By Our Longings
Today I have two sick or convalescing family members and Julian of Norwich rises up in my day-dreams, her words resting on my heart beat - to comfort me. I must need the company of a medieval hermit who survived the plague, and her own near death experience and most likely lost half of all the people she knew and loved - as everyone did in the plague - perhaps even her own children.
Love and dread are siblings.
A wise old anchoress who knew grief and temporality deeply. Who found a way to grieve and mourn and find her place in a universe that she firmly believed was infused with love, built by love, held in love even as we rail and rage, even as our heart breaks, even as we fall into pits of suffering where it is nearly impossible to remember that love still exists - even in the bottom of a pit.
We never suffer alone.
This is just true. We may be alone in our rooms. Isolated in our homes. Alienated from immediate community. We may be cut off from each other in a million ways but our suffering joins us to all who have suffered. All who have lost as much or more than we have. There are suffering hearts all over this earth and on days like today I find comfort in imagining my own as tenderizing and sensitizing me to those who share my condition in some way.
Anguish comes before miracles.
As peaceful as I can be about uncertainty and precarity in my own life, I find it much harder to tolerate as a mother, for my children. Five years ago cancer descended on us like a fire and tore two of their family members away from them at once, and almost took me too. They have survived a string of traumas that I couldn’t even comprehend at their age: S.W.A.T teams on campus for weapon related lockdowns, ruptured appendixes, terrifying car accidents, and the death of a solid handful of peers by suicide, by Covid, by homicide. They prepare to launch into a pandemic that everyone ignores, pressing - sometimes explicitly forcing - infection and re-infection upon them. Storms rage, our habitat teeters on toxicity and collapse. The world burns. How will they live? What can I protect them from? What will they be able to protect themselves from?
I shall make all things well.
When cancer/death-anxiety motivated me to arrange a facilitated psilocybin journey, this was one of the most tangled knots I hoped the medicine would guide me through: How to tolerate all that I could not protect my children from. The answer came symbolically - the image of my children as wild birds, who lived in our nest for a time, but who would need to come and go, venture out into the wild, come back and rest, and live or die in the wild according to their own fates. “The wild is where they belong, whatever the outcome” the medicine told me. They need to be released to these necessary adventures, and I need to trust that whatever has been transmitted back and forth between our hearts is permanent. They live in me and I live in them whether we are close or far apart, sick or well, here or there, alive or dead, in danger or at peace. I know that those I’ve loved, and lost, and who I continue to love have an unfolding psychological presence, and influence upon my life. That is just what love does.
All will be well and all will be well and every kind of thing shall be well.
I can breathe when I remember how powerless I am and I accept all that I cannot control. This world is negotiating crises that are larger than me, larger than any of us, maybe even larger than all of us at once. But there is a seed of mother-love that is released by the fires of this earth - The Mother’s Love. The mother love that I have both received and given in many different shapes and forms, that transcends gender, birth, blood, and the limits of our personalities and names for each other. I have had so many mothers. I have mothered so many. Mother love survives death, illness, suffering. A love I am filled with, that we all share, that we forget and remember and forget again. And that we yearn for. Whatever we may lose there are particles exchanged in our hearts that are indelible, insoluble, incorruptible.
It is by our longing that we shall be liberated.
