What We Ache For Creativity and the Unfolding of Your Soul Chapter One What We Ache For We ache to touch intimately what is real, to find the marriage of meaning and matter in our lives and in the world. We ache to feel and express the fire of being fully alive. When we cultivate and refuse to separate those essential expressions of a human soul -- our spirituality, sexuality, and creativity -- we feed the fire of our being, we find that place where the soul and the sensuous meet, we unfold. Willing to do our creative work and refusing to separate it from our sexuality or our spirituality, we add a life-sustaining breath to the world. Yesterday I received news about two people seeking death. One, the elderly mother of a dear friend, declares repeatedly to those at her bedside that she is ready to go, finished with life in a body that seems to be failing by painfully slow incremental steps. Her son, my friend, writes to me of her struggle to leave. Sometimes she verbally rambles, sometimes she lucidly recalls old songs and stories. Mostly she is quiet, waiting. She lies in bed refusing to eat, willing herself to go, spasms running through her limbs from the effort of trying to leave her body, only to find one breath following another and another, continuing against her will. The other is an old friend who was briefly a lover many years ago, a gifted architect in his late sixties who, despite being well loved by his wife and children as well as many friends, has struggled with depression for years. He disappeared four days ago, and those closest to him fear that he has lost his fight with some inner darkness and has jumped unnoticed from the ferry near his home, has been swallowed by the watery darkness of a January night. Both bits of news arrived yesterday but only reached me today. Sometimes it takes time for unwelcome information to find a way around the defenses of daily living. This morning I said prayers for the man and the woman and for those who love them and went about my business. But this afternoon, as I drove home from picking up eggs and milk in the village nearby, I noticed the way the crimson light of the setting sun seemed to set the icecovered trees at the side of the road on fire. Something in this impossible marriage of fire and ice made the muscles of my chest tighten. And these stories of death finally penetrated my body. My skin flashed hot and I was drenched in sweat, and then a bonedeep chill swept through me as I thought of the sought-after deaths: one, the feverish exertion of trying to leave the body; the other, a cold end in black water. The words of the Robert Frost poem "Fire and Ice" ran through my mind. Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I've tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice. I felt how often we are headed in the wrong direction, fighting the wrong fight, battling with reality and losing. I thought of the aspects of myself that are like this woman and this man: how I strive over and over again to determine something with my will despite all the evidence that it is simply not up to me; how I sometimes mistake surrender for giving up and giving over to that which would rob me of life. To the woman, to the willful aspect of myself, I want to say, "Let go. Let it be as it is. Even this you cannot make happen as you think it should, and if you keep trying, the ease you long for will continue to elude you, and you and those who love you will suffer. It is not your life but simply Life, and it will take its own time, follow its own rhythm." To the man, to the part of me that at times, if only for a moment, has felt the icy chill of despair that comes when I realize I am once again not handling well what life has given me, I want to say, "Don't. Don't even allow the thought of throwing it away. Isn't life already too short, over too soon for all that waits to unfold within us? Fight for it. Reach for it, if not for yourself, then for those who come after us, for all of our children. Don't." I wonder and am somewhat dismayed at how often we hang on where we need to let go and give up where we need to persevere. I am surprised by how deeply I am touched by these two stories. Connection make us vulnerable to grief and loss even as it offers us the intimacy that heals and sustains us. As I read my friend's letter I think of my own sons and know how much it must mean to this woman to have her son with her as she dies. And I think of my mother and remember that whatever else is true of our relationships with our mothers, they have been the very ground of our physical existence, and so their passing must send a tremor through the emotional earth upon which we stand, must leave us bereft in some fundamental way even when we can anticipate and accept the inevitability of the loss. Waiting to hear if they have found the body of the man I once knew, I am surprised at how past intimacy makes this loss seem immediate despite the fact that we have had only minimal contact in recent years. I have had other friends die but never one with whom I made love. I don't know why this makes a difference, but it does ... What We Ache For Creativity and the Unfolding of Your Soul . Copyright © by Lawrence Oriah. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from What We Ache For: Creativity and the Unfolding of Your Soul by Oriah Mountain Dreamer Staff All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
