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Human Longing
Summer 2008 is a vague memory. We didn't take time off so it feels as though I missed it. September has been a sunny blessing as I hear that August was rainy. I was in Berkeley and Sonoma and Walnut Creek and Taos and Emeryville. It was gorgeous but I was tired and mostly working or sleeping lousy due to jet leg coming from one direction or another.
My time in Taos was summer. For five days, I was in stillness and sunshine assisting Natalie at another silent writing retreat. Blindingly bright days. Crisp, coyote howling nights. The magnificence of the vast New Mexico sky overwhelming my tiny body. As I drove from the Albuquerque Airport, I felt a deep quiet well up from the depths of my writer's soul. Cobalt sky, pinon dotted rolling red hills, mesas looming long and still. Tears welled in my eyes and a profound familiarity arose. Is it the land? The sky? Is it me? What is that familiarity that immediately quiets my discursive mind? I'm not sure. It is bigger than Mabel Dodge Luhan House and Natalie Goldberg and my jeep buddies writing next to me in the zendo. It is bigger than all of that.
I touch a well of longing, I think. Human longing. Not just mine. The longing of all these writers wanting there to be no gap between them and their words, their life and the page. The longings of writers are not so different from the ones carried by twenty students who started our Integral Coaching® Certification Module last week. The coaching topics they brought forward curved around a common resonance:
I want to more fully show up as me. I don't want any separation from me in the world and me inside. I want more intimacy in all aspects of my life. I don't want to perform or have to be something anymore. I want to bring all of me to my family not just the "good" parts. I want to feel more peace, stillness in my life. I want to be more emotionally available to others (and myself). I don't want to lie on my death bed saying that I didn't live my "one wild and precious life."
All of the topics bubbled up from the depths of human desire. This deep longing to be more closely connected to human fullness and freedom. To close the gap.
Just like writing practice closes the gap.
This human longing for connection: no separation between you and this very moment, you and this single person, you and yourself when no one else is around. Is that what I touch when I drive out of the Albuquerque Airport and head north on Highway I-25 towards Taos?
Human longing.
It hangs in the air of New Mexico.
It drips off of each cottonwood and catches in the throat of the black crows.
© Joanne Hunt
