One Immutable Truth Born of Desire

Dear Friends and Family,

November 3 marks a year since I began this journey, which seems quite auspicious as I hover now just north of Vermont in rural Quebec a few days shy of dropping back into the States. I don’t know that I knew when I drove away that I was setting out on a pilgrimage. That would come as the miles stretched on. I certainly could not have imagined that you would be here every mile since my first words on Substack in March. That you have has inspired me to bring more to the page.

On this upcoming one-year journey-versary, I wish to thank especially you who have become paid subscribers over these months and invite you who are so inclined and have the means to upgrade to paid to further your support of the writing and care that go into this publication each week. With your support, I look forward to bringing you more Beyond the Comfort Zone and CURA offerings in the coming year.

Substack has created a new social form founded on relationship and trust. In some ways, it’s an experiment that allows readers to support writers directly and conversation to grow around topics of mutual interest. My hope—always—is to offer something that lives in you for a while, evokes the world in ways that shake off the taken-for-granted, and gives you a place to explore questions about this, our shared human condition on this planet, our home. For your support, in whatever way you feel called, I am eternally grateful.

With love,

Renée

P.S. You will read here about Lynda and Tom who hosted me in rural Ontario this week. I chose not to take images of their home or surroundings out of respect to them.

There is only one immutable truth: No being is purely individual; nothing comprises only of itself. . . . Being alive means participating in permanent community and continually reinventing oneself as part of an immeasurable network of relationships.¹

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Inside the cottage outside my window is a wood-burning furnace that heats the water that heats the home of Lynda and Tom through winter when temperatures will drop to 40º below and the lake across the way will freeze some three feet deep. Lynda will walk on this frozen water at dawn and dusk day in and day out to drop a line through a six-inch hole that Tom will bore. On good days, she’ll bring home fishes.

I open the window just enough to catch the drift of smoke. The smell ushers in an old familiar yearning that comes November nearly every year for as long as I can remember. Down in the hollow of me sits a longing for home, a longing to come home—home not as a place so much as a knowing that wants to be known, a knowing that can only be known through another.

It is said that this yearning is not my own. Nor is it any of ours alone. It is said that this yearning is that which suffered all that is into being; it is the yearning of Being itself. When they say that god so loved the world that he gave, what they are saying is that through the fierce angst that bore through Absolute yearning, Love came to be and from that Love poured through ceaselessly all that is, including you and me. We were born of Desire.²

. . .

Yearning is Absolute

it falls through

itself

into

Love

as above so

below we can bear it

. . .

One common housefly then another and another slips through the crack of my open window. I am not ten meters from the chicken coop. Lynda gave me half a dozen eggs, which she wiped down as we spoke shortly after I arrived, her hands soft on the eggs, her eyes just as soft on mine. The flies are swarming now in the van, some eight to ten of them. Their buzz is meaty, restless, and they are relentless in their circles around my body. No amount of effort on my part will steer them home. I open the window a little more, and more still, and still, they swarm me. I swat and shoo toward the opening and still, they come for me. I fling open the door. They retreat to the back of the van. I give up. They hover near.

My body ekes out oils they want to eat. I am food to them. I am touch. I am now their home.  

. . .

Lynda and Tom invited me to dinner. They offered me a proper bath and their washing machine and clothesline. I left a crumpled tissue in a pocket. It tore into a thousand tiny pieces in the wash. Lynda was near and helped me out to the patio with the whole wet clump, and one by one from each article, we shook the tissue free, then hung the clothes to dry. It was time for dinner—braised venison sausage, the last few from last year’s hunt, boiled potatoes from her sister’s garden, and pickled beets and carrots and cukes from her own.

I ate as if I had never eaten. I ate as if tomorrow would come and there would be no more. She had asked if I am vegetarian, and I wondered what prompted the question. Maybe she saw that I was starved for something.

With the eggs, she had offered me apples from one of the ten bushels in baskets on the floor. Tom said, “We keep them for the deer.” I chimed without wait and without thought, “Oh. Sweet.” And I meant it and still do for reasons not the same. I did not know then what I would come to know of what we would eat—together, around their table, like family, like we had known one another for as long as can be known.

After dinner, Tom went back outside to work. Lynda invited me to sit with her and watch the sun set over the lake. We talked of family. We talked of home. We talked of this journey I’ve been on. I did not say that in shedding the past weeks of me in the bath I took while my clothes washed that I feared I might have clogged their pipes with rolled-up clumps of dead skin because she had gone on to tell me a story about colliding with a grouse one day after dropping the kids at school. She said she stopped the car right then and there to peel the dead bird off the grill. The only thing to do, she said, was take it home and clean it up, pluck it of its feathers, and feed it to the family for dinner.

She smiled sheepishly as if she wondered if I would judge her feeding her family roadkill—as if I might think it unclean, taboo. I did not think so. I might have a year ago though before I set out on this journey, before I arrived so feral.

What struck me was that it did not occur to her not to attend to the bird struck by the race of wheels in a world where the rest of life is outpaced by us. It did not occur to her not to restore the natural order of things by bringing the bird home, dressing it as a meal by undressing it of its feathers, wrapping twine around its legs to hold a clump of herbs inside a cavity hollowed out of entrails, liver, and heart that would later become, with spared bones, the stuff of broth. It did not occur to her not to make the bird her own flesh and that of her family.

. . .

We heard Tom open the door and shake off his boots. It was time for me to go back to my rolling home. Lynda moved toward me, her arms outstretched, and wrapped me in the warmth of her knuckled hands. My breath caught a little between the stiff cage of my chest and the notch at the bottom of my throat. I might have lingered, the last time I was so touched was back in August when the Arctic Ocean slipped into my mouth on a frigid Monday in Prudhoe Bay. Tell me, what is communion?

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wind with linen

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1. Andreas Weber, Matter & Desire: An Erotic Ecology, trans. Rory Bradley (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2014) p. 36.

2. I am referring to the cosmology as offered by medieval visionary cosmologist, Jakob Böhme, a metaphysic of nothing to something. Cynthia Bourgeault makes Böhme’s cosmology quite accessible and modernizes the language in The Holy Trinity and the Law of Three (Boulder, CO: Shambala, 2013), chapters 7 & 8.