There’s a German war helmet in the closet.
As I slide open the closet door, a closet that I’ve hardly registered despite all the years of visiting my grandparents, I am instantly captivated by the smooth black shell gleaming in the exposed and muted light.
From his comfortable reclining chair, my ninety-five-year-old grandfather, Chuck directs me to noticing his carefully preserved pilot’s uniform (the one he proudly sported on campus after the war to pick up girls, including my grandmother Peggy, because he’ll explain, he looked quite handsome in it), and he requests for me to find his pilot hat, which quietly sits right beside the helmet.
Curiosity calls.
I sense a story.
Without invitation, and riveted by impulse, I reach up to the top shelf and grasp the helmet to pull down into the living room’s light, and am surprised and alarmed by its heaviness, its chilling weight.
Inexplicable shivers pulse down my arms as I inquisitively press the helmet toward my grandfather.
“What is this?”
“Oh, that,” he greets the question with a nonchalant wave of his hand, “that’s a German war helmet.”
The response surprises and then doesn't surprise me, but I shriek anyway, startling my grandfather and completely freaking myself out.
I pivot and push the helmet back into the calm shadows as an attempt to dispel its untold story from my fingers.
But it’s too late.
I feel the presence of history on my fingertips. And history lives and breathes, and interconnects us backward and forward and into this very heartbeat.
“How’d you get that?!”
“Oh, I forgot.”
I don’t believe he’s forgotten, but it’s the only answer I receive.
I ask several times, and at distinct intervals throughout the evening to scheme and see if I could coax a truer response, but I’m left with my question and a revelation of what now is in the closet, and a relic that speaks to my grandfather’s history.
The metallic cold of the helmet icily lingers.
I scurry to the upstairs bathroom to be alone with my thoughts and wash my hands as if I’m cleansing away the energetic residue of an unknown German soldier’s mind.
But though unknown, I can intuit this man’s emotional narratives, because his mind is my mind, the shared experience of living as a human being.
The extraordinary and extreme world of his time reflected in his inner universe, and there’s the comet streaks of fears, desires, longing, dreams, the battle fields and the peace treaties written and rewritten within the human psyche.
I can only access compassion for his humanity because I’ve started, with breath-paced tenderness, braving into my shadows and my shames.
Meditation and the practice of cultivating curiosity for my reactions and my charged emotions weaves unconditional compassionate consciousness into the skittish and fearful aspects and realms of my being.
I am learning to stay rooted, to lean a frightened and courageous heart forward and not judge what I find. I am learning to not abandon myself, anymore, and forgive myself for the times I did, and in the moments I still do.
I am a highly sensitive person who emits light and that light is attracted to the dark, to illuminating the wounds, the tucked away secrets, the hard heart-stories. And my sensitivity is a strength that can meet the pain with a fiercely loving heart.
It’s the Scorpio in me, I believe, this magnetism toward shining into the shadows emanating from my rising sign.
I do this with lovers. I get close to their wounds, accidentally, like sensing the story behind the helmet in the closet, and the innocent question triggers an ache to roar awake.
I do this when I enter historic homes and older establishments and am enlivened by the whispering of intangible presences – are there ghosts here? And then I totally unnerve myself and avoid mirrors (because I’m spooked that if I look in, I’ll see someone else looking back).
I do this when I casually meet my friends for coffee and strolls. Truths spill and heartaches flow, and a scrambled apology about oversharing or taking up too much space bubbles forth, but I am wildly humbled to be a listening witness to real reckonings that blaze in the brilliance and the brutality of living and learning as a human being.
In cappuccino confessions, in heart-quickening conversations with lovers, in wide-eyed sneaks around spirited homes and goose-bump lively places, I seek to glimpse that shadow, because my sensitivities sense its presence, so why not let it breathe and join the conversation, the world of the living.
Bring the war helmet out of the closet. Bring the shadow to the light, and not to eradicate and transmute the shadow, per se, but to have it lit in consciousness.
These days when I take a seat with myself, I no longer look inward with a critical gaze that strives to fix and improve. I pull a chair closer up to my fears and my insecurities and I listen in a spaciousness that is sugared in grace, and this ripples to my interactions in the outer world.
So afterward, when I think about the helmet I do not see a war helmet that belonged to a defeated enemy, but to a person.
During these extreme times, when I could lazily slip into slapping judgments onto the people who walk this earth with me, I want to stay bravely closer to my humanity, to piercing through the illusion of separateness and see and feel interwoven humanity.
There’s fear in the collective. There’s fear in me. There’s the choice to merge with the fear, to let it permeate and obscure, to let the virus spread an unchecked shadow of corrosive fear into our psyches.
There’s the choice to see that same thread of fear as what unites us. We can lovingly acknowledge our fear and deepen our compassion to understand that people are frightened as well, and they react to their fear perhaps differently than we do.
And when fear of the unknown seizes me, I summon from the stories of history my grandfather flying in WWII. He's steady, clear-eyed, focused on the course cutting through clouds that might explode into bombs.
I call upon his courage quite often. Those genes of resiliency flow through me, and as Elizabeth Gilbert eloquently declares, resiliency is our genetic inheritance.
I make peace with not knowing the story behind the helmet.
I make peace with my own shadows.
I make peace to activate a consciousness capable to cradle the totality of our humanness, of our humanity.