When an inner situation is not made conscious,
it appears outside as fate.
Carl Jung
All That Remains
Ever feel as if your life is a shipwreck...perhaps just today, or for a week or even months at a time? No matter how well prepared you thought you were for life, for parenthood, for your career, for a relationship...things just seemed to fall apart all at once. It hardly seems fair when you've tried so hard to do it all and do it right. A great many people struggle every day with all kinds of depressive disorders because they felt hopelessly shipwrecked on some deserted island with no help or hope in sight.
Artists often address this kind of emotional shipwreck in darker paintings perhaps where they can make such pain visible. Poets, of course, have throughout history done the same. As you will see in a moment - I've done both - but not for the purpose of merely expressing the feeling of being abandoned by the fates or the universe or God. Rather it's to offer hope and remind ourselves that courage in the face of hardship is not what we usually think of - a lack of fear - but rather a willingness to stand up and try again, no matter how afraid we are. There's an old Asian saying, "Fall down seven times, get up eight." That's pretty much the way it goes...and that's okay. The only possible failure is the failure to try to make something from all that remains after the shipwreck.
ALL THAT REMAINS
At times, all that remains
of the graceful, promising ship
in which we once set sail,
onto which we had bravely loaded
and entrusted our adventurous dreams,
provisioned with the sparkling
citrus of hope, the ballast of reason,
is a rotting hulk cast upon some
lonely shore, beached and broken,
darkening with age and petrifying
with desperate abandonment.
We misread the silent stars perhaps,
encountered reefs that were unmapped,
were blown aground with the violence
of the fierce and unexpected hurricane,
the savage force of events and emotions
that whipped the sea to gray-green foam,
the perfect storm against which our ballast
was of little weight or counter-balance.
Here we’re stranded far from home,
even farther from where we thought we’d be,
our hulls splintered, ribs spread wide,
exposing all that we’d possessed.
But there are always treasures
to be gleaned from every shipwreck,
salvaged from the bones of shattered past.
We reclaim what is essential to survival
convey it all inland bit by bit, to an interior
place away from tides and undertows.
We collect from the jetsam what tools we can
to construct a shelter for the present,
to build a boat for some tomorrow –
keep the unbroken planks of wisdom
as foundation for what we can create,
the pegs of persistence with which
to connect the pieces into some new form,
the coiled rope of quiet courage,
the astrolabe and compass of our values,
with which to do our daily reckoning,
the parchment maps on which to mark
the errors of our previous course,
and with fresh insight plot anew
the way to yet dreamed of destinations
beyond the clouded horizon we see now.
We’ll roll the mainsails for a covering,
yet one day watch them unfurl again
filled with the brisk winds of bright new hope.
And when we go at last from here,
we’ll take with us a different treasure
than the gold we’d brought aboard at first -
new jewels of faith and fortitude,
the valued currency of courage.
We’ll leave behind not some worthless hulk
but a story written on that distant shore
preserved as an art and an architecture,
perfectly fitted into the landscape now
where sand and time will make of it
a home not just for gulls and memories,
but for the record of our redemption.
© Lianne Schneider July 2011
Sometimes, even when we're shipwrecked for a time, there are valuable lessons to be learned, qualities in ourselves to develop, and hope - not that someone will rescue us but that we will figure out how to save ourselves. We are the only ones who can.
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