Do you
remember the scene in the Lord of the Rings movie where the signal fires get
lit? One after another, across those glorious mountain peaks, the carefully
stacked fire wood, soaked in oil, is ignited and the flames leap up! And the proclamation
goes out: “The Beacons are lit! The Beacons of Gondor are lit!”
The Beacons of
Gondor were a sign that great danger was at hand and help was desperately
needed.
Deep anxiety
was my mother’s great wound. When she was 11, her young father, who loved to hunt
and who kept 2 dozen dogs, was bitten by one of them and died a horrible death 3
weeks later from rabies.
It happened in the middle of the Great Depression. Her mom was forced to take her
two girls, leave their home in the country to take a job as a seamstress 15
miles away in ‘town.’
This upheaval
left my mother with a festering wound, a pervasive terror that no matter how
stable life might seem, something horrible was always looming.
Though she
always tried to put a bold face it, each of her 3 sons inherited this same certainty,
a gnawing unease that somehow something bad is always lurking.
I’ve always
known this isn’t really true. I’ve worked hard to infuse this fear with reason and
outward confidence. But…
I can’t tell
you how often I’ve waked up at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning thinking, “The Beacons
are lit! The Beacons are lit! The Beacons of Gondor are lit!” All juiced up
with adrenalin, I brace my half-awake self and anticipate the worst, wrestling
with the demon Dread for the next
hour or two.
Of course,
my family ‘Beacons’ don’t work right, they’re dysfunctional. I know that. But part of me wants to stride out and
find the idiot who keeps lighting that first beacon and throw him off the mountain!
Yet as I’ve
sat with my irrational anxiety, tracing the string of beacons back to their source, I’ve
realized it’s my mother who lit the first one. She’d be the one I’d have to
throw off the mountain.
Somebody
said that anxiety is the abuse of
imagination. Sounds about right to me. It’s certainly the misuse of
imagination. Inventing all kinds of nasty future scenarios.
On the other
hand, it’s been imagination, put to better use, that has helped me follow my
family’s beacons back to find my grieving, terrified eleven-year-old mom with matches in
her hand. It's a scene that lights a different kind of fire in the heart.
All wise spiritual
traditions and practices cultivate love. As we meditate, we work on meeting
each thought, each feeling, each image, each story with love. And when love
meets pain it morphs into compassion. That’s just what it does. And when
anxiety or any other unhealthy mental or emotional process is held in
compassion it is transformed. Maybe very slowly and maybe over a long time, but
it is transformed.
Healthy
imagination and mindfulness has allowed me to follow this deep trauma to the
very place of its birth. Who knew it could turn out to be a sacred place?
