A Devotion to My Desires
renewed conversations with heart
Sometimes I think this is it. The trees lining the road catching the snow as it lightly falls, the quiet that feels utterly expansive on a Sunday morning, the dog pouring its unconditional gaze in to mine. Sometimes these feel like the conversations with God that I’m looking for. The beauty I relentlessly seek. The magic I sometimes forget is already so absurdly here that I could reach out and grab it if I wanted.
Sometimes it is in these moments of contact with something more than my self that I can so effortlessly know and trust my infinite worth. In the presence of seemingly nothing I recognize everything as sacred, even my self.
One time several years ago after I became a bodyworker I was Googling alchemic symbols because it seemed like everyone that I thought was cool was suddenly in to alchemical symbols and sacred geometry and I wanted to see what all of these shapes were about.
I came upon phosphorus. It is believed to be an element that captures light. I learned a couple of days ago that 85% of the body’s phosphorus is stored in bones and teeth and I had a lightbulb moment where I remembered all of the times I’d ever said I just knew and felt something deep in my bones. Must have been the phosphorus. Must’ve been all that light.
My mom visited last weekend and she insisted we go to the casino in the hour we had to kill before dinner. It had been 15 years since I stepped in to a casino and it felt like an opportunity that otherwise wouldn’t have presented it self, so I said yes.
I decided that I was going to remain unattached to winning or losing, and that me and money were simply going to have fun. I walked out an hour later with $300 dollars and a shitty grin.
I drove to an interview the other day and instead of thinking about the interview I was thinking about my relationship to change. I decided that change is my best friend. In hindsight of every pivotal moment of change in my life, my life’s data supports this level of friendship with change. Because change is my best friend, change only wants the best for me. It has seemed to always know something that I didn’t, and in that unknown space something has always awaited me that change guided me toward for the better. That bettered me or my circumstance, even if things got a little worse before they got better.
Change always knows what lies ahead, even if I can’t fathom it. It always knows that if there were no unknown, my life right now would be the best it would ever be. Change is my best friend. It always wants the best for me. Again, my life’s data collection supports this. So I decided to go ahead and trust it.
Several minutes later I walked in to my interview and sat down at a table with three other humans, one of which asked the first question: “what is your relationship to change?”
I smiled. You just can’t make this stuff up.
I recently dated a man who didn’t believe in assigning meaning to anything. It made him less appealing to me honestly. I don’t know if that’s reasonable to feel, or any more reasonable to admit aloud, but it’s how I felt regardless.
He’d probably say I was assigning some kind of meaning to him believing in meaninglessness, but as a staunch believer in meaning and magic and truth it came to a point where his opinion meant nothing to me.
See, I can find meaninglessness in things too.
We did find common ground in our belief that innately everything is meaningless. That we are what gives things meaning. But he went even further to say that not only did nothing have meaning but that everything is a coincidence. Random. Unexplainable with no rhyme or reason or need to explain.
I think both can be true. I think something can mean nothing and something at the same time. We are human after all and one of the gifts we are blessed with is to hold multiple truths at once. But to me, it is meaning that gives things shape. It creates containers and borders and boundaries. Guide posts. Road maps. A North Star.
Without meaning, how do you have values? How do you abide by them? How do you have a sense of self? How do you move forward, creating a reality around who ever it is you find there? How do you have intuition, and follow it? How do you have deep, authentic, safe, connective relationships? A fulfilling career? Satiating hobbies? If nothing mattered or didn’t mean anything, how would you do anything at all?
I appreciate the approach of being unattached. I tend to approach life from a perspective of spirituality and the practice of letting go, of not attaching in particular ways to any thing or any one, has actually been a consistent and profound lesson for me.
But it’s not always in the entirety of the grasp releasing that has always given me the most freedom. In some cases, yes. In other cases, it is the allowance of the meaning to shift. To change. It has been in allowing meaning to be there, and letting it be what it is. And letting it be what it is. And letting it be what it is, over and over again, as I continually evolve and change.
I’m used to pouring my self in to things that are not me. I pour my self in to work, men/relationships, identities, plans. The Meaningless Guy that I dated told me his ten year plan and after only a week or two of knowing him I formulated in my head how I could make my self fit in to that plan. I wasn’t even in love with him. It is shocking how effortlessly I abandon my self to fit in to the dreams of others.
I’ve done it because I made it mean something to be a single woman building a life of her own. A fear of being partnerless forever drove a wedge between the life I want to create and having a partner. It made “me and my life” and “having a partner” two separate things.
I’ve also done it because I am not sure if I can trust my self. My capabilities. My follow through. My own power probably.
Ok, Meaningless Guy has a point; sometimes the meaning we assign to things actually holds us back. But again, it’s not in the abandonment of meaning altogether. It’s in how fluid I can allow the meaning to be.
It’s sort of like boundaries. They don’t have to be infinitely tall, impenetrable brick walls. They can be as soft, powerful, and fluid as water as it ebbs and flows on the shore. Ever changing, but there nonetheless.
So I am pouring my self back in to me. I am allowing the trees and the Sunday mornings and my dog’s adoration to be God. I am remembering the innate, unbounded wisdom that lives in my bones and consulting it more often. I am rewriting the narratives inside of me because I believe they will be reflected on the outside. I believe that I am the creator of my world, my reality, my circumstance. That life will affirm the thoughts and beliefs and energies within me that I allow access to my power.
A return to my own heart with a soft, compassionate hold on all of the meanings I have created and will continue to let go and create, let go and create to give my self shape. To make my life a supportive and transforming container. To no longer seek everything I desire in another, but to find it in my ever expanding heart, in the boundless love within the protective edges of limitless boundaries. A devotion to my self, my desires, and the trust that in unifying all that my heart dreams of, all that my heart dreams of will arrive.
Perhaps of most importance, a devotion to knowing it already has.
Tallyho,
Jenny