Whispering Wyrd

The holidays are sometimes a difficult time for me. That’s not a complaint, just a fact. This year feels different though, more exposed. It’s the first holiday season in decades that I’m doing without alcohol or benzodiazepines. No numbing. No softening the edges. Just me, just as I am.

I don’t regret that. In a lot ways, I feel clearer and more alive than at any other point in my life. But clarity doesn’t always mean comfort, and presence doesn’t always mean peace. Not yet anyway.

Over the last year and a half, I’ve learned that I don’t relate to spirituality through belief systems or dogma. What matters to me is lived experience. What proves itself again and again. Buddhism, Daoism, and animism have done that without doubt. Or perhaps I should say aspects of them, because I remain extremely wary of rigid structures and absolute claims.

Animism asks nothing of me except attention. Buddhism offers tools and techniques without threats. Daoism reminds me not to force what has to unfold in its own time.

And then there is chanting.

When I chant Namo Amituofo or Namo Guan Shi Yin Pusa, something very real happens. Not in just a purely “useful” way, not as some trick to calm myself, but as a relationship. I feel accompanied. I feel answered.

I believe Amitabha Buddha and Guan Yin are there for me, regardless of my doubts, my fear, or my confusion. And yet, the fear is still here too often during the ongoing waves of withdrawal.

I’m beginning to understand that this doesn’t mean something is wrong.

In Buddhism, fear isn’t treated as a failure of faith or practice. It arises from causes and conditions, from memory stored in the body, from uncertainty, from impermanence. After decades of chemically suppressing my nervous system, it makes sense that fear would surface now. My body is learning how to be on its own again without alcohol or benzos.

I was feeling better, better than I ever remember feeling in my life, when the heart palpitations came back and reopened old anxieties. That brought grief with it. A sense that I should be further along by now. That I’d somehow earned peace and then lost it again.

But Buddhism doesn’t promise certainty in the body or answers to unanswerable questions. What it offers instead is companionship. A way of not being abandoned, even during fear and worry.

Maybe spiritual peace isn’t the complete absence of fear and worry. Maybe it’s knowing we are not alone when fear and worry arrives.

So, I continue. I chant. I walk. I notice the living world around me. I let myself be held when I cannot hold myself.

I am still searching.
I still have fear and worry.
And I am still here.

May all who are walking this season without numbing
with open eyes, open hearts, and trembling nervous systems
know they are not failing.

May fear be met with compassion instead of judgment.
May the body be given time.
May the heart be given refuge.

May Amitabha’s light and Guan Shi Yin’s listening presence
be felt even in moments of uncertainty.

Amituofo.

~Buck