I was tired. Bone tired.
Without thinking, I clicked buy on Audible — the 25th anniversary of a book I loved on sale for $1.49 — thinking “I suppose I’ll listen to that someday.”
On the plane, all I wanted was to sleep. Clicked again. Listened, dozed, listened, dozed. So that the words that seeped through my weariness felt like a dream.
I hadn’t remember the sections about creativity. About spiritual friendship with yourself and honoring the passion of your soul.
Then I heard this: “When you give in to creative passion, it will bring you to the ultimate thresholds of transfiguration and renewal. This growth causes pain, but it is a sacred pain. It would be much more tragic to have cautiously avoided these depths and remained marooned on the shiny surfaces of the banal.”
Every part of me woke up.
How much of my life have I spent marooned on the shiny surfaces of the banal waiting for what? Permission to be me?
I remember the misery of living in Paris feeling like a loser and seeing a t-shirt that announced, “Rien de grand ne s'est accompli dans le monde sans passion."
Nothing great is accomplished in the world without passion. I knew that was true. I had grown up around passionate people. I believed myself to be one, but something stood between me and the courage to embrace my own passions.
It has taken another thirty years to figure out what because I had a lot of unpacking to do. A lot of sacred pain. Discovering Love and the blocks to loving and being loved. Discovering joy and learning how to actually practice it. Saying yes to the only thing I’d ever really wanted to do and then having the patience to learn how to do it all the while roadblocking myself with workaholism.
Meanwhile the shiny surfaces of the banal continued to beckon. The siren calls of shopping, eating, distractions. The somnolence of isolation, fear and kowtowing to others’ opinions, too much screen time, binge-anythinging.
Now here I was bone-tired from overworking on an airplane ambivalently going on vacation when all I wanted was to show up to to the creativity I was too tired to engage.
Passion is hard to feel when you’re flat out pooped.
I’ve had to accept that this week. I’ve had to stare into space and go to bed early. I’ve had to fill my days with silence and staring at tropical flowers. Thank goodness for the spotty WiFi and cell service. I’ve been stopped in my tracks and forced to fill the tanks.
Then this morning, when I thought, “Time to blog. . .” I realized, suddenly, why blogging was such a game-changer for me when I began ten years ago. I see now, it was a kind of anam ċara.
Yes, that was the book. Anam Cara by John O’Donohue — a book I remembered as being more about friendship with others. . .something at which I have failed far too often. Because how can we be a good friend to another if we have not yet befriended ourselves? The Golden Rule of doing unto others as we do unto ourselves doesn’t work if we treat ourselves like shit.
Then blogging became a kind of soul friendship. I see that now.
So, of course, now that I have finally abandoned the wreck of my lifelong vessel — the shiny HMS Banal sailing absolutely nowhere; now that I have dived into this roiling but beautiful sea of creative passion and purpose, I have come back.
In his Friendship Blessing, O’Donohue wrote:
May you be blessed with good friends.
May you learn to be a good friend to yourself.
They go together, you see. Can’t have one without the other.
May you be able to journey to that place in your soul where
there is great love, warmth, feeling, and forgiveness.
Your soul first. Put your own mask on before helping another.
May this change you.
May it transfigure that which is negative, distant, or cold in you.
Choose the change you feel inside.
Do not go back to the balm of the banal.
May you be brought in to the real passion, kinship, and affinity of belonging.
Belonging is an inside job.
If you don’t know who you are, the be in longing gets lost.
May you treasure your friends.
May you be good to them and may you be there for them;
may they bring you all the blessing, challenges, truth,
and light that you need for your journey.
It took me a long time to realize that a blog is a conversation among friends
who may never meet face to face. This conversation with you has brought me
the blessing, challenges,, truth, and light I need for my journey — precisely
because I hope it will bring the same to you. That is the reciprocity of anam ċara.
May you never be isolated.
Any heart conversation leaves us less alone.
A heart conversation is a dialogue in Truth with Love.
May you always be in the gentle nest of belonging with your anam ċara.
When I write, I imagine you reading and I remember the real purpose of passion
and of creativity. It is connection. A connection that changes both the writer and
the reader. That elides that distinction. That reminds us we are not alone. Not
isolated. Not marooned in the shiny banal. Not losers.
Whether we remember it or not, the gentle nest of belonging awaits us all.
We just have to open our hearts.