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Folklore is filled with the homeless. There are pilgrims and fugitives, persecuted teachers and those unfortunates fated to wander eternally as punishment or curse. Jesus said “Foxes have dens and birds have nests but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head” (Luke 9:58). Dionysus fled persecution from Greece to India to the ocean to the underworld. Sara-Kali was a wanderer and patron saint of wanderers, the Rom. Buddha left home in spectacular manner, abandoning wife, child and duty, never to return.

The words were a pained cry at the end of long email, and probably as hard to write as they were for me to read. 

“I can’t be who you want me to be. Please just give me some space.”

My friend was having a tough time, and though she’d made it clear she needed privacy, I had not been able to resist “checking in” through email, extending invitations. A few times.

Had I actually been pursuing a campaign, not of concern, but of subtle aggression?

“It’s a joy to be hidden, but a disaster not to be found.” —D.W. Winnicott

As children, we are vulnerable and know it. We hide from bullies, from punishment, from mockery and scorn. No matter how loving our parents, our lives are not in our control, and so we hide to stay safe. But we also hide in order to have our hiddenness acknowledged and respected. I remember running up to my room after some perceived slight, hoping that my mother would notice and worry over my disappearance, but not necessarily that she would find me and force me to talk about my feelings.

Pre-dawn yoga. As we flowed from pose to pose, the teacher’s words emerged from the rhythm of her own movement:  “Since we were in the womb…the universe has never stopped… supporting us. That’s why…we are still…alive.”

I knew in my bones it was true. Looking at the moon, wandering the woods, touching the earth, I find that truth again. When I disappoint myself, I know the trees and the sky do not judge. Good or bad, I am held in the web of life and known by an awareness that goes beyond my own. 

Five days of silence…my friends laughed in astonishment. I’d signed up for a retreat at a Buddhist centre in the woods: no reading, no writing, no talking, no eye contact. My friends were amused (amazed?) because they were familiar with just how much I could talk. But maybe not with why.

“I don’t have crushes.”

I accepted long ago that my friend has achieved a higher level of consciousness than I. But, seriously? No crushes?

“But when you were a teenager, surely…”

“Nope.”

It turned out the reason was not her high-mindedness, but her feeling that crushing on someone was unsafe, reviving an ancient, powerful fear of rejection.

That threw me. I crush early and often and am always vaguely ashamed of having done so. I certainly enjoy all the pleasures of a good crush, but I’d never considered that my crushes might reveal a belief in my own potential. Yet if a crush allows us to see the beauty in someone else, perhaps it also helps us see our own. At some level when we dream of someone, we also dream of who we can become in their eyes or at their side. 

I picked up the letter with a smile. Inside, I knew, would be a note of support from a yoga school friend. We’d written each other small appreciations during our training, planning to send them a few weeks after we got home. By then we might need something to encourage us as we returned to “normal life”. Hopefully, she’d said something nice.