I Don’t Know Where This Is Going

A Personal Letter to You Before I Reach Home

Dear Friends and Family,

I write this letter from the Long Island home of a dear friend, both of us on retreat last week with Cynthia Bourgeault¹ at the Garrison Institute in New York. The pause for retreat and here these thanksgiving days seems a pregnant interstice on the journey. And because this is so, I’m writing a personal letter to you today just days shy of being back home.

At Garrison, we woke each day in silence in spare rooms inside what was once a Capuchin monastery overlooking the Hudson River.² Long halls echo the waking silence but for the here-and-there pattering of footsteps across oak floors that sound a comforting, creaking reminder that in our inner work, we are never alone. Morning sun filters slant through antique and stained glass in this old brick monastery. It shimmers across wood as it comes inside lending a bath of light, honeyed and enveloping. There is nothing here that is not nourishing to the inner life of human being. The setting becomes a container for questions, for contemplation, for reimagined ways of being.

In this teaching retreat, we explore what it is to hold our planet at this time and as a collective. We ask how we might become bearers of hope and midwives of transformation. We wonder how we can help. These questions have been the living, inner thrust of this pilgrimage of thirteen months. They are why I have detoured for this retreat.

I walked into the Garrison Institute having just that day shared with you a post entitled, “Inflection Point.” In it, I touched on Dante’s Divine Comedy and intimated this time in the human unfolding as a collective dark night. That post would soon seem to have offered in fragments a subconscious foreshadow of what the week would hold.

I also shared there that it was a dark night in my own life that in part called me to this journey. My marriage had ended; I would have stayed forever. Our home was vacated, then emptied, then split into two separate bank accounts and soon filled and made home by a different family; I would have received my final breath beneath that roof we once called home. My career took a sudden turn; I could not have seen it coming and would not have chosen the change. There were other things, too, that would reweave the fabric of family and even my physical health for a while. And while none of these things were catastrophic, together, they were cataclysmic. For a while, they hollowed out life as I knew it, ushered me through a hell that seemed at times the path traveled by Dante’s pilgrim as I reckoned with loss. In time, they purged me of habitual trappings of mind, stuff, and who am I now that it’s all gone. And they gave me something of the essence of being.

. . .

A dark night is an unraveling of life as we know it so profound that it shakes us out of every possible taken-for-granted way of being and sets us squarely in the lap of an empty I don’t know.

I don’t know who I am.

I don’t know where I am.  

I don’t know where I’m going.

I don’t know how I am to get there.

If we’re lucky, a dark night wakes us down to our marrow and births us anew. It does so for us as individuals. It does so for us all. It would be hard to deny that what some call the metacrisis³ of this time is a dark night for humanity.

Sometimes, we circumnavigate the dark night and plow ahead unchanged. But if we can stay with the trouble,⁴ the trouble will bear fruit—fruit beyond our control and need to know and so, fruit of a different order of being.

When I write to you, I write in the phenomenological present. It is never fully formed, never a conclusion, always in process, always becoming. My hope is to evoke the world as it impresses upon me in a moment or many and lend to you a meditation as it lives through those very impressions. The aim is not to show you my world. The aim is to see together our world. Nor is the hope for any particular ideas conveyed to be fully metabolized in a reading. The hope is for the felt sense from the reading to be experienced. Lived.

Over time, the meditations give us an image of the world through their lived imprint on our collective cells. What comes alive in you from what impresses itself upon me gives us together a holographic view, each of us seeing through a moment as aspects of the whole. The whole cannot be seen, experienced, or understood by one person alone. The whole needs the whole of us seeing, experiencing, understanding together. This holographic seeing is absent right or wrong, good or bad, true or false, either/or. Holographic seeing sees through from every point of view. In this way, Beyond the Comfort Zone gives us the experience of seeing together and belonging to the world anew. Your weekly comments are as tightly woven into each post as the words that prompt you to share. And so, it comes to me as I go home that it does not matter where go I? in the van. What matters, it seems to me, is our play at the edges of what we believe we know, who we believe we are, what we believe we need, and who that still small voice beckons us to become.

Many of you came to Beyond the Comfort Zone for the vicarious adventure into wild places. Some of you came out of intrigue about the topic, others out of desire to participate in a pilgrimage, and others still for a foray into contemplative silence. Whatever brought you, my hope is that you’ve stayed for the whole of it . . . and what it stirs in you . . . perhaps even, what it asks of you.

Which brings me to what I want to say to you before . . .

(where go I?)

. . . I go home next week to reunite with family and loved ones and enter a period of winter stillness to finish one book (about the body and human becoming) and begin working on another (about this unfolding journey).

What I want to say is this:

I don’t know where this is going when I go home. Truth is, I never have. And that’s what it’s been about, walking head- and heart-long into the abyss of I don’t know. I want to propose that this is where we are as a collective at this time on the planet. We don’t know. All the while, something within and between us quivers with a knowing that is shifting the very fabric of our being, and it yearns. That something needs our help for it to happen. Beyond the Comfort Zone will keep playing at the edges of uncertainty and yearning on behalf of our shared becoming. There is mercy there and every reason for hope.

As I begin on Monday the final stretch, please accept my uttermost gratitude for pilgriming these many miles with me. Circling wild reaches of North America has been a journey like no other and truly because we’ve traveled together. There are more wild reaches yet, but for now, a winter rest from the road. Beyond the Comfort Zone will continue every Sunday though. So, please share in my sweet anticipation for what is to come over the winter on Beyond the Comfort Zone even as I—and so, we—don’t yet know where this is going. That not-knowing is the open empty from whence all possibility flowers forth.

I’ll see you next week from home. . . .

Ever in gratitude and with love,

Renée

1. Modern-day mystic, Episcopal priest, writer, and scholar teaching in this retreat on the unfolding of human consciousness in the context of this “metacrisis” moment in the human unfolding—the ecological planetary and species, institutional and social crises of our time.

2. In 2003, the century-old building became home to Garrison Institute, “a not-for-profit, non-sectarian organization exploring the intersection between contemplation and engaged action in the world.” https://www.garrisoninstitute.org/about-us/our-story-so-far/].

3. For an understanding of the term and phenomenon, “metacrisis,” see Jonathan Rowson, "In the Making: Becoming Human in a Time between Worlds.”

4. I borrow this phrase from Donna Haraway. See Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). From the book jacket about the text: “In the midst of spiraling ecological devastation, multispecies feminist theorist Donna J. Haraway offers provocative new ways to reconfigure our relations to the earth and all its inhabitants.”