When I was a very small child I witnessed a terrible violence. Its flashback was the domino which set off all the others, it was the key waiting to be fitted in the lock, and when that happened, when the black box opened in my head, all that had been crazy-making made sense. This week I’ve been drawn again to that moment, it’s been present, and it’s helped me make sense of something else.
In the vast space that’s opened up since the end of one relationship and the repositioning of others, longing has revealed herself as a constant, vocal companion. Or as Tara Brach would call it, the wanting mind. And with Tara Brach holding my hand, I’ve been investigating. My version of longing positions herself as desperate for work success. She focuses on the most public version of me, I want, I want, I want. If this obstacle would clear, I would be happy. If this number was achieved, I will be safe. Longing tells me that out there, in the big wide world, too enormous to comprehend, pieces must be moved to achieve peace, and she reminds me I am small and must shout the loudest. She tells me it’s impossible, yet I must do it. She fills me with insistence. She tells me this time it’s real.
When I was a very small child I witnessed a terrible violence. Let’s put these two pieces together. I was alone, but for what I was witnessing. There were adults but there was no one to tell. Had I tried (did I try? I don’t remember) I would not have been believed. I know this from trying to tell of other moments, not as bad but pretty bad. I was in a basement with a large house above me. I was small with a vast world outside. I was suffocated and trapped, as if I was drowning with the enormity of the task at hand, to stop this thing that was happening. I remember that. I remember thinking I must do something. It was up to me, and me alone. There was no one there to help me.
That feeling of small and I must do something, the juxtapose of impossibility, longing has carried with her. She imprints it perfectly onto my present day like a tracing paper plan of repetition. This house sits perfectly on that one. It’s so familiar, so instinctively perfect in its copy, that despite all her arguments to the contrary, I can’t look away. I know that the heart stopping panic I feel now in the face of things beyond my control is sourced directly from that moment, many years ago when I was small. Longing is clever, isn’t she? She’s so beautiful in her deception, and too, she is born from the natural desire to thrive. There are so many layers.
There’s more.
Because imbued in that origin moment was love. I determined it was up to me to rescue. I set out on a mission to move heaven and earth. Imagine a three year old taking on the world. Imagine it was life and death. That was me. And yesterday, listening to Tara Brach teach on addiction, lying on my yoga mat, a heavy blanket, an eye mask, I witnessed the insane bravery of that belief for the first time. I put the pieces together. I saw her, my small self, and cried for her imagining she could do this, the impulse to stand in the way of fire, the thought that she was strong enough. And I cried for her misunderstanding. And I cried for the inevitability of her failure, and how she would take it on as her fault. No wonder longing overlays the everyday frustrations of my work with such a sense of drowning. No wonder every frustration feels like life and death. She is repeating all she knows. And it’s no wonder, with the repositioning of relationships, that this should come up today. I cannot move heaven and earth. I cannot save anyone.
Eleanor
