what Leaving and Loving have to do with each other
what Leaving and Loving have to do with each other
a lyrical essay in several movements: first movement
Thank you for reading (en)WOMBED, a love letter of sorts exploring the ways we can cultivate artful participation and attentive witness to Life by embracing the full spectrum of our humanity and listening to the voice Thomas Merton called the soft voice, the gentle voice, the merciful and feminine. Feel free to share it with whomever you think would benefit from, enjoy, or feel deliciously challenged by these ideas.
Most of what i know about love I’ve learned from being broken by it, gutted-- in fact hurling my guts, knees pressed to a cold bathroom floor, though i could hardly call myself a supplicant even in that moment, coming to later with my dog licking my face awake and clean of tears. Loss as a kind of ultimate purifier.
More than a decade later, on a different bathroom floor, keening and keeling over, nine cm or so opened, feeling my child’s body ready to launch itself into individuality, simultaneously anemone and bone, i broke again under the weight of a different kind of ecstasy. Love gave my self back to me in that moment, a kind of surprise as i held the main event in my arms wailing herself and me back to life, those lost and forgotten places re-attaching in the split of mother(womb) and child.
No one can fully articulate Love’s mystery, though the poet-me cannot stop trying, the was it drops and drops on me, more download than understanding, more bruised knees and cracked wide heart than anything that would align with the cultural constructs (read rom-com for example, though i love to sink into the oblivion of them at times). It’s a bit like when the English language became as native to my being as Romanian – a moment where a phrase was untranslatable to me into the frame of meaning making i had used my whole life until that point, the one to one correlation of sense lost, and yet i understood. I understood something in English i had no clue how to translate. Body deep, bone song.
The friend who had asked me what the phrase meant, upon my inability to tell him, dubbed me an arrogant little girl and walked away. It was a ur-moment where a chasm opened between the world of cognitive knowing, the truths one can explain and build whole religions systems upon, AND the gnosis/ ginōskō or yada of one’s inner knowing. Body deep, bone song. How apparent it became in that instant that i wasn’t allowed to know in this way, that what i could not explain was not real. I felt scared and alive in the power of its inarticulable nature. To attempt a translation then would have been to diminish all that had transpired. The raw depth of unmediated experience. The aliveness of this newly woven kinship. This language now me, and i her.
I find this is the nature of Love as well, though i feel like so much of what i know of love is meant to live in the liminal, between two lights of wonderspeech and silence, less declaration more dance. We can’t always tell that what has hit us, cascaded over our heads, drowned us, unmade us, was actually Love. Sometimes it takes the retrospective gaze to fully see because Love stubbornly refuses to be categorized, to play by the rules of -isms, to diminish itself by climbing into the caskets of neatly fitting identities. She’s paradox, one moment all humble taking off of shoes before stepping into your house, the next re-arranging the furniture, breaking a few things in the process.
Most of what i know about love came through leaving, my first twenty years of life, a series of magical escapes, some thrust on me by the swirl and whirl of an itinerant, wanderlusty preacher trying to settle but never being able to – my father who looms so large, so heartbreakingly beautiful in his lostness. Some were chosen though in most cases unconsciously. More re-enactment than agency.
Leaving country and extended family and soul’s home, leaving colegi de banca (classmates with whom i shared a school desk for years), the awkward machinery of playgrounds where as children we almost died impaled on the rusted metal of broken swings, where we forged love bonds strengthened in the kind of madness that had us flinging ourselves off great heights with imaginary wings.
Leaving long queues for milk and bread, grandparents and cousins, and another swing built by dad and uncles in our grandparent’s yard that to us, cousins, was rocketship, sailboat, castle, prison, kingqueendom in the sky, paradise (never) lost, stage, and chrysalis. Childhood unspooled its magic there. Leaving the guardian of all those worlds —the cherry tree with its vermillion sour fruit, flesh warmed by the sun, bursting love on the tongue.
Leaving church --which i have kept on doing, these stories to come -- where i had learned that Spirit was a bird, not a domesticated white dove, but a phoenix, the never-ending cycle of conflagration and dust.
Leaving all i thought i was, my names being pronounced the way they were meant to. Leaving dewdrops pugnacious through the snows of March, the violets sold by gypsy women at every street corner for a few cents a bundle, the lilies-of-the-valley that came a month later, oh, i can talk to you about the seasons of my home country through the language of blooms. My favorite perhaps, poppies. Fields and fields of them, shameless bounty, in the colors of blood and sunsets.
The list of leavings is endless, but later in life, includes a fiancé, my family of origin for a while, sisterfriends, toxic boyfriends, Iasi, Portland, San Francisco, Chicago, jobs that didn’t fit, Seattle, Atlanta, Wilmington, my first university major Pre-Med, a six hour titration lab i that made me so claustrophobic i had to run outside 4 hours in and threw up not too far from the building, scaring a bunch of deer that were sunning themselves. Eventually i left my second longest love affair, Academia, not too long after finishing my PhD.
I share this because the leitmotif of your life might look like this too – a series of starts and stops, tapestries unfinished, threads frayed. A constellation of wild swervings, intelligible only to you and some of your soul people, or perhaps completely baffling to all involved including yourself. Perhaps there was judgment, misunderstanding, admiration, exile, condemnation, applause, and everything in between. I’ve experienced all these. Often, simultaneously. Rarely was the humanity of me was understood. The complex PTSD with which i was later diagnosed. The longing that was a map to my insides.
Tricky too because from the outside all these leavings looked the same — from the inside, some were the most inarticulable knowings, wisdom that saved my life. Others, the work of fear.
One gorgeous reality i kept running into again and again in each one —Love. Love that became clear in the retrospective of these leavings, Love in her many facets and iterations. And where there was love, i found another gift hidden among the ruins new growth of each leaving. The limitations of Ego (Personality) and the limitlessness of Soul (Essence). How each illuminated by Love drew me (and you) forth and forward toward this moment. Their dance was priceless, and while spiritually speaking, we tend to think Ego must die in order for Soul to thrive, i have come to realize the relationship is far more subtle. Less about death and more about alchemy. Less about disavowment or (worst-case) annihilation, but more about embrace. Becoming flame.
I end on an invitation. Perhaps you might write your reflections or take yourself on a walk barefoot through the grass or on fallow soil.
What patterns might you be disavowing in yourself? Feel shame about? Where do you feel the rub and ache of powerlessness?
Friend, this is the fertile ground of your awakening. Your preciousness (i know, i sometimes cringe at this word too, but then i look at my baby and my whole body turns flame for her ultimate wellbeing—so let’s reclaim it!) made starker and more alive in the midst of your ruin. Here is where you might discover the truth of you, because in embracing and not hiding your powerlessness, you take off your egoic garments, you get naked and unashamed. This is true salvation, and the reversal of what you might have ingested, i.e. they were naked and ashamed and had to be clothed. We will quibble with that text later, because i don’t believe it means what we were taught (some midrash would do it good).
The only way to free ourselves from shame is to get naked. To get real and true and unflinching in our disclosure. Begin with yourself. Pause and feel (while staying in your window of tolerance). Write the truth that scares you, that you would evade forever if you could. Reclaim that part of your soul, because in the act of witness (whether pen to paper, or speaking it to the birds and sky and grasses, or to a safe friend) you let Love rush in, that energy that longs to wrap itself around every part of you, especially the ones you keep under lock and key, longs to bring her shame-dissolving warmth to you. It’s like that moment when the sun and the moon stay in the sky together, distinct until one seemingly dissolves into the other’s flame. It was the moon radiating her austere light. No, she was the sun all along.