Hungry

I've been listening to a podcast with Jon Gabriel and one of his successful coaching students.  She talks about being hungry... hungry for the emotional work she has had to do to be able to begin to finally feed and nurture herself and lose weight.

I have been realizing lately just how hungry I am.  I've done SO MUCH emotional work over the years.  Endless self-help books.  Years of therapy.  Years, now, of meditation and spiritual practice.  

I've dating anyone who would love me.  Dated anyone I thought maybe I could love.  I've spent the past three years, now, not really dating.  Last fall when a dear friend started emailing me regularly, deep in the throes of divorce pain, I thought, again, that maybe THIS was the thing I'd been waiting for my whole life.

That's even what he advertised.  And, at least he admits it, now, with some level of remorse for what he unintentionally did--which was to do exactly what so many had done before him.. make promises he actually couldn't, or didn't want to keep.

And I don't even have (much) regret.  What I have is really, just... sadness.  A lot of it.  My ex-husband and father-of-the-children, in a bizarre twist of life weirdness, has been taking meditation courses, and is now in what we call "core" where he is beginning to wake up to all the things he's been so, so sleepy with for all these years.  And I'm the one who is crying.  Crying about the divorce again (after 14 years).  Crying about the childhood stability that my children didn't have.  Crying about a near empty nest... about losing a key component of my identity that goes back half of my lifetime to this point.  Crying about not knowing what the next forty years could possibly look like since the first forty have been nothing like anything I'd planned.  

And as I continue to wake up to all the things I've been so, so sleepy with for all these years, I realize that this mad hunger I have had for so, so long... is not really what I thought I was hungering for.  I have lived an imagined life.  Not imaginary.  Imagined.  I have spent the majority of my 46 years saying that I'm a poet.  A dancer.  A gardener.  A camper.  A hiker.  A physical being.  But I never dance.  Or garden.  Or camp, anymore.  I haven't actually hiked for years and years.  I haven't gardened for so long that I've forgotten how to prepare soil, would have no time to get my hands dirty.  I can't even find time to clean up the dog poop in my yard.  I've been so, so tired.

I've survived.  I've made it through each week with a few pennies left between paychecks most weeks.  And I've learned and learned hard lessons.

It's true that I've developed some level of expertise in some areas.  People tell me now that I've got some wisdom, and that I'm a leader.  But I still clench my stomach each day as I drive to work--afraid, maybe, that someone will figure it out.  That I have no idea why I'm here on this planet, or what it is I am doing that makes my life meaningful.  Aside from feeding my children, which I continue to try to do, even though two have now grown up and moved out, I am not sure what good I am to the world.  And for some reason, it actually matters.

I'm a skeptic, hungry to know that the world has meaning.  I'm a healer without anyone to heal, having lost the belief that this world can be healed.  I'm a mom with only one child left at home, and a really huge (for one person) house, with old dogs who won't likely live much longer than my last child's final days of high school.  And then it's just me, plugging every extra cent into my nearly empty-at-this-point retirement account, and hoping someday to carve out a few thousand dollars to go see The David in Italy before I die. Me alone in the world, trolling around social media each evening, looking for some illusive connection to other human beings, looking for some online political discussion to crash.  

I'm hungry to get all my words out.  I guess, I'm hungry to write. I used to fill journals and journals with words, working out my emotions and my ideas on the pages.  I no longer believe that anyone will read them.  I doubt those old journals will ever be opened again.  God knows I don't want to re-read all that nonsense.  I've lived it already.  There's nothing I can do to bring back those old imaginings, really.  My kids are grown.  Those opportunities are gone.  What's left is whatever it is---but nothing I had planned, exactly.  It's a strange, strange place to be.

I want to dance I think.  I want to camp again, and hike.  I want to read books.  Not listen to books on audible.com.  I want to read them.  And I want to dig deep into the soil and find a way to heal it, to plant in it, to grow something that will produce a fruit with viable seeds.  

I am hungry for connection.  I am hungry for myself.

Crossing Over

I'm listening to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir sing about saints and angels.  I've collected angels for years, sad ones, young ones, protective ones, "angelic" ones.  They are scattered through my house next to my crosses.  Growing up Mormon, the cross was taboo.  There are no crosses anywhere on or in the Mormon churches and temples, and wearing or displaying a cross is heavily frowned upon. It it considered to be both an "idol," and also a representation of Christ's death, when what we are taught (or expected) to celebrate is His resurrection.  It was His power to overcome death which supposedly allows us all to live again someday, to be raised from death, perfected, and sealed to our families in the Celestial Kingdom, forever! We could have these blessings as long as we obeyed Him, made and kept our covenants, repented of our sins...

After leaving my childhood religion and finding nothing suitable to replace that now empty place in my center, I found myself inexplicably drawn to the beauty of the cross as a symbol. I was drawn to it but unable to touch it. When I bought my first cross, a cheap and sparkly key chain, which I then hung from a rainbow ribbon off the rear-view mirror in my Subaru (Yes, I said "Subaru!" Seriously. I didn't mess around. I was a lesbian now, and I wasn't going to do it in a small way!), I slowly began to understand the draw this religious symbol had for me. I already knew that it wasn't the association with Christ that drew me. I'd worked through my conflicted beliefs about the fall, resurrection and atonement long before I'd first noticed that I was in love with crosses.  It certainly wasn't a hunger for religion that drew me. 

It was the taboo. To my family, the appearance of the cross in my environment symbolized the reality and the depth of my apostasy.  I knew when I displayed a cross, there would be no question in their minds that I had been lost, at least temporarily. Well, as if "coming out" had not been enough to do that already? But my need for the cross in my life went so much deeper than trying to prove something to my family. And, in fact, my early hesitance to display a cross was associated with not wanting to hurt or disappoint my family any more than I already had. What hanging a cross from anywhere in my world symbolized to me was freedom, not from death as I'd been taught to believe.  It represented freedom from dogma. Oddly, hanging a cross was my first real rebellion, a symbol of finally being separate enough from the beliefs of my childhood that I could own something I found to be beautiful, and it was nothing more than just... something beautiful.  The negative meanings and attachments I'd associated with the cross were no longer what was dominant in my life. I could love crosses because I loved them, regardless of what anyone else chose to believe about that. It was not unlike the transition I'd already gone through with my recognition of my sexual orientation and identity. My love of the symbol, I understand now, was a small, latent reminder that popped up many years after I'd come out, to represent the reality that what I love is mine to love, no matter what anyone else teaches or believes about it. Who I love is mine to love, no matter what anyone else teaches or believes about him, or her. And how I love, and even how many I love, and when, are subjects that are simply nobody's business by my own. 

When I first started to indulge my interest in the cross, I was still exclusively dating women, and in fact was in a long(er)-term monogamous relationship. Looking back, I find it fascinating that the symbol which has continued to speak to me so deeply is one that potentially antagonizes both my Mormon family and my gay friends. Of course there are exceptions, but so many of my friends in the LGBTQ community have followed the pendulum to a place far removed from Christianity. I understand the inclination to reject the groups that have first rejected us, not to mention the reality that the cross is a symbol which has been held up to justify hate and destruction for centuries. I get it. What I find so intriguing about my continued deep longing for the symbol, a symbol which for me represents beauty and love in my own life, is that I am drawn to something that is rejected by both of the predominant "families" to which I've belonged. I hang crosses in my home,  while at the same time standing and telling the truth about myself, a truth which in so many ways has also been rejected by both sides. My house is full of crosses, now.  My bedroom is my church. I let myself have both my essential spirituality and also my taboos, and I'm profoundly, profoundly at peace with my life, as it is.