soul journey

“The Broken Ground” by Wendell Berry

The opening out and out

body yielding body:

the breaking

through which the new

comes, perching

above its shadow

on the piling up

darkened broken old

husks of itself:

but opening to flower
opening to fruit opening

to the sweet marrow

of the seed—

                        taken

from what was, from

what could have been.

What is left

is what is.

The breaking through which the new comes. Berry knew that when it comes to wellness of spirit, you can’t get to a new place by just closing your eyes in the old one and willing it to be different. To move from one state of mind to another is metamorphosis. That kind of change requires something to crack open, something else to push forth. A bud won’t blossom without breaking its form. That kind of growth is painful; it’s delicate and difficult and who knows how long it will hold. But the act of it is also illuminating. The rising above those husks of previous selves gives one a new vantage point, the heart a new pace of beat. What is left is what is. Hallelujah for what is left still being of (beautiful) substance—for not being a void!

I went to New Mexico a bundle of exhaustion and stress. I’d worked six frantic 75-hour weeks in order to be able to leave. And that kind of time commitment was just the icing on a job that had been dominating my life for more than three years. I was taking a pause from a keen mixture of love and hate—feeling on the one hand so proud of the work we do (of my role in it, of the dedication of our staff, of the kids we serve) and on the other so miserable over being miserable for so long. I thrive on diving deep into lots of different interests; I never felt worn out when I worked 40-hour weeks, had multiple regular evening volunteer gigs, wrote often, and took photography classes in addition to being my social butterfly self. But diving shallowly into millions of pieces and parts of one thing has been draining the heck out of me. That’s because the reward is missing—the bounty of insights gained through deep focus or deep application of my skills, the strength of personal bonds formed when dedicating my time to a few kids rather than to hundreds and hundreds and in theory. And as though having an all-consuming job that doesn’t give much back to me wasn’t causing enough stress, there was the part of me that knew I’d spent my life savings on graduate school to be able to give this new career a try and was disappointed in myself for not finding it rewarding enough to want to stay in. What could be more rewarding than knowing that thousands of children growing up in really tough situations have a supportive, nurturing, and I hope life-changing place to be after school and in the summer, when they are most at risk of finding detrimental paths to follow instead? But the thing is, a body includes a heart and a mind, and if my job gives me only distant connection to the heart’s rewards of the work, it gives me almost no opportunity to reward the mind.

I went to New Mexico thinking I needed to do two things: first, to reignite the creative side of my brain, believing that submerging myself in creative writing for days on end would give me the deep focus and the sense of craftsmanship that I’ve craved throughout the time I’ve held my current job; and second, to unwind, let go of stress, feel well and happy again—for I am too much of an optimist to spend so many mornings waking up dreading the day; I wanted to return to feeling joyful about the life I live.

In week two in Albuquerque, I began to see that those goals might not be quite right. If one thing has frustrated me more than any other over the past three years, it’s been spending so much of my time on one thing. Thus the prospect of spending most of my time off writing came to feel like the wrong approach. To regain a sense of balance, I needed to put multiple things into play. In addition, I was utterly worn out; to revive creativity, I needed more than just to will it back. I needed new inputs to stimulate it. So I wrote, and I read book after book that had been piling up on my coffee table, and I read news articles and education articles and the Huffington Post, and I researched jobs and applied for a handful, and I drove many hundreds of miles to see stunning scenery and take thousands of photographs and listen to fantastic music for being on the open road and feel my heart fill with the sensation of soaring, and I watched movies, and I researched soup recipes, and I slept—ten hours a night for the first month. That’s where I realized that the unwinding part would take some serious work too. I had sleep to catch up on, stress to expel, and liveliness to rediscover. I lived like a hermit for four weeks, seeing almost no one, and it felt good, because I needed to nurse and nurture myself back from true depletion.

In week two, I also dug my hole deeper. I hit a wall with my writing, and through doing so I came to acknowledge that I’d severely hit a wall in general. I had, for three years, been living a life that did not make me happy, and though in the first few months of the job I’d allowed in depression, I had, for multiple years now, been actively working to put an end to the situation. But nothing was coming of it. I’m sure I’ve applied to at least fifteen jobs per year since getting this one, but I’ve never been offered a new one. In week two in Albuquerque, I felt squarely stuck. Don’t want the job I have, can’t find the one I want. I felt at a loss for what I should do next.

Remarkably, in acknowledging that—in first writing it in a blog post and then announcing it to my dear friend Jenny, who has been with me through so many soul journeys over the past 15 years, and then announcing it each morning to myself—in acknowledging it, I found that though at a loss I wasn’t exactly lost. I was in a place of not being there yet but not being nowhere. I was in a finding place. A place where everything is cleared away, like an attic that’s been emptied of its contents. Emptied of what has been and filled with an air of what could be. Husks cleared away so a bud has space to grow.

On week four, on the phone with my mom, in attempting to answer her question of what I had gone to New Mexico to find, I discovered that perhaps the answer lay in an entirely different garden than the one I’d been trying to make grow.

My mom asked me that question and my response had nothing to do with my career. It had nothing to do with leaving the life I’m in. It had only to do with pursuing the thing that I care most about bringing into being.

For years, I’ve said that I feel I don’t have to get married—that I’ll only do that if I find someone really worth marrying for me—but I do have to be a mother. It’s the one thing that I don’t want to live life without doing. Without being. Nine months ago, when I turned 35 and looked in a metaphorical mirror to accept the facts that the biological clock is ticking and if I want to have a baby I may have to do so on my own, I panicked. I was sure that I couldn’t be a single mom with the job I have now, that I couldn’t afford to have a baby in the Bay Area, that I couldn’t succeed at raising it without a sort of help that I would have none of here. To become a single mom would require moving back east to be near family, to live somewhere more affordable. It would require leaving the part of the country I have loved living in best. It felt like it would also mean giving up on love. Those thoughts broke my heart, and they scared the heck out of me at the same time. When, last May, I went to the doctor to learn what the process of having a baby on my own would be like, at the end of the conversation, I asked for a deadline, which she wouldn’t give me. I asked again—by what age do I have to start trying if I have any chance of doing this biologically? She said simply, “You start trying when you’re ready.” I knew at that moment that I was not ready.

On the phone with my mom, in week four of my New Mexican hermitage, having given it no previous thought on the trip and having read just three pages of a memoir a friend lent me about a woman who did something similar, I announced that I was, in fact, ready. It had been a terrifying thing to consider sooner because of all the changes it would require, and I—stressed, unhappy, and exhausted—hadn’t had the energy to clear my head to think about it. But after a few weeks of recuperation and loving living somewhere else and moving past feeling lost just because I was at a loss, it was like I had tilled the soil of my garden, and I had laid down seed, and now a little sprig of life was breaking ground. Over the next few years—as I know it will take significant time for my infertile ovaries to allow me to become pregnant or an adoption agency to allow me to take home a dear little one—I feel sure that a bud will rise from the green stem of the plant, and as it opens into a flower, I will undertake the hardest journey yet of my life. For now, all I can do is open all the doors to making that happen. In three weeks I will meet with a fertility specialist. After that, I will begin to learn about adoption. As I get those balls rolling, I will also look for new jobs in the Bay Area and also in Washington, where my mom lives, and Jenny lives, and other family members and dear old friends live too. And as I do what it takes for my body to yield a new body, or my heart to yield a new heart, I will be a different being than I have been, and in my metamorphosis I think I will continue to feel something that blossomed during weeks five and six of my journey, as I drove almost 2000 miles of southwestern highway, seeing and climbing on and making art from so many marvelous new places and creations. That thing I would call serenity.