“Why did you get an ocean tatto?”
There is something about standing above a process like that, as well as such immense depths, which puts us face to face with our smallness and the vastness of the mysteries of our natural world. I know some people who feel claustrophobic in the open ocean, often meeting annihilation anxieties that pulse through all human beings. I did not find myself anxious, but rather at home in the abyss. The trials of my winter had forced me to face a possibility of annihilation. Rolling over offshore surges on a 20-foot boat, I was at the mercy of the ocean and Her will; it gave me the opportunity to confront my own cycles of life, death, and the equilibrium between it all. It is a process that Melissa Nelson relates to as “climate change” and the way it connects to “our own internal climates that have become out of balance; it’s kind of the mirror of human consciousness being like a climate in chaos. They are so interrelated.”
The Myth of "Doing it all”
In the face of this acceptance is the confrontation with ourselves, not what we imagine we should be or even what social media has insisted we need to be. It is essential that we meet ourselves in the space between our highest hopes and our reality, even when it is not what we imagine it should be. While we’d like to do an hour of yoga every day, perhaps 20 minutes, 3 times a week is all we can manage for now.
Soul Retrieval
As an adoptee, I have always imagined that there are one million parts of myself that have been sacrificed and lost over the years. The infant me who was removed from her mother and then spent three weeks in foster care—how could she not have lost herself in those days of confusion and chaos? The adolescent me who was riddled with anxiety—how could she hold on to herself with thoughts of suicide chasing her? These adoptee parts of my soul are not the only parts that were lost, but those that I remember coming back towards me that day.
Forgetting our rectangle ways
I am beginning to believe that it is hope that brings us back to the wheel, to life. A colleague of mine recently told me about Mariame Kaba’s quote, “Hope is a discipline.” We hope for change and then we find the action within ourselves to return to a process, which will eventually shift the clay from a rectangle to the wild unknown that lives within it—or us. Sometimes it comes easy, and sometimes it is an act of love to hope with discipline.
I Dissent.
There was a time in my more Catholic life when I was pro-life. I figure I should name this facet of my existence because, if I don’t, surely someone who remembers this tidbit about me will attempt to out me. I am naming it here because, like my damn freaking uterus, it is my own. My own story to tell and make decisions about. If I am going to talk about how profoundly pro-choice I am now, I want to first acknowledge the shadowed place that I crawled my way out of. On my terms.
The Existential nature of living
But the hard truth of life is that we can be standing in the happiest place on earth, with a backpack full of organic snacks, and still hear the cry of the world that reminds us that the safety and security we believe is a given, was never ours to begin with.
Being Human When Life Falls Apart
But if we are all struggling, perhaps it would benefit us to come together in that vulnerability. Our community has experienced multiple traumas, and I believe deeply that we will be ok. How quickly we will be ok, or how long the ok-ness will last, I do not know (I am sadly not said wizard). But it is a perk of being a therapist to watch the resiliency of the human soul, even when all feels lost.