"Foraging in the Famine-Fields of Image"

 

The night of sense is a period of weaning from the consolations that characterized the beginning of our relationships with the divine. The solid nourishment of pure faith is an acquired taste, like solid food for the weaned child…… God begins to offer us a more intimate relationship

Thomas Keating, Invitation to Love

In most people’s lives, the moment of ‘awakening’ is one of the most powerful moments that brings them back home again, out of the winter of exile where their minds would have been foraging for nourishment in the famine-fields of image.

John O’Donohue, Walking on the Pastures of Wonder

A long period of grief and the pandemic is coaxing me away from the “famine-fields of image” towards the more nourishing and evanescent fields of the real, the infinite, and the divine. 

Grief has a way of purifying us of our attachments if we can withstand the emptiness and sadness.  When we face a loss, we have two options, to grow into more depth or to calcify into a brittleness. The choice often depends on our practice and grace. We can choose to continue to “forage” in those “famine-fields of image” desperate to cover our pain with attention, power, and money.  These things feel immediately secure to our small self but in the end serves to numb and harden us from life.  Or we can choose to enter into the unknown edges of the sorrow with the chance of finding there the greater nourishment of spirit, wonder, humility, and mystery.  The unknown geography is so much more vast than we could have imagined but we need to turn away from the famine fields to see it.   

Yoga helps to strengthen our physiology and nerves to bear the greater load of grief.  And when we have this suppleness to contain the grief, it can break us open to what sustains us in loss, emptiness, and desolation.  We cultivate the capacity to “walk in the desert” not knowing where we might find water for our thirst, fruit for our hunger but an openness to the journey because it promises freedom.

I find it to be a day to day choice not a one-shot deal this choosing to grow and become more fully my true self. Sometimes I need to cling to the concrete, the controllable, the security however false and desecrating this is to my spirit.  I am not yet ready to turn away from the famine fields even if they do not nourish me out of fear of starvation. But with practice and grace, I become aware of the gripping and can let go of what is no longer of sustenance, becoming available to what might be the greater purpose of my life. Letting go even a little is most time enough of wild ride to carry me into a unexpected creative becoming. 

I find a childlike quality in the letting go into the mystery of life’s unfolding, the awe in the everyday, the true nourishment of life.  But now I can bring with me the whole family, the joy and the sorrow, an integration of the inner parts which gives me courage and faith. In my body/mind, the joy and the sorrow come together like the bleeding edges of watercolors to create something that is real and beautiful.