Oh, good afternoon, sweet Saturday
In continuation from last week’s letter, I have a confession: I have a fear of commitment.
How strange it is to admit this, especially because I am always so drawn to writing the poetry of the present moment. And it is truly a paradox, because this fear of commitment is not one of relationships with people but instead, relationships to place.
The crumbs of this fear started showing up probably six months ago. And when I say ‘crumbs’, what I mean is my ability to first look this issue in the eye and take it on consciously.
Do you know similar quirks? And the conscious realizations of them? It feels kind of good to name it, when it finally does dawn on you. But at the same time, I am witnessing how difficult it is for me to state the dissatisfactions out loud and to let myself soak in them, BE with them, in order to better understand. Motherhood, as always, is helping me come to terms and showing me the way. Why? Because very early I started to see similar quirks in my children, and immediately I devoted myself to loving them through them, if that makes sense. If I am committed to loving them through their disruptions and quirks, I must be committed to loving myself through mine as my own child too. Love the quirks - especially the parts that are uncomfortable. This is also a paradox, because it builds the experience of life, the intimacy of life — which is exactly what I’m after.
So commitment becomes most challenging for me in relationship to place. With the here & now, and with planting roots. It’s been one year and 2 months since we moved into our home in Arizona. My birthplace, and the place I never thought I would return to after leaving at 18 years old. Even in the commitment on paper — to this house, to this move — I looked to Aviv and told him: maximum 2-3 years. That’s what I see for us here. Sure enough, March 2022 rolls around and I start to feel the itch to move on and go elsewhere. But this time, it’s not up to me and Aviv. Our children are also affected — they have a budding life to uplift and replant wherever we decide to go, and though I still feel like a family of birds, I admit that we can’t just relocate as easily as we used to. My bold, impulsive side has to come to terms with the fact that there are much more important things at stake. Oh! How parenting whips us into shape. No more bypassing or running away. No more escapism…
I guess this commitment issue all started because I grew up in a divorced family, and until my mother remarried, we never owned or committed to a home. Even after we moved in with our blended family, the longest I stayed in a single house (which was also only half the time, due to split custody) was no more than 7 years. With my father, we were always packing up and moving on. Rented house to rented house to rented house. Even after I moved to New York at 18, I kept the trend alive and found myself in a new apartment every year or two. And then Aviv and I quit life in Manhattan to travel the world for four years. Again, place to place to place. Packing life up, unpacking. And though we mastered a sense of minimalism and quality vs. quantity, for me, it was also always due to a secret chronic dissatisfaction. Traveling, on paper and in many memories, was the dream of a lifetime. But I was so preoccupied with waiting for a place to strike me as “home” energetically that when it failed to (it always did, because MY commitment was never there - more on this below) I wrote it off as quickly as we landed. Then off we were again. With our “Leaving Wooster” period, we traveled and lived in over 20 countries over the course of 4 years. I never felt like it was the right time to plant roots in any single place—despite the love affairs with Italy, France, Mexico and Bali and all the other places in my mind we still have yet to travel.
After writing last week, I started to reflect on this desire for pleasure and presence and intimacy with life that I always seem to be after. If I take an aerial view for a moment, I see that true pleasure, at least in my life, always seems to have a number of core characteristics:
commitment & devotion (ie: “there is nothing else you should be doing”)
presence in body-mind-spirit
mental/spiritual openness to vulnerability
courage
curiosity
and a sense of deep slowness, or time stopping.
Again, it is motherhood and witnessing my children freshly discover the world that I have to thank for this lesson and vibrational shift. Naturally, they embody these characteristics most of the time. They are totally present and intimate with place&time as it is. [To play devils advocate (muahaha 😈), they are also under a spell or perspective: the safety of our wings - comforted and loved and cared for - with nothing else to do or worry about in order to keep the flow of life going.]
Back to those crumbs i mentioned: they were always there trailing around me, but I couldn’t see them. I wrote places off as quickly as we landed because I never really gave the discomfort a chance. Too afraid to commit and feel the discomfort. No matter what, I felt lost - and I refused to let myself sit with that, devote to the holiness of even that feeling.
I’ve since come into contact with certain quantum theories that prove over and over that we are our reality. There is never anything wrong outside that isn’t directly connected to something inside. As above, so below. It’s all connected. The beauty of being a child is that your inner and outer world are ONE. The ego is just starting to develop, and there is no separation. Then there is. You vs. Them or You vs. It. And then you go through the illusion of that life and hopefully get to a place where there is oneness again… uh oh. What was I writing about?
Oh yes - my fear of commitment. It is not due to anything defunct with time&place. It’s totally rooted in my own psyche. This makes it incredibly easy to access — but at the same time, how foreign and confusing is the non-physical landscape? We can’t touch it, taste it, smell, hear or see it. It’s this energy floating inside — kinda like the Aurora Borealis or a galaxy.
Doesn’t the emotional landscape kinda feel like this light looks?
In reflections like these I start to realize that everything is a metaphor. A micro inside of a macro. Cells and atoms are like little solar systems. We truly are the universe, or the universe is us — physically, mentally and spiritually — all at once.
It’s a journey. And ultimately, I come back to a version of that mantra again. The affirmation that there is nothing else i should be doing and no place I should be, except here.
I’ll conclude without conclusion, because it is part of a life in progress. In lieu, here is a picture, and a beautiful & inspiring poem, related to everything i just wrote.
“Lost” by David Wagoner, Traveling Light: Collected and New Poems
“Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here, And you must treat it as a powerful stranger, Must ask permission to know it and be known. The forest breathes. Listen. It answers, I have made this place around you. If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here. No two trees are the same to Raven. No two branches are the same to Wren. If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows Where you are. You must let it find you.”
Happy Saturday, sweet world.
Lovingly here&now on the floor of the Arizona desert,
Paulina (and Liv)