Sacred Wounds Jan Goldstein
Yom Kippur Morning, 2025
“The hardest thing is the world is to live only once…”
This is the first line of poet and novelist Ocean Vuong’s new bestseller The Emperor of Gladness where one late summer evening in the little noticed town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai perches on a bridge in pelting rain, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. It’s Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia, who convinces him to take another path. It’s a book about chosen family and the burning and blessing of becoming a caretaker, what it is to be alone and found, what it is to feel the pain in life and discover the power of meaning in it.
My second book published by Harper Collins was a work of nonfiction, in which I share how the pain of life that is inevitable, caused individuals to succeed because of the pain they encountered and allowed them to learn from. Carl Jung said There is no coming to consciousness without pain.” NOT UNTIL WE ARE LOST, “ says Thoreau, “ do we begin to understand ourselves.” But there is a gift if you will in all of this. It’s there wrapped inside the darkness, waiting only for us to claim it and to build our lives with the beauty of its light. To do this we come to a realizartion that this shababt of shabbats provides, that life is not so much about attaining happiness as it is about finding meaning, purpose.
How I begin with my own story of How wounds broke me open: marriage/dad/weeping on Loch Lomond. A summer fortnight that found me finally letting it all let loose on a boat ride on a lake
The light that opened me wide to new understanding. It wasn’t that I couldn’t see before/feel before, it was only it now took on more breadth, it was deeper, more encompassing.
Billy Joel writes the lyric:
In every heart there is a room
A sanctuary safe and strong
To heal the wounds from lovers past
Until a new one comes along
And every time I’ve held a rose
It seems I only felt the thorns
But if my silence made you leave
Then that would be my worst mistake
So I will share this room with you
And you can have this heart to break
That openness. Knowing the wound is coming and letting it come.
I am saying: To live life is to be wounded. What we do with these wounds determines the arc and depth and breadth of our lives.
It can be love, a friend letting us down, loss of loved one, illness, betrayal…and yet to be a part of the world, to care, means fear and pain will follow and threaten to break us open. And yet, there is a moment when our wounds become scars and scars become sacred.
For Courage – John O’Donahue
When the light around you lessens
And your thoughts darken until
Your body feels fear turn
Cold as a stone inside,
When you find yourself bereft
Of any belief in yourself
And all you unknowingly
Leaned on has fallen,
When one voice commands
Your whole heart,
And it is raven dark,
Steady yourself and see
That it is your own thinking
That darkens your world,
Search and you will find
A diamond-thought of light,
Know that you are not alone
And that this darkness has purpose;
Gradually it will school your eyes
To find the one gift your life requires
Hidden within this night-corner.
Invoke the learning
Of every suffering
You have suffered.
Close your eyes.
Gather all the kindling
About your heart
To create one spark.
That is all you need
To nourish the flame
That will cleanse the dark
Of its weight of festered fear.
A new confidence will come alive
To urge you towards higher ground
Where your imagination
Will learn to engage difficulty
As its most rewarding threshold!
Yom Kippur call on us to atone. Which, as we often say, is to split the word atone into 2 to find its purpose—to atone is to become at one. With ourselves, our purpose, our words and deeds. How does one do that when broken? How does one heal in order to become at one?
Rachel Naomi Remen is a nationally recognized medical reformer and educator who sees the practice of medicine as a spiritual path, author of Kitchen Table Wisdom and other bestsellers: She writes, “Wounding and healing are not opposites. They’re part of the same thing. It is our wounds that enable us to be compassionate with the wounds of others. It is our limitations that make us kind to the limitations of other people. It is our loneliness that helps us to find other people or to even know they’re alone with an illness. I think I have served people perfectly with parts of myself I used to be ashamed of. ”
Sometimes Remen suggests, it is not for us to speak loudly, to shake up ourselves or another person. IT is in the sounds of silence that healing and growth can come.
She says, “Perhaps the most important thing we bring to another person is the silence in us, not the sort of silence that is filled with unspoken criticism or hard withdrawal. The sort of silence that is a place of refuge, of rest, of acceptance of someone as they are. We are all hungry for this other silence. It is hard to find. In its presence we can remember something beyond the moment, a strength on which to build a life. Silence is a place of great power and healing.”
Mindfulness calls on us to listen, become aware of ourselves and what is happening in the moment with no judgment. The word listen is composed of the exact same letters as that of silent. It is in the silence that wounds take on wonder, and healing begins.
Musicians will tell you that often, the meaning and the nuance of a piece can be found in the pause between the notes. Yom Kippur calls us to pause between the notes of our very lives and to look at how we look at the world and how we go about interacting with it, including how we approach fixing it.
Again, Remen observes, “One of the pioneers of the Human Potential Movement, Abraham Maslow, said, “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.’ Seeing yourself as a fixer may cause you to see brokenness everywhere, to sit in judgment of life itself. When we fix others, we may not see their hidden wholeness or trust the integrity of the life in them. Fixers trust their own expertise. When we serve, we see the unborn wholeness in others; we collaborate with it and strengthen it. Others may then be able to see their wholeness for themselves for the first time.”
What is essential and we don’t often do it enough, is to share the stories of our lives. It is how different generations in a family or community learn from the past and present.
“Everybody is a story,” says Dr. Remen. “When I was a child, people sat around kitchen tables and told their stories. We don’t do that so much anymore. Sitting around the table telling stories is not just a way of passing time. It is the way the wisdom gets passed along. The stuff that helps us to live a life worth remembering.”
Instead, the tendency is to go into the shadows when hurt by life as inevitable as hurt is. How else do we respond? Does one push back? Do we allow ourselves to deepen? Do we use the experience to create a richer embracing of life?
Some of you may recall my once sharing my admiration for the great Katsushika Hokusai an artist, though not what many would call a typical Japanese artist. Japan’s best known woodblock print, his Great Wave, is also typically un-Japanese. Yet Hokusai (1760-1849) who lived during the Tokugawa period in a Japan of traditional Confucian values and feudal regimentation was himself totally Bohemian: he was outspoken, quarrelsome, restless, aggressive, and sensational. He fought his teachers and was thrown out of art schools.
Had Katsushika Hokusai died when he was struck by lightning at the age of 50 in 1810, he would be remembered as a popular artist of the ukiyo-e, or “floating world” school of Japanese art, but hardly the great figure we know today. His late blooming was spectacular – it was only in his 70s that he made his most celebrated print series, Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, including the famous Great Wave, an image that subsequently swept over the world. “Until the age of 70,” he once wrote (self-consciously parodying Confucius) “nothing that I drew was worthy of notice.”
A stubborn genius he left in excess of 30,000 works; silk paintings, woodblock prints, picture books, manga, travel illustrations, erotic illustrations, paintings, and sketches. He didn’t care for being sensible or respectable; he signed one of his very last works “The Art-Crazy Old Codger”. What did he teach us of approaching life?
Contemporary poet, art historian and curator of Japanese art, Roger Keyes, a professor of East Asian studies, reads between the brushstrokes of this artist Hokusai’s extensive work and gives us this beautifully structured poem, “Hokusai Says”.so we may learn about living from this artist:
Hokusai Says
Hokusai says Look carefully.
He says pay attention, notice.
He says keep looking, stay curious.
He says there is no end to seeing.
He says Look Forward to getting old.
He says keep changing,
you just get more who you really are.
He says get stuck, accept it, repeat yourself
as long as it’s interesting.
He says keep doing what you love.
He says keep praying.
He says every one of us is a child,
every one of us is ancient,
every one of us has a body.
He says every one of us is frightened.
He says every one of us has to find a way to live with fear.
He says everything is alive –
shells, buildings, people, fish, mountains, trees.
Wood is alive.
Water is alive.
Everything has its own life.
Everything lives inside us.
He says live with the world inside you.
He says it doesn’t matter if you draw, or write books.
It doesn’t matter if you saw wood, or catch fish.
It doesn’t matter if you sit at home
and stare at the ants on your verandah or the shadows of the trees
and grasses in your garden.
It matters that you care.
It matters that you feel.
It matters that you notice.
It matters that life lives through you.
Contentment is life living through you.
Joy is life living through you.
Satisfaction and strength
are life living through you.
Peace is life living through you.
He says don’t be afraid.
Don’t be afraid.
Look, feel, let life take you by the hand.
Let life live through you.
The story of this Japanese artist is the kind of story I have been sharing with the world in my weekly 15 minute positivity podcasts on All That Matters w/Jan Goldstein ever since the epidemic. True stories that can help us reframe life to open us up to finding the good stuff we might miss, stories that uplift and deepen and celebrate. I am deeply humbled to share with you that 2 weeks ago we were informed All That Matters w/Jan Goldstein was selected by MillionPodcasts as one of the Top 100 Life Stories Podcasts, Top 100 Affirmation Podcasts and Top 100 Overcoming Adversity Podcasts on the web. That may be a shameless plug but it is also something I’m deeply proud of and I think we should speak of moments and events which give us pride and help in the formation of tikkun olam, for the podcast is meant as a way to learn from individuals who have encountered life’s challenges and found a way to become more, not less. IT is a celebration of our sacred wounds and of our ability to use humor and art and poetry and stories to become at one with ourselves. I would never have started that podcast if life hadn’t broken my heart. If divorce and the death of loved ones and the overwhelm of life had not cut its way to my heart which not only wounded me but allowed the light in. That’s part of the deal of being alive.
“The hardest thing is the world is to live only once…” But if we learn from our wounds we live many lives within our precious one. And those many lives become one when we are at one with ourselves. So, like Hokusai, open yourself. Let your wounds heal, let them fill with light and wonder, LET them deepen you. Know when you offer yourself to the world, it will wound you. Life comes with hurt and pain yet also with hope and passion. To become at one means we will not allow the pain to so harden us that we can no longer breathe the goodness there.
Say to the world, “Hineni, here I am… and you can have my heart to break.”
