Sacred Longing.

An invitation to the weary hearted.

Image: Amy Treasure/Unsplash

All I know this evening...

We are not meant to be this lonely.

Lean into the longing.

Yes.

Leeean.

Lean in.

Then what?

We need each other.

And,

yet,

Where are we?

This is how it began, or this at least this was the snippet I felt capable of sharing with the world the other night while drinking wine and wailing. 

I laid on my couch and the ache breathed through me. 

What ache, you may say?

The yearning to be seen, held—witnessed. But more than that: the inescapable awareness that something is missing. A lot is missing to be more accurate. 

Aside from the arms I occasionally wish to hold me, I miss bug guts on the windows, dragonflies on the pond. I miss seeing faces daily whom I know as the back of my own hand. My mother is home from Texas, and though we meet on occasion with great warmth and affection, something in me longs for more…more faces to see and touch with regularity. 

When I had my granddaughters in my care over the winter I grew accustomed to carrying the weight of their sweet bodies. Here, just a few days ago, I had them in my home again for a few days and each night I passed out, my body wedged between them, all of us crammed into my rough hewn four poster wooden framed bed. 

It was lovely, if crowded. 

And now they are gone again.

It’s not just my longing to hold and mother little bodies which will never be fully fulfilled in this life. It is a simple and undeniable fact: our bodies are not designed for the world in which we now live. Our nervous systems have not evolved for modern times, but for waking up daily and seeing faces we know, wandering in fields and forests, gathering food, making bread, making things by hand, and holding hands with others. 

As our modern world overtakes the natural one, we have less natural noises: fewer birds singing (though in my neighborhood the crows and magpies' cacophony is near consistent). We have fewer bugs, bees, and butterflies. I normally rescue half a dozen buzzing bumbles by hand in my house this time of year which wander in through open windows. This year…maybe 3. I have seen no ladybugs, very few spiders, a thimble full of rollie pollies. 

Our ecosystem is changing. Solastalgia—ecological grief—is real. 

I, we, are still recovering from the enforced isolation and paranoia of the p(l)andemic. The damage which being “locked down” did to our individual and collective psyches is still unfolding, and likely will be for years, well into the next generation. 

We are not made to work, sleep, stress, and repeat that cycle until we are dead. 

We long for something more … the numinous, the mystery. 

We cannot supplant that deeper desire by being in connection with things. We cannot fill the hole where the wild longs howls through us with objects, people, and places which do not actually feed our souls, yet that is what we are “sold”; that is what we are programmed to do. But the programming is failing. And as a result we burnt out, we become anxious, and depressed.

We are in the in-between: the space where something is dying and dead, but what is coming has not been reborn, yet. 

And it is lonely. 

This loneliness is the loneliness of both initiation and of something being deeply wrong in the culture in which we are living—and it aches. 

If you, too, know this ache I would encourage you to lean into it—and reach out and ask for support. We need the solitude of the sacred and the warmth of each other. 

If you resonate with what I am sharing, you may find benefit in the webinar I am offering on July 5th. 

I invite you to join me for a class in which we will discuss the different layers of loneliness and sacred longing and workshop ways we can lean into it, as well as genuinely support ourselves and each other.

Link will be sent to email used for payment prior to class. Recording will be sent out 48 hours after live class

Register here.

Much love to all of you!

~Justice