On purpose.
Why am I here and in service to what? What is wanting to live through me in this world?
I'm hungrily taking in this podcast Mark recommended, two and a half hours of content seemingly gathered and presented exclusively for me. These are the questions Jungian psychoanalyst and author, James Hollis repeats in various iterations, saying we must ask ourselves such things if we want to live our lives not just with purpose, but with fulfillment and joy. He speaks to the stimulus-response cycle in which so many of us become entrapped, the hell of our unconscious patterns, the deep loneliness of an unlived life.
Why am I here?
When I allow my gaze to be too hazy, sometimes the answer to that question starts to leak. It drifts in many directions, following rivulets branching off from the strong current of my life. Before I know it, those little streams have dried up and I find myself lost. Why am I here? How did I get here?
This permeability has often been my challenge in life. I morph. I shapeshift. I meander and wander. In some ways, it's a gift. I find myself able to relate to most people; it is easy for me to make connections, understand others' points of view, feel what's beneath the surface. I also, too often, find myself then identifying too much with the parts that feel resonant and then also absorbing ways of being in the world that are not truly my own. I end up confused and drained.
My marriage was one long tributary I followed, refusing to stop long enough to realize I had set out on the wrong path. It was the ultimate example of deviation from self; I followed something too far that only kind of fit. Extricating myself from that relationship has encouraged me to know and see myself the most deeply I ever have, even, especially, when it is painful.
Conversely, at this point in my life, I'm learning to release the desperate cling to identification of any kind. I long to identify, name, articulate, encapsulate, define the world around me; I also recognize not just the futility and constriction of such, but the falsity of it. Self is an illusion. We are all part of an inextricable whole. The snake was always a garden hose.
I can increasingly live in this emptiness, this interconnectedness, and I can recognize that there is a particular frequency to my humanness this lifetime that I am meant to embody. And that trying to deviate from it quite literally makes me sick. It feels like an incurable loneliness to live a life other than the one that is mine.
And so I return to the question, why am I here?
I've known some glimmer of it since the earliest days of my struggles. I was once 19, seeing Horacio Miller for therapy while attending UC Berkeley for undergrad. He was an older man from Argentina; I remember him as always in glasses with a newsboy cap. He communicated often through poetry, which resonated with me even then. I'd ride the 18 bus to Solano Avenue to sit in his small office near the Safeway where Emma and I would buy endless sandwiches and Wyder's pear ciders. When I was with Horacio, I'd wring my hands, bite my nails, and scribble endless fraught words in my journal--rescued kernels of clarity to carry with me out into the muddy world.
I was objectively depressed and diagnosed as such, but hindsight illustrates clearly that I just didn't know myself and that that distance from self filled my life with a haunting loneliness, an endless desperate search from some thing I craved, which, unbeknownst to me, was the woman herself on that very search.
I think about Horacio now, because he asked me a question that has stuck with me more than two decades later. I came to him, wet. I came to him in the murkiness of other people's opinions, their styles, their mindsets, their stories. Everywhere I went, I tried on a bit of what I found. I carried it all with me. It became heavy and confusing. I became lost. I was a hippie, retro, vintage, goth, emo, straight-edge, drunk, liberal, religious, agnostic, good girl/ rebel/ intellectual/ slut/ prude. There was no self. There was too much self. I was lost.
I admitted to Horacio I didn't know who I was. I was a different person everywhere I went. I was an endlessly absorbent sponge. I was exhausted.
He asked me, What's true about you no matter where you go?
Maybe it is just decades of memories of memories, but I feel like I can remember that question, because at that moment I arrived. Someone invited me in-- me, independent of all the parasites I willingly took on. And I had an answer, my own answer. I said that I loved being with children. I felt good, clearest, most like myself when I was with kids.
That has been true about me my whole life. It was true when I said I wanted to be a teacher at 5, when I started babysitting at 11, when I volunteered my time at summer camps at 12, when I nannied throughout my 20s, when I pursued an ECE degree at 25, when I taught for preschool for years, when I had my own children, when I opened my own school. My own moral and emotional barometer sometimes feel murky, but when I ask myself if I'd be proud to share my way of being in the world with a child, if I could explain it, encourage it, rationalize it, give it heart and life and love through the eyes of a child, that is my clearest truth. My most radiant self is evident absolutely through the lens of a child. Nothing makes more sense to me.
Why am I here and in service to what?
I am here in service to childhood. Not just for children, but for adults as well. I am here in service to play, to ease, authenticity, joy, simplicity. I am here in service to community. I am here in service to love. I am here in service to nature as a vehicle to remembering our own true nature. I am here to as radically and totally live my own life as an invitation to others to do the same-- to strip the pretense, the labels, the identification, the limitations, the fear, the projections, the stories, the constrictions and just be. To shift out of so effortfully doing life into simply being alive. Childhood is the natural embodiment of that all. It is liberation. It is expansive thought, endless creativity and curiosity, open-heartedness, energy, joy, natural connection, fearlessness, and radiant love. I am here in service to childhood.
I am not a teacher. I am in service to love. I am here in service to love.
I feel so absolutely clear on that. It's been true since I was depressed at 19 and it's true now. I am so grateful to be on the path that is mine. I feel unsure where exactly the expression of this mission will lead me and concurrently so absolutely clear I'm just where I'm supposed to be. I trust it's unfolding. I am listening, always.
This weekend, I listened and something new and important came to me.
While I am in service to childhood, I struggle remarkably as a parent myself. I feel constantly challenged, unappreciated, run ragged, lonely. At its core, these feelings come from a fear that I am not enough, that no one hears me. They come from my own lostness-- from, yet again, looking for my completeness, my identity, in another person. It is asking someone who is so early in the process of becoming in the world to affirm me. It's so much cognition, so many years of learning and studying early childhood development and then clinging to that as my identity. I should know how to be with my children, how to support them, how to respond. My constant failure to do everything perfectly makes me angry. It challenges this "why" I identified as my path so long ago.
This weekend I took the girls to Vedanta for one of their Sunday morning talks. They roamed around the verdant hills overlooking the Channel Islands, picking flowers and eating lemon bread with the Sunday School teacher, while I listened to a talk on the Divine Mother. I spend quite a bit of time contemplating the balance between masculine and feminine; I know so much of my purpose is in holding the nurturing feminine energy, that softness and fluidity. I once received an intuitive massage-- a combination of physical touch and intuitive readings. The man told me my left side, the feminine side, felt like a great oak tree, a grounded force that provided shelter and comfort to so many. This reading felt so resonant for me, and there was this sneaky bit of pride in that connection that has proved to be my challenge.
Listening to the talk, I had a revelation, the missing piece in all this work. I have been attempting to offer that nurturance from myself. I've been delivering it from a human place, from my own effort; it is laden with ego. In the end, that will only exhaust me, as well as having clear limitations. The true invitation is to offer that love, that feminine wisdom, through the channel of the divine. It is not mine to offer; it is an infinite, unending source of love, which I can embody and express but it is not generated from me as an individual.
The Divine Mother is my mother. The Divine Mother is the source of any comfort I might offer. I am simply a vessel.
I so often fail to allow myself to feel nurtured in this life. I am constantly seeking it, seemingly in futility. As if to challenge that idea, which flickered into consciousness as I had this realization on Sunday, the most glorious breeze swirled around me at just that moment. I was sitting on the porch of this beautiful temple on the most perfect fall day, my face blissfully shaded and my legs, warming in the sun. The breeze was a Disney breeze; it was somehow visible; it was the twirl of magic at Cinderella's feet as her rags turned into a ball gown; it was palpable.
It came to me and said, I am your mother.
I almost laughed.
I've created this entire world where my life happens predominantly outside. I extoll the gifts of nature so often. And yet somehow I've been missing this very obvious message that the love I crave is quite literally all around me. She is my mother. The breeze is my mother; the coast live oaks and their abundant season of acorns are my mother; the Channel Islands are my mother; the lemonade berry and the coyote brush and the wild fennel and the elderberry and the nopales are my mother. Mother Nature is my Divine Mother. She is my messenger, my guide, my mentor, my pathway to love. She has a strong back, a soft front, and a wild heart. She is always here loving me, showing me, teaching me, holding me. I don't need to go in search of that love or nurturance myself; it is truly just outside the walls of my home. She is everywhere.
I want for nothing. I have landed on the exact path, in the exact place I am meant to be. I am here in service to childhood and nature is always here to remind me. It is expansive thought, endless creativity and curiosity, open-heartedness, energy, joy, natural connection, fearlessness, and radiant love. It is seasons, death and rebirth, patience, perseverance, blatant or sometimes almost imperceptible rhythms, collaboration, harshness, resilience, beauty, and radiant love. I am here for what is wild, for what lives both so firmly in its identity and also entirely outside of it, for all the ways in which we are inextricably linked. I am here in worship to all of this daily. It is a reverent prayer.
It is not an identity. It's a purpose much greater than me. I am here in service to love, to childhood, to nature. Two decades later, I don’t just know, I don’t just feel it, I have built my life in service to this mission. I am aligned, I am clear, I am nurtured, I am mothered by the universe around me, I am safe, I am loved, I am love. I am so, so grateful.