Quote Roundup #4: On the unraveling of self and desert pilgrimages

Personal growth happens when we are willing to come undone and enter the desert of uncertainty.

This is a long reflection. I didn’t know what direction it would go, and it’s not specifically about writing. Instead, it’s a personal essay. It’s chock full of metaphors. I think it’s quite possibly one of the deeper, more vulnerable windows you’ll access to my heart. I hope it speaks to you today, maybe as a companion or maybe a champion.

“We can only go to the place where we are not yet.” —Elisabeth-Paule Labat

There is a threshold where our past and future link. I imagine it as a dirt road. I have been walking alone on this path for many years. It is a forest in which I tread, vibrant and green and teeming with life. I savor the solitude, though I wish for companionship from time to time.

Whenever I feel lost, whenever a new uprising of tumult surges in me, I picture a fork in the dirt path. I don’t know which way to go, but I cannot continue forging straight ahead. I must choose right or left, but which is the way? How can I know? I pause for a moment, moving my head back and forth, pained with the decision I face. Both avenues appeal to me; they look the same. I can’t tell if one is right or wrong, better or worse than the other.

What if they’re both good? I ask myself. What if they’re both not good?

The place where I am not yet is the pilgrim’s way. We are all sojourners in this life, each of us winding our way down our own labyrinthine roads, sometimes finding ourselves back to where it all began. The truth is that there is no defined arrival. We are, after all, human. And humans keep happening upon new destinations and new beginnings every day.

I can only take that next step, whichever way I choose to travel. It will be neither right nor wrong, just part of the experience that’s meant for my life. Life isn’t about the final destination, anyway. It’s about how I rise and fall every day, then get back up to rise and fall once more. It’s the ascent. It’s the descent. It’s the fading and flourishing.

Every day brings about little deaths and resurrections.

“Mostly we grow by falling apart.” —session with my spiritual director, Mary Sharon Moore, on 10/26/2020

2020 was That Year for everyone. I wasn’t excluded. I think I might have managed the COVID-19 scare better if I hadn’t brought home a newborn the day before the worldwide shutdown. Maybe. Maybe not. I’ll never know.

What I do remember, in patches of fog and frustration, is this: I fell apart. Yet I held it together on the outside. I didn’t allow myself to unravel, not even to Ben, because I didn’t believe I could. It seemed wrong of me, selfish somehow, since the entire world was unraveling. People everywhere were dropping dead from this mysterious virus, so who was I to weep? Who was I to lament?

I had an intact family. We were safe. I could walk outside my front door any moment of any day without fear of reproach. No one was scouting our local park to ensure it remained vacant. For a flicker of time, I was afraid of encountering people. I thought maybe I had this virus and didn’t know, so I didn’t want to pass it on if I happened to cross paths with someone else. I thought maybe they had the virus, and I didn’t want to catch it and bring it home to my vulnerable infant.

The real reason I fell apart, though, was because my mind grew weak and unstable. It couldn’t hold the tension of my daily life and world turmoil. I was weary: weary of my body growing a human, then expelling it in birth three times in four years. Every organ and cell was exhausted, exasperated. I needed a break, needed rest.

And then my spiritual director told me on the phone, “Mostly we grow by falling apart.” Those six words gripped my heart in a way nothing and no one had for years. Relief rushed in like a rainshower. Finally, someone put words into something I needed but couldn’t muster to give myself, which was permission to unravel. To be a mess. To be needy. To hurt. To be weak and dependent and grieved.

It’s been nearly four years since that conversation, and I am still unraveling. I still fall apart. It feels peculiar and unfamiliar, as most growth spurts do. My initial reaction is fear, until I lean into that tension and let it teach me about myself.

“The further you go into the desert, the closer you come to God.” —an Arabic proverb

The desert has been a spiritual metaphor for me these past ten to fifteen years. At one point in my youth, consolations were abundant. My life blossomed in every facet: my relationships, my faith, my health, my education and career. Life had color. It was vibrant, alive. I can still see myself then, before age twenty-five, and the exuberance I emitted was incomplete. I am embarrassed to say that my naivete made it so that I blithely assumed life would remain a verdant springtime.

Now I’m forty-three. Not young. Not old. That in-between phase of life, the autumn years, I suppose. I look in retrospect at my younger self with wistfulness, a mixture of regret and nostalgia. I miss those years before hard suffering entered my life, but I also don’t. In some strange way, suffering brought me to the desert. And the desert is where I have been stripped of everything frivolous that once distracted me from a deeper sense of self, a stronger faith.

I don’t like being in the desert, but I recognize its value, its stark beauty. What I am, what I have been for ten or more years, is parched. The longing for wholeness and truth has grown stronger, more urgent. I am lonelier than I ever have been. I feel like a stranger in my own house, in every relationship, in my neighborhood. I am a wayfarer still meandering along that worn dirt road.

Some days I enjoy being alone. Other days, I wish I were surrounded by a community of people who get me. It’s not that I believe they aren’t out there. I do. In fact, I have some incredible friends who feel much as I do. But the moments of connection are so rare and infrequent that I remain in the desert, searching for what will revive my drooping spirits.

If God is meeting me in the desert, then it is surely in the absence of human comforts. It is surely in the silence, in the solitary treks through arid and desolate wasteland.

“Every desert has its hidden springs.” —Fr. Donald Haggerty

There was a time I hiked a trail in the desert. Ben took me camping at Heron Lake in northern New Mexico. The “lake” looked, in fact, much more like a pond to this Midwesterner. In northern Indiana, lakes can be hundreds of miles long and deep, splicing several small towns. It was a small, tranquil campsite where we stayed overnight, and the paltry gleam of water only partially satisfied my senses.

Our first full day on site, Ben and I chose a trail to explore. Every trail I’d ever taken before that moment was in a lush, green forest. But this time, I was trodding on red sand and rocks. The expanse of land stretched its arms far to my left and right, without so much as a tumbleweed here or there. Maybe a sagebush, too. But very, very little green.

At one point, I asked Ben if we could take a break. The midday heat was melting me. We stopped next to a fallen branch, scraggly and withered. Upon it, I noticed a strip of irridescent green. It was a tiny lizard pushing its front legs up and down. “Look, it’s doing push-ups!” I laughed, and Ben snapped a photo.

The desert is severe. That’s what I learned on that camping adventure.

What I picture is the oasis I’ve only nominally heard of: the surprise wellspring to quench and cool after trudging through hot, dry sand for miles without reprieve. It’s an apt metaphor for hope, isn’t it? When I feel despondent and the drudgery of days turns into years, I still cling to the possibility that I might happen upon that spring of water.

In fact, I will. I just don’t know when. But when I do, I will revive.