Stepping Back & Extending Care

I often write about the importance of stepping back and reflecting in order to clarify what matters most.  Today, I learned a different step back move though: taking a step  back from an interface with another when more space is needed, and extending care at the same time.   It is the “and” that makes this new.  So many of us know how to create distance from another, but to be able to do this with care is a different matter. 

Here are two poems that, in combination, may express this better than I can – one is by Mary Oliver and one by William Strafford.  The first helps capture that evolution into realizing we need to make a new move for ourselves, in which distance may feel necessary to be able to find and keep our own ground: the second opens the possibility that in distance, there can still be care, extended, like current carried deep.

The Journey 

by Mary Oliver, from New and Selected Poems

One day you finally knew

what you had to do, and began,

though the voices around you

kept shouting

their advice—

though the whole house

began to tremble

and you felt the old tug

at your ankles.

“Mend my life!”

each voice cried.

But you didn’t stop.

You knew what you had to do,

though the wind pried

with its stiff fingers

at the very foundations,

though their melancholy

was terrible.

 It was already late

enough, and a wild night,

and the road full of fallen

branches and stones.

But little by little,

as you left their voices behind,

the stars began to burn

through the sheets of clouds,

and there was a new voice

which you slowly recognized as your own,

that kept you company

as you strode deeper and deeper

into the world,

determined to do

the only thing you could do –

determined to save

the only life you could save.

ASK ME 

by William Stafford, Learning to Live in the World

Sometime when the river is ice ask me

Mistakes I have made.  Ask me whether

What I have done is my life.  Others

have come in their slow way into

my thought, and some have tried to help

or to hurt; ask me what difference

their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.

You and I can turn and look

at the silent river and wait. We know

the current is there, hidden; and there

are comings and goings from miles away

that hold the stillness exactly before us. 

What the river says, that is what I say.

Where in your life might more space in a relationship actually provide a better shape for care?