Last summer I was camping alone in the mountains, as I often do. I go in solitude to meet myself in the bare truth, to study beauty and review everything I’ve been up to, and to renew my vows to what I love. I like to imagine I am a detective of my own becoming, hunting clues and tracking patterns, watching for hints of what might be next. The heart is our original map, full of all the directions we’ve been seeking… when we’re brave enough to follow. For me, it takes being alone to return to that map.
But as you may have experienced yourself, aloneness can be a sharp, disorienting place, even downright unbearable. I usually experience the first solitary day as a softening, an encounter with what feels like heaven — the joy to be back with myself and the Earth as interwoven beloveds. But by the next morning, I begin the inevitable descent into everything I’ve been ignoring in my heart. At least now, after many years of practice with hermitage and solitude in the wild, I know to expect this stage of wretched self-reconciliation.
And so day two came and there I was, surrounded by incredible beauty, in utter despair. Misery, even. I began writing in my journal about all my heartbreaks, my failures, the misguided diversions from my path, the floods of anger and the despair at having to be a human. I could call it wallowing, but it was an honoring of truth.
I sat there on a sun-warmed river rock, gratuitously stewing in my own wild mess. I studied the scribbled lines in my journal like animal tracks, re-reading the last few untamed sentences I had written. And then, there it was. The truth I never could have found without my own heartache as the only guide forward. In tears I scrawled new words onto a fresh blank page:
could it be possible…?
that every single failure
was a declaration of my bravest truth.
what if what I thought was a collapse
was in fact
just me, wilding succeeding
at loving myself.
Many years ago I told a similar story to a guide named Ray, sharing that I felt as though I was continually losing my way on my own path. I was positive that I was thoroughly “messing it up.” I will never forget the glint in Ray’s eyes as he said to me, “If this is failure, then, God… I hope we all fail. I hope we all get this lost. Because what I hear is the story of a beautiful unfolding.” He emphasized those last two words with so much sincerity, they still echo within me. A beautiful unfolding. A wild success.
This was the turning point, almost ten years ago, when I realized my strange and daunting new task, one that would surely take me the rest of my life to understand: To fall in love with the parts of me that seemed to be hopeless and lost. The parts that felt like misfits, who had no sensible plan whatsoever. I began to sense a deeper story living within me, a beautiful story that threaded me into a web of kinship with everything. The story of my own life.
if it’s all you can do
to keep on trudging–
there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the Earth
is exactly what it wanted
(Mary Oliver)
What if the “wrong turns” in your life, the missed opportunities, the assumed failures in the eyes of self or others, were actually your most courageous declarations of truth? What if you are already enough? Often, the things we think we aren’t doing enough of also tend to be clues to what we care about most. There is a deep instinctual knowing there, holding the keys to what you are truly hungry for.
As one Hafiz translation says, “don’t surrender your loneliness so quickly — let it cut more deep!” Our clearest knowing is interwoven with the pains we know most intimately. At the raw, molten center of the heart is the part of you that knows what it came here to find. In a world obsessed with healing, wellness, and fixing ourselves, are we able to hear our hearts breaking? What if instead, we listened carefully for the howls and wails of the wild voice within, the one that is wounded beyond repair. To let that forgotten instinct-song be loud, and become our brave guide on the path ahead.
What if we dear, tender humans, in all our striving,
our imperfections, our apparent catastrophes,
deep in our bones
already know
exactly what we’re doing here?
what if your own life,
just as it is,
is a love story,
heartbreaking and magnificent,
a miracle of becoming.
a beautiful unfolding.
a wild success.
may you fall in love
with the great mystery
of your own unfolding.
with heart howls and whale wails,
Kate
Dear Kate your words always find me when I need them most! And I hope you know that even in your days of confusion, heartbreak, misery, you've been a light to so many people. I am forever devoted to your work which has brought ME guidance in my times of uncertainty. Truly. There is so much noise around us it's so difficult sometimes to decipher our own voice and heart from everyone else. I love the idea of a solo journey to find that voice again.
P.S. I also loved the snowflake story from your last newsletter! So fascinating
Bonjour, Kate. This is a gift that will break. Like peanut brittle, I think, but a mischievious version.