is that I have trouble sorting out the levels (even simply hoping they make sense). The idea is to identify what I am really grieving here (yeah, my cat of course, but let’s skip the obvious) and also — this is the difficult part for me — to pinpoint what remains for me of this feline relationship.

What made it worthwhile? What justifies or compensates the suffering when it ends? What is really hurting because of this particular loss, and what is just old stuff coming back to the surface? Because without that, the obvious conclusion to this much grief (and those who have been through separations of any type in their life can probably relate) is vowing never to put oneself in a situation that leaves the door open to suffering like this again. To put it clearly: to be able to love (or bond) you need to be able to grieve (to come to terms with loss).

I’ll dive into this exercise in another post. First of all, because it will be long — and second, because it’s not easy, and I think I have to take things little by little. Writing this up is the first step.

Chris de Burgh Concert in Lausanne [en]

A pretty long review of the fantastic show Chris de Burgh gave last night in Lausanne.

Warning: long, rambling, and clumsily written review ahead. I obviously still have progress to make in review writing! Thanks for bearing with me.

Chris de Burgh gave us a delightful solo show in Lausanne last night, armed with only his guitar, his piano and his songs (ok, with a very small dose of recorded choirs and stuff for a couple of songs).

The show started with The Road to Freedom, title song from his latest album, and continued for two and a half hours, including songs from a variety of albums. I was happy to hear It’s Such a Long Way Home, from the album Crusader, pretty early on in the show. Crusader is one of the first Chris de Burgh albums I actually owned, way back in the time of vinyl, and it’s an album I appreciate a lot.

Chris de Burgh introduced many of the songs he sang by giving the audience some background on them, often half in French and half in English. (We also got updates on the score for the ongoing Russia-Portual football match, which I found pretty cool — even if I don’t care about football at all.) Last Night (a personal favorite), a song about the damages of war, for the young soldiers who come back, and those who remain when they don’t, was an occasion to comment on actuality: Maybe Mr. Bush will think about this next time he wants to go to war. Right on the theme of war and its ills, Chris de Burgh later sang Borderline followed by Say Goodbye to It All — something I’d really been waiting for, as the second was written as a sequel to the first one.

Speaking of sequels, Lady in Red (a song you probably know even if you’ve never heard about Chris de Burgh, and that you might also understandably be sick of hearing too much on the radio) has a sequel in the latest album: Five Past Dreams. Before singing it, he told us about this strange fact: women spend a lot of time making themselves beautiful before going out, but men seem incapable of remembering what they were wearing. Lady in Red is about this man who is a party, and is looking at this beautiful woman in the crowd… and suddenly realises that it’s the woman he came with…

After poking a bit of fun at Britney and playback singers, Chris de Burgh put on a headset mike and actually got off stage with his guitar to walk through the public and shake hands while he sang a medley. Pretty impressive, if you ask me!

One great present of this evening for me was hearing the song Sailor again. Sailor is a song from the album Eastern Wind, which, along with The Getaway and Man on the Line, made me discover Chris de Burgh nearly twenty years ago. I remember the time when I listened to this song over and over again — it was one of those spine-prickling songs for me. And when Chris de Burgh started singing it tonight, I realised that I had totally forgotten it existed. I was incapable of naming it until he reached the chorus — something which hardly ever happens to me, as I have a pretty spooky memory for names.

I won’t go through all the songs which were sung. Imagine how many songs can be sung in two and a half hours, even with a fair amount of chatting en between! However, I’d like to mention one that I found particularly moving: Songbird, written after Chris de Burgh heard Eva Cassidy singing on the radio. Unknown in her lifetime, she died of cancer at the age of thirty-three, and it is said she had one of the most wonderful singing voices ever heard.

To sum it up, this show was a real treat. Chris de Burgh was the first artist I ever got to see live, almost twenty years ago, and I have trouble understanding how I let all those years pass without seeing him again. I’ll definitely be on the lookout for his next tour.

My friend Rachel, who accompanied me, knew only two Chris de Burgh songs (the inevitable Lady in Red and High on Emotion, but of course she had no idea who sang those songs), but she had a really great time too. I think that like me, she was moved by how very human and close to the public Chris de Burgh is. It seems to me (and the notes you can read in the Ask Chris section on his official website seems to confirm this) that he really has a sincere belief in his work — thirty years after his first album.

As I was saying to Steph a few hours ago: I like artists that look like human beings. If you have a chance to see Chris de Burgh live, do so — particularly if all you know of him is Lady in Red!

For the curious, here is a list of the songs I didn’t mention here but that I remember from the show:

Don’t Pay the Ferryman
Living On The Island
Sight and Touch
Sailing Away
St Peter’s Gate
Lebanese Night
High on Emotion
Natasha Dance
medley: Carry Me (?), Save Me, Tender Hands, Crying and Laughing…
Snows of New York
Where Peaceful Waters Flow
Nothing Ever Happens Round Here
Rain in Paris (the only song I did not know)
new album: The Words I Love You, Five Past Dreams, Snow is Falling, Read My Name, The Journey, Here For You (?)

Update 24.06.04: I’ve been thinking quite a lot these last days about why I like this singer so much, and why I’ve stuck with him for the last 20 years. Here is something he says about feeling what he sings that I really like:

When I sing, I like to convey a total and absolute honest belief in what I am singing. It’s very important for me to convey an emotion, and unless you feel that emotion, you can’t convey it. It’s my belief. So when I sing, I wear the song like a coat, I try to convey everything that I put into it initially. All the ideas, all the feelings, all the emotions.

Chris de Burgh

If you’ve listened to his songs a bit, I think you’ll agree with me that this is a man who seems to know what it is to love.

Savitri II [en]

You want love, and I don’t want it? What is it that I have given you these six years

You want love, and I don’t want it? What is it that I have given you these six years? Only I did not get entangled in the nomenclature of what I wanted, of what I still want–that’s all. You ought to have carried me off, dragged me away–yes, I am writing what’s true, what’s absolutely true. Nothing is ever gained by analysing things. We only become strangers to our own selves.

P. S. Rege, Savitri