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.