Conflict: Victory and defeat

A poem by Sara Teasdale, and a note on inner space

I’ve long loved Sara Teasdale’s verse. I often see myself in her words, wonder how it is she manages to speak with my voice and maybe how I seem to speak in echo of hers. Today, I have for you her poem titled Conflict, which is all about inner conflict and its consequences.

The Spartan and the Sybarite
Battle within me day and night;
Evenly matched, relentless, wary,
Each one cursing his adversary,

This first line caught my attention, with its two capital letters, each an S. ‘Spartan’ and ‘Sybarite’ are mostly opposites, so it is natural that these two aspects of our selves might come into conflict.

With my slow blood dripping wet,
They battle from sunrise to sunset.
And from sunset the fight goes on
I shiver and hear them in the dawn;

What is the indigenous fable of the two inner wolves? “Which one wins?” “The one you feed.”

These combatants are evenly matched; both are fed, and well fed if they can battle all day and then all night. I’ve studied a couple of martial arts, and I can tell you that sparring—even without heavy armor, even without weapons—is extremely tiring. When we would go down the line and spar with each of our fellow students… well, you’d just hope that there were only a few students in class that night, because we were all left wrung out, panting, dripping with sweat.

They fight to the death this time, but I
Care little which will have to die,
Whichever it is, when the end has come,
I shall be the defeated one.

And these two inner selves are not the ones bleeding from their fight. It is the “me,” the whole self who suffers the wounds, who bleeds and shivers. Ultimately, it is not they who are defeated, but this same “me,” this whole self. Whether it is Sara Teasdale or you or I, when we allow aspects of our self to battle in this way, it is we who lose and nobody else. It consumes all of our attention and energy, and then we have to tend our wounds and get back to life again.

But this isn’t how it has to be. Open battle is hardly desirable, between nations, between tribes, between people, or even within ourselves. I’ve written recently (and more than once) about inner space, a capacity and spaciousness within where we can hold ideas that conflict and observe them and learn from them and maybe appreciate any paradoxes we find.

Siberian husky dog by Cheerfully Lost

It sounds simple, doesn’t it? To just create a space where no actual space exists. I’ll admit that cultivating this inner space has been pretty easy for me in recent weeks. This may be a result of decades of spiritual practice, time to mature intellectually and emotionally. Not that I’d call my heart and mind mature, maybe wise mostly from experiencing my own errors and failures… and their consequences. To create this inner spaciousness, though, you have to be willing to entertain conflicting ideas. And sometimes the ideas are ones we don’t want to feed, lest they grow into loathsome ravening wolves.

There is a sense of helplessness in this poem, that the author has no control over this battle between her inner selves. She is stuck for a day and a night until the Sybarite and the Spartan settle down, and there is nothing she can do.

Except… there is something she can do. This is her, this is her heart and her mind, and she can decide how to handle this inner conflict. She doesn’t have to feed the wolves. Instead, she can pause, take a breath, let the air flow and swirl into her inner spaciousness, bring the two combatants inside, listen to them, and love them. Instead of grown wolves, she can see them as puppies. She can snuggle them and watch them play and learn from them. There is no defeat when it’s puppies at play, rather than wolves at battle; instead, she might find delight and joy and laughter instead of weariness and blood.

Glass Ball Reflection by Vicki Hamilton

It may sound like I think the answer to everything is to create this inner space and just let everything live there passively, but the verb I favor for it is that we cultivate this space. Our inner capacity is an active and dynamic thing rather than a passive one. We have to engage with it, tend it, feed it, pluck the weeds. And we don’t just dump stuff there and hope it works itself out. We have to invite things in—ideas, behaviors, observations, Spartans, Sybarites—and sit with them there, observing them, talking with them, coming to understand and appreciate them. When we do, we can learn so much, grow so much, discover who and what we are. And just maybe, we can avoid becoming the defeated one.