unveiling the genuine heart of longing

The last hours of 2009 fold into each other as I sit in my small, warm home. The fire has emitted so much heat that I have to prop open a window. The bath took place as the light from the day settled into darkness. I spent much of this final day of the first decade of a new millenium in my PJ's allowing my body to recuperate from a cold I got during Christmas. I ventured out early in the afternoon to take a walk in the woods with my canine friend, Wily -- it felt wrong to finish the year without the forest, without fresh air and movement. The morning was spent doing paperwork to satisfy New Hampshire state requirements for shelter residents. All in all, not a bad balance for a day.

An interesting process has been unfolding in my psyche. My belief system once gravitated towards the quelling of longing. The ultimate basis for this practice was protective in nature; indeed, each of us emerges into this world completely needy and wholly dependent on others to satisfy our physiological and social needs ("food, touch, and movement" as one of my teachers repeats). When our aches and callings are thwarted we learn to shut down or act out as adaptive coping mechanisms -- our little systems go into disassociation with a primal recognition that without 'other' we will perish.

Never have my needs for food, touch, nor movement gone away. As adults these basic tenets of life are translated into the need for genuine human contact, nurturance, and emotion. For many years I fostered my belief that to embody such neediness was a setup for pain and disappointment. In Buddhist literature I caught wind of similar messages around non-attachment. In self-psychology cheerleading I heard the message: "Happiness is not having what you want but wanting what you have." This blended nicely with my Scottish/Canadian/Presbyterian sensibilities of don't be greedy, be grateful.

Indeed, my early-life coping strategy to disassociate and numb myself to my own yearnings got more sophisticated but the strategy was serving the same purpose: essentially, don't long, don't yearn -- this will only invite pain. It got so that I looked to others to discover what I should be wanting and reaching for, as though the communication link to my own innate and unique instrument no longer resonated or harmonized with life moving in and around me. Perhaps I just didn't trust myself anymore to tell me what I wanted. Perhaps this helps me understand how lost I can feel at times with respect to finding a path through life with relationships, geography, and professional journey. So often I have to try something before I realize it simply doesn't "fit" and it makes life a long and sometimes frustrating exercise in the "process of elimination" (as an aside, I just found the phrase 'process of elimination' a hilarious euphemism for pooping). But I digress.

So, my point you ask.... my point is that this final day of 2009 seems like as fine a day as any other to unveil my genuine heart of longing. Being willing to feel my ache takes immense courage because there is a rawness combined with vulnerability. In aching and longing I enter into a dance with the universe in which the awakening feels treacherous and the outcome unknown. As I sat this morning with meditation I heard a young and innocent voice within me speak: "I will give up chocolate if I could simply have another chance to love deeply." I heard this voice clearly because she was unashamed, she was fierce. I began to laugh uncontrollably at the clarity and gumption and unabashed life force in this young Martha offering a deal -- offering to give up her favorite treat in exchange for something more profound, more stirring for her soul.

I know I yearn for a family. I am not focusing on the composition of that family, I only know with conviction and courage that I want to love deeply and get tangled up with a group of people, a partner, a child, a community. I am not covered in Teflon. My veils to yearning only numb me to my basic nature and need to belong, to nurture, to be nurtured. I similarly long for a farm, open spaces, a wild natural world around me to which I can tend. It is easier to recognize my yearning for the natural world because it feels as though it is safer and that I can realize this dream with my own hands. In the past I have attempted to similarly manifest relationships and it has ended badly. In the end, however, I am learning that it is a mistake to focus my attention on the object of my yearning. Rather, the aliveness and rawness lies in the experience of opening to ache in and of itself. It requires me to stay connected to my heart, my senses, the world around me, the depth of soul within me. With genuine longing there is no ground to stand on and nothing to hold.

"The deepest nature of everything is longing...Beneath even the most hardened surfaces longing waits. Great music or poetry will always reach us because our longing loves to be echoed. Neither can we immunize ourselves against love; it knows in spite of us exactly how to whisper our longing awake. It is as if, under the clay of your presence, streams of living water flow."

John O'Donohue, "Eternal Echoes"

Perhaps as you look at a year awaiting your presence you too will consider not so much your willingness to resolve and forsake but how you can deepen into beingness, opening your system to respond more harmoniously to life. If accessing your own ache feels safe, take a hint from me and reach deeper.

week 4, year 1

As 2009 comes to a close, I enter my 4th week working at North Country Shelter in Jefferson, NH. Many have asked, unsurprisingly, how my new job is going. I'm trying to avoid a pat answer or a packaged response. My experience shifts through each day and with each new day, more arises. Let me see if I can cover the good, the bad, the ugly, and the breathtaking...

the kids! some days I want to throttle them, other days I am inspired to new levels of gratitude and awe. They can pack with each other like mean dogs at times (and I generally love dogs) against any adult's attempt to connect or make sense of their craziness. They can also open and trust and put themselves so bravely into my/our care, despite how many times they have been let down and dropped. Their histories are generally heartbreaking and, for many of them, their future prospects are meek. I am accustomed to working with mostly middle to high-income families and the kids I've counseled have had many resources thrown at them. These kids have had some very tough breaks, made some not-so-wise choices, and now are looking at the major task of turning their ship around or heading into the adult legal system. I don't get to work with the parents anymore. I'm not sure it would matter -- these kids have been labeled, the parents for the most part aren't curious about how their parenting planted the seeds for the child's behaviors.

They think I'm weird. Amazingly they put up with me and my continuous requests to make eye contact with me and slow down, "take a breath." They give me space to do my thing and I put up with the ridicule they dish out. I think we're getting along just fine.

The staff. They might think I'm weird too. I sometimes get a bit bossy with my insistence that people stop speaking from the ubiquitous "we" or from the depersonalized "you" and use the always direct and potent "I" when making statements (preferably with fewer than 10 words!). They've begun to lift their eyes up from the floor during meetings and similarly made some eye contact with another human being in the room. I gotta say, the kids are more consistent -- must be something about teaching old dogs new tricks. I love how I see the hearts of my co-workers so clearly, so profoundly. The job is hard, there are few positive reinforcements, there are many thankless moments, thanksless days. And still, most of them show up the next day smiling and working hard for the kids.

The paperwork! F___ Me! I bum myself out with the possibility that it'll be the paperwork that kills me. I can't seem to get ahead. I don't get enough time supporting the staff or working with the kids. Most of my days are spent at my computer. My butt is getting flatter and wider, my skin more pasty.

The commute.... thank God for metal studded tires -- hello! it really snows here in New England. I love it even though I get a bit tensed up coming home in the dark and wind and white, wondering if the person behind me has also discovered the magic of studded tires as they ride my butt towards the next curve in the highway.

As I spent time with family and friends over the last few days (it was Christmas afterall), I did an inventory of my new working experience. Sometimes it feels like this direction makes no logical sense -- I make half of my wages in Colorado, I work more, I am inside almost all the time, I get insulted, disrespected, and ridiculed, etc... But there continues to be an inner knowing about where I am, that everything is just as it needs to be even when I can't see the intelligence of the Universe at play. Some mornings I feel lost. Then I remember to stop judging my experience and simply accept what is and say 'thank you.'

The circumstances of my counseling work at NCS are such that there is little opportunity for me to be a therapist in the usual way I think of myself as one; I don't get to employ tools and tricks from my tickle trunk of skills (Canadian reference to Mr. Dress Up, fyi). I am continuing to relinquish my habitual way of trying to be helpful. I never know if or when I will get to connect with a resident at the shelter, maybe once and never again. At first I was putting an inordinate amount of stress on myself to try and be perfect and efficient with this limitation, stress being the key word -- I was setting myself up for burnout and discouragement -- dis-courage-ment, less heart, less bravery, de-coeur-ager ("courage" coming from the French word for "heart"). With this self-created stress I was going more into my head, more emphasis on diagnosis and assessment and intervention than simply showing up in this moment with only my courage. These folks don't need a therapist, maybe they just want connection during this confusing, chaotic, and crazy time.

From John O'Donohue's "Eternal Echoes":

We need a new psychology to encourage us and liberate us to become full participants in our lives, one that will replace self-watch with self-awakening. We need a rebirth of the self as the sacred temple of mystery and possibility, this demands a new language which is poetic, mystical, and impervious to the radiation of psychologese. We need to rediscover the wise graciousness of spontaneity. The absence of spontaneity unleashes us negatively on ourselves. (p.235)

The photos for this entry -- the first shot is the sunset from my office window as the day wraps up in northern New Hampshire. The beautiful brunette is my office mate, Lynne; she's the Family Service Worker at NCS and, for 16 years, she's trained and supported every staff member and loved every kid. A couple of other shots were taken while I visited my mom and sister over the holiday weekend in Ontario. I particularly liked the red and green buoys which popped up from the water and caught hold of my sense of sight during our Christmas day stroll by the river. This last photo I took driving east on Hwy. 401 from Peterborough towards Montreal on Sunday morning as the sun was rising and shining through the fog and the trees. I like light shining through fog and trees.

be well, my love to you

martha

landing on my feet

Last night I dreamed -- blessed illusion --

that I had a beehive here

in my heart

and that

the golden bees were making

white combs and sweet honey

from my old failures.

- Antonio Machado

(translated by Robert Bly)

My apologies for the lapse in writing. If it's any consolation, even when my writing is not so public, there are private pages in journals which I pour over each morning. For the past couple of weeks I've been acclimating to my new surroundings and my new employment - at times I've felt too at odds with myself to package something for my community of friends and family to view.

In my last entry I wrote about the ache that all this moving and butterflying about was creating in my chest and how I was heartbroken by all the 'goodbyes' that come with change. Change is exciting for my system; I feel alive with the sense of possibility and adventure. At the same time, change is taxing and it brings me up against some of my demons regarding doubt and regret; what-could-have-beens, the roads not taken sometimes haunt me. As I settled into my first few days at work I was overwhelmed with information, new systems, names of people (co-workers and clients), rules, norms, requirements, etc... As I settled into my new home, following 3 months of homelessness, I was holding expectations that my new space would be blissful.

And it is. But it wasn't the first couple of nights as I got to know the quirks of a new space.

My home is a beautiful sublet. It is the home of a couple who have travelled to Florida for the winter and it is filled with their lovely furniture and personal wares. It is heated primarily by a grand woodstove which pumps out the warmth (backed up by a Rinnai propane heater that kicks in automatically). There is a gas cooking range, a refrigerator (recall 'the fridge magnet' - it worked), internet, TV (aka "martha's 2-in-1 energy zapper and depression machine"), and a sleeping loft with a soft bed, feather pillows, new flannel sheets, and a duvet. While there is no shower there is an impressively large tub. And herein lies the beginning of my adventure. For some reason ???? the water supply is not sufficient to fill the bathtub,.... In fact, the hot water runs out in under a minute. Apparently it's on a constant feed heated by a furnace below but it must be a slow heat or low capacity unit. So, last Tuesday night, following a white-knuckle commute from Jefferson to Franconia, I ached for a soak. I realized quickly that this was impossible by pulling on the hot water tank. Forty-five minutes and 8 stock pots of boiling water from the gas range later, I was blissfully soaking in the best and most satisfying bath I've ever built. What a ballet of boiling water and hoping that by the time the next 3 pots were boiled, the water already in the vast tub was not returning to its tepid origins too quickly. I drank 2/3 of a bottle of red wine as I danced back and forth from the cooking range to the bathtub. Afterwards I realized that I should probably drink herbal tea during this process if it's to become a regular affair. Of course, I need all the boiled water I can get for the tub so maybe I'll stick with wine, might have been why I enjoyed my soak so much.

My sublet feels like a home as I sit here on my first Sunday night. I have begun cooking again for the first time in a long time. I am deeply grateful simply to have a roof, warmth, music, soft places to sit and read, and a private place to both fall apart and come back together. As the snow falls endlessly in this small New England town, I am aware of what a luxury it is to have a safe and warm space.

I attached the poem above because I am not alone with my demons and my thoughts of failure. Sometimes, discomfort and disorientation feel simply like darkness and despair. At other times, I feel the ground rise up with an offering for adventure and growth from the same elements of confusion and doubt. Failure to see the light, failure to follow my integrity, failure to choose the good path need not be an end in and of itself. Sometimes it's simply a jumping-off point to a new possibility.

Sometimes one just needs to supplement the hotwater system with a few pots of boiling water and a few glasses of wine, even as your kitchen begins to look like the inner workings of an Italian restaurant.

The image of the rainbow was taken near Jefferson while I was driving to my first day of work. I took it as an auspicious sign of being in the right place at the right time with everything I needed for the ride.