Every morning, when I look out of my bedroom window, I see a crack in the world.
The steep, tree-covered mountain wall that runs perpendicular to my view, obscuring the horizon and extending as far as my vision reaches to left and right, has an opening in it. It’s shaped like an asymmetrical “V,” with overlapping diagonal slopes that pull back to reveal the next fold of mountain above and behind them, and come to a point below, directing my eye back down to earth. In the midst of a massive heap of rock which blocks my view of the sky, slowing the arrival of sunlight each day, it offers a possible way through to other layers of existence. An interruption. A gap.
This is the Combe Grède gorge, a well-known feature of Switzerland’s Chasseral National Park, in the midst of the Jura range of mountains that straddles the northwest border with France. I’m not a native of this country, but have come here, like many emigrants, through marriage and for work. We moved from the US four years ago when, after we’d been together for more than a decade, my Swiss husband got a job in his homeland.
We framed our move to the public as a chance for our adolescent son to experience the other side of his heritage, an adventure we chose as a family. While that was true, it would never have happened if our former life hadn’t collapsed. Something that seemed solid and permanent had shifted and cracked; a gap had opened up, and we’d waded through the rubble into this new life.
Unlike my husband, I had no ties here, nothing in my blood calling me home. No kinship with this mountainous land — or so I’d thought. I didn’t know that the cracks inside me, which had just been shifted and eroded and tumbled down in an avalanche of disturbing force, would find expression in a symbol that met my gaze every morning, calling me on a further journey. There was a difficult slope I had to climb, before I could reach the place of spaciousness and light.
On many winter days, fog and clouds conceal the further view through the Combe Grède, turning it into a cold white arrow pointed at the heart of our village. But when the sun starts to coax away layers of obscuring mist, it becomes a dream-landscape, with a higher, purer land beckoning through the veils. Watching this spectacle, I remember how when as a child I came to the end of the Chronicles of Narnia I longed to go “further up and further in,” how I closed the book with tears in my eyes, because I could not reach the ring of mountains that surrounded the shadowlands. The real world of spirit and truth, from which the shadows fall.
“To the mountains I lift up my eyes,” sings the psalmist. “From whence does my help come?”
Mountains are nature’s fortresses, lookout points where we distance ourselves from our enemies, scanning the landscape for threats. Strong places that we shore up further with defensive walls and castle keeps. There’s one of these in our valley, a couple of towns over: an ancient curve of tower wall, crumbling at the top. When we first moved here and started to explore the paths through the forest, it acted like a magnet on our twelve-year-old son, who insisted on climbing it when I wasn’t looking, and laughed at my anxious calls for him to come down.
He’s always been a climber, a scaler of precarious structures and impossible rockfaces, who trusts in his ability to tell the difference between solid and slippery. My own sense of safety has been much harder to establish. I prefer secure constructions, fortresses that have no holes in them, no cracks or gaps.
But when we lock ourselves for too long in the fortress, life can’t get through. The defensive structures are not the help; they are only meant to keep us safe until help arrives, from a source that is stronger than stone.
From what strong place issues the relief for an embattled soul? How will reality come down into the place of illusion, through the concealing clouds? My help comes from the Lord, the Lord who has made Heaven and Earth. Before there were mountains, there was the Maker of mountains. And though mountains are barriers, they are also bridges, places where heaven touches earth. When we lift up our eyes to the highest point we can reach with our earthly vision and pray for help, something might come to meet us there.
* * *
The cracks in my life started early. Each time, I toughened up around and against them. The fortress got stronger, and getting out became harder.
I don’t even know how this crackdown began; it’s lost in the years before I had conscious memory or a clear sense of self and other. My remembered narrative begins at the age of seven, when my family moves from northern California to Seattle, a seismic shift that seems to destroy all my comfort and security.
Crack.
The other girls in my new class giggle and look sidelong at me. I decide that they are making up a secret code and talking about me. I won’t try to be friends with them any more. I find a hideaway in the blackberry bushes that surround the school field. I crouch there amid the thorns, a princess armed with pride and guarded by loneliness.
Crack.
My own body becomes an enemy, sprouting hair and knobby protruberances, shifting into new forms. I’m horrified by the blood, the smells, ashamed by my fear of the lust which is on everyone’s lips and in their eyes. Physical closeness causes me to drift apart from my muscles and bones and watch them from outside as they do things I don’t want to do. I don’t feel love or desire; mostly, I feel numb.
Crack.
In graduate school, as I’m student-teaching a class of third graders, I am so nervous that I black out during a lesson, unable to see what’s in front of my face even as I’m walking around and talking about the multiplication tables. The children yell and run around the room, but I don’t even notice. When the teacher who is mentoring me asks what happened, I can’t admit the truth; I say I just didn’t know what to do.
Crack.
Each crack divides me further from my real self, my real experiences and thoughts. I am barricading myself in the heights, while the life and growth is taking place somewhere else, down in a body I am afraid to enter into.
I find ways to hide and pretend, to do well enough, to escape scrutiny so that no one will tell me I need help. I can’t allow myself to know I need help, because that would destroy my fortress. I know it is not right to be so numb, but I don’t know how to stop. If I melt, I might drip away to nothing, like the Wicked Witch of the West.
* * *
To climb up through the Combe Grède, you turn left from our house and walk past the last few scattered houses and farms of the town. You come to a rocky streambed that is sometimes dry, sometimes flowing with water, depending on the season and the conditions above. At the moment it’s strewn with huge machines that are ripping back layers of stone and gravel and putting in bulwarks of concrete, to try to contain the floods that rarely, but destructively, come down from the mountain at times of storm and snowmelt.
Past these ugly signs of human intervention, you enter the trees, tall, silent presences that climb the mountain with you. Bright, translucent leaves of beech and maple are slowly replaced by darker shades of pine. Soon the rocky sides of the gorge are higher and closer. You twist and turn through them, sometimes on metal or wooden platforms that have been built out from the rock. There are a few metal ladders to climb where no path could be built. At other places, the rocks recede and you climb through majestic forest vistas, where elves and hobbits could conceivably lurk.
After about an hour, you bump up against the mountain, where a concave rockface rises nearly sheer to a plateau at the top. Here there is usually a trickle of water coming down from above, caught by a pool and then descending further towards the floodworks. It’s a good place to stop and rest and look around, seeing where you’ve come from and where you still have to go.
From here, the path zigzags back and forth up the steepest part of the climb, edging carefully up the rockface, with sturdy wooden railings or metal chains to keep you from falling off. After a moderately strenuous workout, you come out to a flatter area of woods and fields and pastures. Trek through this, dodging cowpats and the occasional cow, then make the final climb up one more ridge to the Chasseral Hotel, a place to rest and refresh yourself while you enjoy the splendid view. (The Swiss mountains are full of such conveniences.) A little further on is the Chasseral itself, the highest peak in the area. As well as being a lookout point, it’s been crowned with a communications tower that points even higher into the air, invisibly shooting messages and data far and wide.
The Combe Grède is on the north side of the mountain slope, and so it is sheltered from the sun, always relatively cool and moist. Plants adapted to this shady environment grow here, and especially in the lower part the trees and rocks are covered with moss and lichen. In the spring, there’s a big crop of Bärlauch, the garlicky green that the Swiss love to harvest and cook with during its brief appearance. Throughout the summer, various varieties of wildflowers appear, evanescent drifts of yellow, white, blue.
It’s a magical place. All the street noises from below quickly die away, and you feel immersed in a green, shadowy world, surrounded by birdsong, smelling the damp earth. It’s a way to enter into the rock, but not an enclosed cave, still open to the wind and to the sky. In the heat of summer its shady coolness is no doubt why many people choose this way to make the climb. But it is also full of life, quiet, slow-growing life that seems untroubled by all the chaos reigning elsewhere. When I climb here, even if I start out tired, I usually feel revitalized by the time I get to the top. The life seems to collect and concentrate itself here, and to impart itself to those who pass through it.
It’s a feminine place, too, with its crevices and its dripping water, its soft mosses and rounded rocks. It reminds me of the feminine qualities I need to accept and appreciate in myself, difficult as that path has been. Of how it’s all right, sometimes, to step out of the sun and simply grow, slowly, quietly, not making lots of noise and bustle, but just welcoming what wants to come in and climb up through you.
* * *
I was in my thirties, disgusted by my inner coldness, before it happened. A man fell in love with me, and though I wasn’t in love with him, I liked him. I trusted him. I liked feeling chosen, as though I might be good for something after all, in spite of being so numb. My body didn’t feel desire for his, but at least it didn’t run away, and I was able to stay with it and not black out. I pushed my body to come together with his, to close the crack that severed me from love and community and connection with life. We were married.
I had a child to please my husband. He was the one who said he wanted to have a family with me. He hadn’t wanted it urgently — just maybe someday — but when I got pregnant, he was excited and supportive.
That changed after the baby arrived.
The baby changed everything. I couldn’t wall myself off in numbness any more. Nursing him was so painful, I finally asked for help from a lactation consultant. She showed me how to get into a better position so at least I didn’t feel like my nipples were being chewed off each time the baby tried to feed.
But he still wasn’t feeding well. I knew this. I knew his diapers were not wet enough. But I didn’t tell anyone. If something was wrong with the baby, it meant something was wrong with me. And I could not admit that. It would shatter all my defenses.
Fortunately, his feeding trouble was discovered by others — he wasn’t gaining weight — and a state of emergency erupted, a confusing quest to find out what was wrong and how to repair it. I was plunged into a chaos of expensive machines and awkward devices and worry that there wouldn’t be enough milk. I had to put the baby down to use an electric pump several times a day, breaking our connection rather than strengthening it as the milk was produced. I was given conflicting advice by different people — you must pump during the night; no, you need sleep — and didn’t know what to believe.
I was tortured by sleep deprivation, it was true. A hungry baby is hard to soothe, and mine cried inconsolably before going into an exhausted doze, then waking up again after what seemed mere minutes. My anger and impatience increased as my reserves of energy were depleted. I found myself having to put my child down to scream and hit things.
I wondered about the cause of the problem, but nobody could ever explain it; whatever the reason, he never did learn to latch on. I couldn’t pump enough for him, and had to supplement with formula. After eight months of this exhausting routine I gave up, knowing I had failed at a mother’s main task: feeding my child. I couldn’t even love him, as any normal person would. He was a responsibility that had been handed to me, that I would do my best to fulfil, but forcing myself to love a bundle of insatiable, impossible demands was beyond me.
Postpartum depression was something other people had. What I had, I knew, was a shameful deficiency I could never reveal to anyone. I could not let them know about my inability to love, or I would be cast out forever, into the outer darkness.
I couldn’t hide what was outwardly visible — my body had been bared to the world in the process of birth, and my breasts had become the subject of public debate — but I could hide my feelings and thoughts. I could cover up the terrifying abyss in my own soul, which sucked away all pleasure and comfort, and left me clinging to a thin barrier, like a railing holding me to the cliff.
Keeping up appearances was the only thing that prevented me from falling.
My husband didn’t know what had happened to me. He didn’t understand, and he judged me for my weakness, my incapacity. When he came home from work and found unwashed diapers and no dinner on the table, the hard fury in his eyes was like a slap. While he never physically harmed me, his judgment flung me into the pit of self-loathing I’d already prepared for myself. He could be tremendously warm and accepting, so that I melted into his embrace, but also hard and unyielding as stone, shutting me out completely.
I noticed that he would never, ever apologize when I was upset about something, but gave me the silent treatment and waited for me say that I was sorry. I always did, and was always welcomed back, so long as I didn’t question this rule. I lived for the moments of approval and connection, and waited out the angry, critical times, in my own fortress of silence.
Years went by. Slowly, as our child survived, and grew, and showed more of himself, I was able to take delight in his becoming. If that was love, then I loved him. I was certainly moved by the courage of this small person who had come to me, trusting me in spite of my incapacity, and asked me for a place through which he could come to earth. Only a part of me held back, worried about doing something wrong, still obsessed with my own failure. I was unable to conceive a relationship in which judgment played no part, and so a space grew up between us. Not a full estrangement, but a gap, a space of uncertainty, of not-knowing.
No one else saw what was behind the fortress walls. To others, we looked like a normal, happy family. But change was coming, when the truth would overturn appearances.
Our son went to school, where he could not focus. He always seemed to be thinking of something other than the task he was supposed to be doing. His teachers talked of laziness, and of learning disabilities. I looked at them blankly, maintaining the wall.
My husband and I went to work in a community caring for developmentally disabled adults. And I found my own teachers.
* * *
Our new home was in the Monadnock region of New Hampshire, where solitary peaks—Monadnocks in the language of the local Native Americans—lift up their proud heads above the general hilly landscape.
Each human being is a mountain, a solitary peak, a Monadnock. We are the mountains that would be pulled up and thrown into the sea by faith, if we had enough of it.
But we are not ready to swim in the sea of life. We hold ourselves hard and separate, hanging on to our identity, clinging to the rocks that make us feel secure. We try to forget that the hardest matter we can imagine will at some point be shaken and fall into dissolution. Making ourselves into mountains may not be the ultimate solution to the threats that assail us.
It was there, though, that I learned how to stop being a mountain, and to fall into the sea of my helplessness. Six years of working with people who did not hide their disabilities, who didn’t pretend they were not in need of help, shook the foundations of my fortress. I couldn’t care for them without admitting that I had parts that were in need of care, too. And I couldn’t struggle to understand their baffling methods of non-verbal communication without starting to hear voices inside me that had long been ignored and denied.
They told me that I had hurt my own child.
I was still hurting him, by my refusal to seek help for my own pain.
My volcano of suppressed anger was destroying us both.
The voices told me something else, too. They told me that I wasn’t useless and incapable of love or caring. I could be a caring person, and I was needed. I was important. The people I cared for did not cast me out and reject me because I had flaws and weaknesses. They bore with my weaknesses, and revealed their own, while also offering their strengths. Together, by doing for one another what we could not do for ourselves, we could become whole.
They lived what I read about in the Bible and heard in church: the love that closes all gaps, heals all wounds. It’s not a pretty, sentimental love, but the ground on which we have our being, the reality that no one can survive without help. And I knew I wanted to reach the place of truth, myself, no matter what might have to fall away.
Shaken, I started to reach out at last, to friends, counselors, doctors, priests, spiritual directors. Once I started to admit that I could not hold up my life all alone, and that maybe I was worth the trouble of being supported through a process of healing, the avalanche started to roll.
I saw that my husband, too, with his cold, hard attitude, was only trying to conceal his own deep hurt and vulnerability. I pushed him to get help, too, but he didn’t want to. He pushed back, and in a moment of fear, I forced him to leave our home, which was also our job.
I had caused an eruption that destroyed our life.
But once the gap had been revealed, it could be mended. Words I had never heard before came out through the cracks: “I’m sorry” and “Now I understand.” Homeless and jobless, we could finally stop the pretense of self-sufficiency. Being in need of help was no longer a question.
I do not advise setting off an eruption as a means of healing. But in our case, it turned out to be the only way to bring down a prison of prideful concealment. The walls had to fall, before the light could get through.
* * *
After the eruption, we lived apart for a year; although I wanted to trust the miracle, it took time to be sure that the ground was really safe. When it was, we came here to the mountains, restoring our family, closing the gap. Only I soon discovered it wasn’t the end of the avalanches for me, but the beginning.
My body was going through the transition of menopause, and many things didn’t work they way I was used to. I developed allergy-like reactions, sneezing and rashes. The migraine headaches I’d had monthly for years became more frequent and irregular, as my periods stopped.
Medical investigation uncovered gallbladder disease and microbial dysbiosis. I had my gallbladder removed and dosed myself with probiotics. I changed my diet, challenging long-held habits of stuffing down emotions with food. The rashes went away, but the migraines were a moving target. Every time I altered something, I would briefly feel better, but then a headache would strike and put me back in my bed, vomiting up bile, unable to hold down even a sip of water.
Now I was the one with the feeding problem. What was I really hungry for?
My son, now a teenager, had adjusted amazingly well to his new school, including several new languages, but he was still distracted and unfocused. His teacher, though, didn’t talk about laziness and disability, but about trauma and recovery. I found that I wanted to tell her about what I had gone through after the birth, how I knew it must have affected my baby, and how much I wanted to heal that rift now.
She invited me to tell my story to the whole circle of teachers, so that they could better understand and support us.
On the day of the meeting, I had a migraine. I threw up in the bushes after our half-hour ride down the mountain to the school, but I was determined to go.
I sat in the circle of about twenty-five people and looked around. I thought of how fifteen years ago I could not have imagined myself telling this story to such a large group. I couldn’t even tell it to my own husband, or to my closest friends. I was convinced that I could never, ever tell anyone how bad I was, how shamefully lacking in love.
Now, that didn’t matter. It didn’t matter who might judge me, or how. All that mattered was our beautiful boy and his future. If my opening up meant that his way could be made easier or lighter, I would do it. I held to the truth that my so-called “disabled” friends had taught me: we are part of one another, and we need each other. Admitting that need does not diminish us, but makes us stronger. And where human help is insufficient, weak and fallible as we all are, there is the divine love that will never fail us. Turning at last to that mountain of love had given me the strength to leave my fortress.
There was no sudden, dramatic change after our meeting, but a slow shift. As I continued to seek many kinds of support — physical, psychological, spiritual — and to learn from the wisdom of others, I found ways to live with my changing body. I discovered that I could lean into its pains and discomforts instead of stiffening against them, and listen to its messages. Meanwhile, our son began to share what he had not when he was younger: how lost and uncertain he had felt, as if adrift in an abyss. How he still felt that way with people, in spite of all reassurances that he was appreciated and loved. I told him what I had gone through, and how I had found help. In our conversation, a new life of acceptance and understanding could begin to grow, released from the prison of silent shame.
I can never give him back those lost years when I was not really able to be there for him, but I can be there for him now, and offer him my most heartfelt love, a love that I owe to him. It was his courage in coming to me, unworthy as I was, that opened up my heart. I have to trust in God to fill in any gaps that remain, and continue the healing work of reconnection.
* * *
I walk up to one of my favorite places in the Combe Grède, where a huge beech spreads her motherly arms wide over a rough log bench and a fire circle. I hop over the gurgling brown stream and sit on the bench. It starts to rain — it’s been raining off and on all day, that’s why the stream is so full — but hardly a drop reaches me through those protective branches.
I want to pray. I get all tangled up in myself, telling God about what’s wrong with me and how I want him to fix things. Then I stop.
I simply sit in quiet, and look up through the leaves, where a patch of sky is beginning to lighten, a promise of sun to come. I breathe.
In the stillness and coolness of the Combe Grède, in its emptiness that offers a place to enter and to grow, I encounter what I need to learn. I need to tame my fire and let it come to rest, let it cool and turn into rock and not fear being frozen or imprisoned thereby. The rock will be colonized by life, slow, patient, determined life that takes hold of it and transforms it and crumbles it into soil. This life will rise towards the sun and receive light and turn it into nourishment that fosters more life. Everything will die and become new.
Even if the sun is hidden, even if it’s blocked out by the rocky shoulder of a mountain, life still has its way of growing. There is nothing to worry about. I only need to find my place, settle there, and sense how the sun is calling me.
I get up and walk back down the mountain, into my life.
I enter into the realm from which my help comes: my home, my family, my community. I turn toward the people through whom I experience the presence of God, not as a shadow, but as a revelation of eternal realities. In them, the rocky barriers that divide us begin to shine, to become transparent and show forth the love that created and connects us all.
Love will come, along the way.