You see twenty patients a week. How do you deal with taking in so much pain from strangers? I asked Anthony one night, over the phone as I lay on a pull-out bed in a friend’s living room in Montreal. The post show signing had taken ages and I was exhausted but I couldn’t sleep.
Have you ever heard of a “sin-eater”?
No, I said. Tell me.
It’s when a local holy man, or a guru, takes on the sins and sufferings of the community by opening to those who are in pain, and filtering the pain and suffering. He takes all the emotional trash and, through his body, through his love and capacity to stay present, clarifies the pain into compassion. Lots of religions have their version of it. Jesus does it for the Christians.
A community confession-booth attendant, basically, I said.
Ha. Basically. There were professional sin-eaters in England. A guy, for money, would come around and eat bread over the corpse of a dead family member to purge the body of sin before it went to heaven. It’s also the magic and mystery of what we do – when we nail it – in psychotherapy. We take on the suffering of others, digest it, transform it.
And artists? I asked. Sounds like art.
Yeah, good artists do it. You know the “Artist” and the “Medicine Man” used to be the same guy. “Musician” and “Shaman” used to be the same characters, in a way. Our jobs aren’t that different, you and me. I’ve seen you at the signing line, I’ve watched you. Eat the pain. Send it back to the void as love.
Can I ask you a question?
Ask, he said.
Do you ever have days where you can’t take it all in, and it just makes you too sad?
Yeah, beauty. It happens all the time.
…..from “The Art of Asking or How I learned to stop worrying and let people help” by Amanda Palmer
My mother was watching television when I dashed into the room late at night, red eyed and snivelling, and pronounced that I just wanted to “do something” with my life.
I was, I think six or seven, and I think she was rather confused by what had provoked such an eruption. The answer was nothing, as usual, or perhaps it was just that I didn’t really know. In any case, I was becalmed and sent back to bed and it was put down to another one of my outbursts.
But the feeling, the longing to change things, the wish that we could somehow be together with our pain and our fears and our doubts, that stuck with me. And I am reminded of it in months like this. A month when a group of cartoonists were murdered for no reason other than they drew pictures that someone else didn’t like. A month when a group of shoppers were murdered because they were Jewish. A town that was the home of 10,000 people, obliterated in Nigeria, a school of children in Pakistan, trying to pick up their lives after witnessing more than 100 of their classmates gunned down.
These are just the big stories. Closer to home there are countless more. Perhaps smaller, but no less devastating tragedies that don’t get reported in the news, instead being passed on by word of mouth and sometimes not even that. Cancer, addiction, abuse, depression, dementia. Freak accidents and people who vanish, slipping through the cracks.
Even smaller are the everyday tragedies. The years given over to relationships that hurt us, jobs that slowly kill us, a feeling that somehow we don’t deserve what we really want. How many days, hours, minutes are lost in worry and fear, and how many need not be?
In a month like this, when it seems like everything is too big, too hard, too wrong, I happened to be reading this passage in Amanda Palmer’s “The Art of Asking” and it gave me hope.
It is so easy to get overwhelmed by the great divine tragedy of it all and sometimes there are no actions that feel large enough for the trauma and turmoil going on around you. In those moments, perhaps small actions are all we have. Perhaps they are all we ever have.
Ideas are some of the smallest actions available to us but their impact is as great as the butterfly that alters the path of a hurricane with the flap of its wings. And we express our ideas through creation. The words we write, the pictures we draw, the songs we sing. The scientists’ equations and the entrepreneur’s latest invention. They are vehicles for our ideas, our hopes, even our pain, so that they can be consumed and transformed into connections.
In a month like this, it is easy to feel the need to withdraw, to despair even. It is easy to feel the need to fight or to tear down. It is easy to feel the need to consume and comment, rather than to create.
My suggestion? My hope? Make your creations. Tell your story. Respond in your work and in your life. Create the world you want to see, even if it seems too small or trivial. Eat the pain and send it back to the void as love.