Faults
Oakland, CA 3 October 2001
Things are shifting here. I am moving in bit by bit. Soon I may actually feel at home here in Oakland again. I would not have predicted this some months ago. I would have said that such an idea was crazy. Then again a few months ago Nick was alive, I was living in Portola Valley, I did not know A, and my sister had a great job with a bright future.
I need to be mindful of this, of how surprising it is to see possibilities unfold in my life. And not expectations or extrapolations from the current state. Most of what is possible is unimaginable. The choice points are like synapses with very little discernable pattern. Like the choices water makes seeking its own level.
A little while ago I was out at the car looking for my pen. As I was walking back to the house, I felt this wave of sadness and loss and missing what is no longer in my life. I felt it also earlier this morning. My first thought about it was that it was a sign of weakness and vulnerability. Then I thought better of that. There is a quality of craving to the missing. A selfish part. A needing or wanting to scratch an itch part. But there is also a deeper part, a part that reveals itself when I don’t act to relieve the… what? not pain really, it is more like an ache. When I let the ache settle into me, it has a transformative effect, and it is transformed in return.
As I sit with this ache – with no intention of acting on it in the moment - I have the clear sense that I can endure this. Not acting to discharge this feeling is the right thing to do in this moment. Those are actions that serve to pull me to the surface. There is a time for such buoyancy, but this is not one of those times. I need to stay on the heartline, on the plumbline.
As I wrote the word “plumbline” I was thinking “faultline”. This may also be a time to “find fault”, but not I the usual sense of ascribing blame. Maybe if I were to look at what has happened over the past two weeks from a very rigorous posture of finding fault, important learnings would emerge.
A fault is a weakness. It is not a failure. It is not frail in the usual sense of that word. A fault has an odd strength to it, an enduring quality. My weaknesses, my faults, seem to withstand enormous pressures for them to somehow disappear. These weaknesses have an admirable (grudgingly so) tenacity to them. At the same time these faults, these weaknesses, are the only way I have to get into the deeper fissures of my life. And they are the only way for me to get into the deeper fissures in other’s lives that I care for and love so deeply.
Maybe it is from living here so long - living on or near faults - that I feel so differently about the word than someone else might. The faultlines here are actually beautiful. I remember driving on Interstate 280 with A in the spring and I showed her the beautiful reservoir at Crystal Springs and the watershed next to it. I could see in her eyes how beautiful she found it. And then I told her that it was the San Andrea Fault and I could see the mild surprise on her face.
I/ we are not accustomed to seeing faults as beautiful. I, when I am not paying attention that is, see them as embarrassing and shameful. It is only when I can trust that someone would still see the beauty in them that I can reveal them to another. And it is only when someone else can trust that I will see their embedded beauty that they will reveal theirs to me.
And the trust goes deeper, just as faultlines go deeper. I need to trust that my acknowledgement of their faults is not going to be seen as a judgement. Faults relieve pressure. They expose the hidden truth to our lives, the truth often buried beneath the crust from the stories that we tell ourselves, stories about who we are and who we are not.