Reeling Myself In
I have written before about earthquakes… the ground shaking right now… But wait: there is a new element here. I see, with clarity, the heat-waves of conditioned response distorting perception, “impressions” rippling through my field of vision. Considering them as such seems to slow them down, and they eventually dissolve.
I shift from the intellectual appraisal of my experience to my body.
I recognize a deep pang, a craving: a part of me needs to be physically held. “Hold me tight” is the clear request. I, the 54-year old grown-up-in-residence, watch as this intangible, almost unquenchable desire, drives the command of my body. I ponder whether being held now, as an adult, would meet this need. I feel it wouldn’t.
What would, then? What behaviors could soothe the vacancy of love that this core of being holds? Smoking (two packs a day 20 years ago), alcohol or food binging, the easy sex of my late twenties, being adored or care-taking, chiseling away at to-do lists? I’m afraid none would. At the end, I would still be met at the room next door by the same originating pang, perhaps inflated by the disloyalty of having run away from it in the first place.
Hold tight as I ask the question… “What would, then?” As I inquire, I blow off the easy self-help, spiritual bypass formulas that first pop up for the uninformed crowd. Nope, none of that… If it were obvious, monkeys would be teaching us how to do it. But it ain’t.
The long quietness of inquiry, the time I’ve spent asking the question, seems to be the holding that I needed. As I stay, I am held. There’s no resolution as in the intellectual equation of question-leads-to-answer-that-solves-the-problem. (This reminds me of the suggestion that I “get a 9-5 job” to heal my depression, which I wrote about in a previous post.) There is no linearity here, but a honey-like loop of presence, of being by being, of holding by returning, back again and again with interest and caring.
From here I can hold myself as well as another, with no frantic doing, no binging, no bypassing, with my own simple presence assuaging the previous vacancy of love, the vacancy of presence, the former kite-flying of holding myself at thread’s length.
Rumi taught that the Divine IS the longing for the Divine. Attending to the need IS meeting the need.
Mount Hood, Oregon. September 2019. © Ciro Coelho/InwardRide.com.