The Comforts of Home

I remember a time before I met any of you – a time full of both loneliness and wonder. I had returned to the US after 9-11, having abandoned my dream of living in Africa or India, and I couldn’t imagine anywhere I wanted to be more than Portland. I took a train north from LA with two large bags, filled a studio apartment with furniture from Goodwill, and after three months of temping found a front desk job for a small nonprofit full of energetic, fascinating people. I didn’t have a car so I took the bus to work and sometimes walked 1 ½ hours back home from outer southeast to northwest. People everywhere were alarmingly friendly, I enrolled in a volunteer conflict mediation training program, and I went out to happy hours and house parties with my coworkers to sing and drink and talk about life.

There was a lot of magic permeating the feeling of being lost, and of falling in love over and over again. People gifted me books and spiritual items that fed my hunger to understand what it means to be human. I took my dinner to the park and read the Tao Te Ching under the trees on long summer evenings. The local coffee shop became my living room where I read the Lord of the Rings next to the fireside and people-watched. I bought a djembe and lugged it through the dark brush to the top of Mt Tabor for moonlight drumming circles. I got my hair braided. I discovered shamanic journeying and past life regressions. And everywhere I looked my loneliness and longing for connection was met by an experience of poetry and mystery. All I wanted was to explore myself and this new place, both uncharted and pregnant with possibility. That impulse that led me abroad during college has continued to guide my unconventional, often baffling direction for the last fifteen years through caves and avalanches, past breath-taking vistas and hillsides in flame, to the tops of pines thrashing in the wind and to the edges of lakes so sacredly serene I held my breath not to disturb the waters.

During this new season, I feel the loneliness heavy on me, infiltrating me as thousands of tiny thorns on my skin pressing their chill tendrils deep inside my bones. I have lost the sense of wonder. I seem to have decided over years of experience that the world is a calculated, insensitive, and impersonal patch of brambles oblivious to and unable to nurture my deeper value, and I am a person determined to undermine myself – condemn myself to irrelevance and melancholy – by speaking a language no one else can understand. But sometimes life demands a fast in the wilderness. That furniture and those books, that drum and those braids are all gone. But I have a small basket woven from the most enduring fibers I have gathered and into it I continue to place scraps of poetry and melody and image – enough to subsist on but far from the meal I crave. This wandering calls me to remember that none of my thoughts of what I lack are complete without thoughts of what is my birth rite.

Always in my dreams I am surrounded by people. I am traveling on buses through urban neighborhoods, exploring sprawling house parties and venues full of shared revelry and sensual affection. We caress each other, speak words of truth, and part again. Sometimes I sing in the streets and everyone stops to listen. Sometimes I am frantically late for a flight and no one understands or helps. Sometimes the flight is taking off and although the plane is small and turbulent, I relax into the ride. A man corners my car and smashes my window to take my purse, another holds me a gun point, and I feel infinitely calm in my knowing that I would rather face injury or death than let him take myself from me. I hear the gun click, startled by the extent of his desperation, but there is no explosion, no wound.

I am coming to understand that my pain is your pain, our pain. Perhaps that is why my sense wonder is dulled. When I arrived in Portland, that place felt so alive each thing vibrated a few inches from its form – both the joy and the grief – and we shared it. Now, here in this place, everything vibrates beneath the surface in almost every face I encounter – that grief, that fear, that loneliness is withheld from me. And so I keep mine to myself. Where does one go to heal when everyone needs to be soothed and reassured? I cannot harden myself to win at a game I know will leave nothing of real value left in me. All I know how to do – all I have ever really done from my soul – is simply put what I see and feel into words as best I can so you know you can come and sit and cry and dream and sing and dance with me. We may not know what else to do to stop the bleeding of this earth but feeling together makes us strong like the grove that shares roots underground, and we can carry a spark of warmth for each other and our sense of place in our hearts to challenge all the forces that pressure us into manic activity to escape a fear we can never conquer in our isolation.

It does no good to ask “why”. Only to inquire “what”. What can I do to nourish myself while I drift, aching for soil that can strengthen me enough to bloom and go to seed in service? What is this time of trial asking me to let go of and what is it vital that I retain? What can I do to bring soul into every moment, not just the ones I think lend themselves to creativity and vulnerability? What would that young woman wandering the streets of Portland with these same fears and dreams tell me is most important to do and to believe?

The soft animal of my body needs that person I was in those early days of Portland now more than anything. I am once again finding my way within myself and around this new place, and I need that sense of wonder and adventure if I am to hold my own form and not evaporate into the fear and isolation that surrounds me. I let out my frustration and sadness, and a coworker simply rubs my back. I feel my whole body release into the delicious pleasure of that sensation, right behind my heart, loosening all I have clenched to protect it from those unwilling or unable to honor my tenderness. I watch a new friend’s body bowing and weaving like a reed at the river side, longing to embody that feeling of flexible strength in my own form. I share the grief that floods my body when asked in a guided practice to find a pleasant sensation and one participant after another shares that the grief I described is in them too. And then we make plans to go into the woods together and share our practices for reconnecting. I brave the tick-filled grasses to honor the oak grove with a sweet song I had never heard before and have now forgotten. These scattered minutes are my food and my faith.

The strength required of me now, and I believe all of us with soul, is to keep searching, keep asking, keep letting ourselves be moved by life so we can feel, deep in our bones, like salmon following a distant scent up stream, the direction of home. So today I slept late, lingered in the space between sleep and waking, letting all those dream images fill me and continue to live. I covered all my clocks, cleared my schedule of all obligations, and have allowed myself to be led only by what my soul longs for. Today it doesn’t want to interact with any humans. It doesn’t want to linger on how comparably vulnerable and restrained I feel in my waking hours. It simply wants to write and stretch, and relax, and read poetry. Not because it will get me to a safer, more nourishing place, but simply because it is the only thing I can really do right now: to feel and fully embody myself when there is nothing to prove. And that sensation will guide me home.

Nancy