Eden’s Pull
Some days I feel a pull so deep it can overtake me, often leaving me feeling displaced and completely off-centre.
It's this deep heartcry in me, for connection.
It usually starts with a longing for a sense of ‘home’, where I am connected to a sense of my ‘true-me’. The cry usually grows into the longing for even more connection. To be a part of a whole, healthy, deep community, a longing for connection to family.
The cry often feels like an unexplainable gravitational pull into the land. As if the land is the one place that really knows how to guide and connect me to who I truly am.
There's something at the core of me that longs to be connected to something ancient, something mystical, something pulsing with a life-giving-energy that is divine and ‘more’. Some how for me, that longing, all feels birthed out of connection to land.
I want a life story that is deep and rich, connected into years upon years of other peoples stories, all woven together. I want my story to be braided in with theirs. I long for it to be woven into generations built on generations, all driven with some sort of divine reach in-and-down-and-out, for something so much more.
I want to feel like a branch, or even just a leaf on an ancient, gnarled and twisting tree, to feel like I'metched into some significant landmark that stands for century on century, you know the ones that speak ancient truths and mysteries, even though they just stand there silent. Monastic ruins, castles, hidden fortresses, now overgrown, once bustling, now sleeping, but still remaining.
The deep crying out too deep is the ‘something’ in me that wants to be connected to ‘place’, to ‘home’, to be ‘known’.
It overwhelms me at times, the longing. Why is it? Is it right? Are they simply the unformed places in me that are deficient and purely seeking to feel wanted, needed, significant?
Despite this longing, the desire for connection and beauty, for home and being known, I find myself disconnected. Disconnected from family, from my country of my origin, from feeling I am truly known.
In the practical, some could say my choices led me on the path that leaves me feeling this way, disconnected. It is true, my choices have led me to be right where I am, here, this place, this day. But, I also know that many of my choices were made while disconnected from myself, while not truly knowing whose I was, or where I belonged, I started disconnected. I went in search of simply feeling wanted. One step and one choice at a time, those choices and that path has led me here, it is true. Despite it all, I'm truly grateful for that lonely, rocky, windy, uphill path my choices have journied. I've grown on that, path, evolved on that path, I healed on that path.
Even still, after all these years of wilderness wanderings, I continue to search out the mysteries of my heart, the constant longing for home, and in doing that, I often still, very much feel that I am alone.
Driven mainly from feelings of being abandoned and rejected, not truly knowing that I am loved - as I am - who I am - how I am, and - where I am. I am still constantly searching, still constantly assessing. In most gathering, most conversation, in most of my encounters I am looking, I'm hoping for some sort of profound ‘affirming-my-worth’ type of connection, some thing that speaks to my heart and goes on to say, “Devina Rachel, this is where you belong, now you have found a place you can stay”.
I scour new towns, new communities, new villages, new visions, new dreams as if to seek signs that say “this is where you best fit”.
Silent repeating questions ring out: “Is this place for me”? “Do I have a space amongst these people”? “Is this my community”? “Could this be my hearts tribe’?
For years I was constantly looking for the grass that was greener, thinking that ‘home’ was just around the corner. The constant seeking felt like ‘my life adventure’, even though it all often left me feeling empty, unfulfilled and like there really was something wrong with the picture.
Those so called ‘adventures’, I've come to realise were just a ploy allowing me to try to realise, contextualise, to imagine myself in all sorts of possible scenarios of life, mixing and matching this part with that, looking for the perfect combination of factors, a magical key to unlock the rusted-over latch to my deep desires, something that would shine a neon light spelling out “Welcome Devina Rachel, this is your place, these are your people”.
The desire for something more, the desire for deeper connections, friends who share in the desire for bubbling rivers, starry night skies, crackling fires, mountains, for deep green overgrown valleys, for dappled sunlight shimmering through blossom trees, for a beauty that embraces and pulls me and ‘us’ into the land - the sense of being established ‘in’, while also being woven ‘with’.
These overwhelming desires truly leave me feeling liminal, like I'll always be in-between places, between homes, between spaces. These unfulfilled feelings are like being seen, while still very much being unknown.
I'm trusting for hope to find its place in my heart, to ease these ongoing longings for connection, to settle the wrestle in me to get back to some version of Eden, not so I cease to desire it any more, but so I can appreciate all that I do have, before reaching for more.
