Dwelling in the Wilderness : A Short Series
We're already there. Is there more life in the wilderness than we could imagine?
Dear Hearts,
It’s been so long since I wrote to you. It’s taken me a while to find the space and the courage to keep sending these words out into what sometimes feels like a void. But the desire to stay connected to you all through words has never left me. The world has just been so heartbreaking the last long while that I’ve stayed simply trying to stay emotionally afloat. But I’m doing this thing now because I have felt compelled to for a long while even when I’ve resisted. Resisted simply because of how hard it can be to make oneself vulnerable to the world. But what I have learned is that it is in the genuine sharing of my heart and being receptive to the sharing of other hearts that I have often found the compassion, the hope, the inspiration, and the perseverance to show up in the world in ways that feel life-affirming and full of possibility and grace, despite the challenging things we all might be enduring. So, I am saying yes to sharing in this weekly way with you all. “A Little Heart to Heart” letters from my heart to the heart of the world, you. In hopes that something life-giving—no matter how small—comes of it. I am making the initial letters accessible to everyone.
Today is the beginning of Lent, a time traditionally recognized by the Christian faith to consider what it means to live in a wilderness for 40 days. The gift of this season is that the wilderness is a landscape with which we are all familiar in some way, regardless of our belief systems or traditions. And I trust the hospitality of the season to hold space for anyone and everyone who desires to explore how to dwell, survive and perhaps even be transformed in such a wilderness—a wilderness symbolic of how we live fractured lives, so often divided from nourishing, soulful, love-infused parts of ourselves. A wilderness symbolic of ways we so easily and routinely separate our lives from Spirit, from Divine Love and from recognizing ways we are sacredly threaded to one another. A wilderness in which we might very well be called to remember that some forms of life do grow where we’ve assumed it must only be barren land. I couldn’t think of a better time to start this new exchange with you. A better time than now to begin by exploring what it means to dwell in the wilderness – now when we are already all collectively submerged in so much sorrow from the events of the world. Even as we get caught up in the events of our own lives, there are profound ways I suspect we are all experiencing a modicum of grief for which we may not even have the words. I know that I am.
*
I curated a group art exhibition called ‘The Flesh of the Earth,’ and it opened in New York just a few weeks ago on February 1st. Just a day or two before the opening, I woke up at one a.m. and couldn’t fall back asleep. My soul seemed like it was filled to the brim with sadness, and it made my body feel like it was submerged beneath something unbearable. After trying to breathe through the feeling without anything changing, I called a friend on the other side of the world; it was barely morning there.
When he picked up and said hello, I could tell I had awoken him and before he had the chance to say anything more, I burst into tears. The ugly kind. The phone was silent on the other end for about a minute while I bawled. Then he asked quietly and calmly, “What happened?” In that moment I felt a sudden wave of shame wash over me because I had nothing to articulate that seemed worthy of my waterworks. No one thing had “happened.” In fact, there were some beautiful things occurring in my life. Yet my weepy response to him was, “Everything, it’s everything.”
What I didn’t have words for was how challenging it had been—and continues to be—to be fully present in the particularities of my own life while holding the larger context and reality of our collective global life. I didn’t know how to hold my sense of normal with events in the world so horrific that it was almost as though nothing really should be considered normal for any of us. I didn’t know how to say that at times, regardless of what was happening in my own life, my soul felt like it was in mourning. Because it feels like so much of the world is terminally ill and we are rotting from the inside out. So, I just said, “Everything. Everything happened.” And then just as quietly and calmly as he began my friend said, “It’s okay. You can cry.” And I sat on my bed in the dark and cried and cried until heaving sobs became damp whimpers. And he listened.
*
Where I am from, when someone dies, people flood to the house to be with the family of the dead. For the first days the visitors cry and wail, even if the loved ones are too shocked to cry for themselves. As time passes, people come to just sit with the family, to share the silence of grief and the rote routines of daily life during grief. Space is made to acknowledge pain, suffering, death, and the quiet chaos it unleashes. Life does not stop, but space is made for grief. Maybe it’s from the experienced awareness that if you are not hospitable to grief, it will haunt you, and take up its own residence in its own ways until you find the courage and the wisdom to welcome it. Sometimes I wonder if we have forgotten that we are all a family.
*
I have been thinking lately how for so many of us we seem to have no communal rituals for grief. We know how to be reactive and how to rage, which actually I think are parts of grief. But what I’m wondering about in particular is if we know how to dwell in the wilderness of grief, the place that can at times seem like a wasteland without boundaries, a dry expanse of landscape from which we aren’t certain how and when we might find a path out. How do we learn to live in such a place with all that also inhabits this wilderness? What can a wilderness hold? What can be cultivated in such a landscape?
I think, as a global community, whether we acknowledge it or not, that we might be in that wilderness space. I think that we have been there for a couple of years and that each subsequent year has come compounded with so much more visible violence and suffering than we’ve had the capacity to process. The last four months alone can testify to that. But just because we haven’t processed it doesn’t mean that our bodies and our spirits have been immune. Rather, I imagine that are bodies and our spirits, and even the earth we walk on daily, are all haunted with unprocessed grief. It might be impossible to avoid because I deeply believe that there are ways in which all beings, all life forms are connected. We are family. And when violence is enacted upon another life it is an energy that reverberates in some way throughout all life. One can only imagine the intensity of reverberations currently happening in our world now. So again, I ask: how do we dwell in a wilderness of grief?
*
The next 40 days will be a time to explore this, to wander with curiosity and courage deeper into wilderness, into grief and other things. And to hopefully find that perhaps this space is also a surprising landscape of possibility.
With such gratitude to you for being a fellow sojourner.
From my heart to yours,
Enuma
I'm on a break from counseling today and read your letter, and it's lovely to see. Thank you for naming the particularities of your struggles. I'm a counselor and I tell my folks: Trauma work is grief work. We are all holding so much and sharing through words helps me feel more connected to Spirit. Thanks for being a conduit of grace today.
You summed up so much of what I have been feeling. Dwelling in the wilderness. So grateful that you have taken the time to reflect and share with us. Sometimes it is not one particular thing that makes us feel a certain way, and it is not always easy to name those emotions that churn through us. I will continue to come back to that space of dwelling in the wilderness, as a place for me to reflect, explore and find solace and hope. Thank you.