Such a Word: Yearning. Such a Deep Chasm. What an Incredible Gift.

This is me, three days after melanoma surgery last September. My tactic in 2012, after my melanoma surgery, was to shut off yearning.

I read the prompt from Meredith today for AugustMoon13  – all about yearnings: what did I yearn for last January, what do I yearn for now, what has changed? Or something sort of like that. I actually read it and closed it, read it and closed it, read it and closed it, which started my repetitive phrasing here and the search for quotes from women writers I respect.

 

This is actually what Meredith wrote:

                                Have you developed new yearnings so far this year? Let go of old ones?

Yearning.

 “Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

Yearning.

“Why is love intensified by absence?”
― Audrey Niffenegger

Yearning.

“How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm. To rest and trust; to give your soul in confidence: I need this, I need someone to pour myself into.”
― Sylvia Plath

Such a word.

“I didn't know then what I wanted, but the ache for it was palpable.”
― Sue Monk Kidd

Such a word.

“I am tired, Beloved,
of chafing my heart against
the want of you;
of squeezing it into little inkdrops,
And posting it.”
― Amy Lowell

Such a word.

“Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there’s no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It’s loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.”
― Margaret Atwood

Yearning is one of those words that is so deep – it is one of those words that makes a slow, careful incision in my chest, intentionally scoops out my innards and then leaves me hollow inside but all stitched up, almost like new again.

I found a quote from a writer who is not a woman and it was as if a hole was punched into that hollow shell.

“Unopened gifts contain hope.
”
― Jarod Kintz

Maybe this is why I have pushed my yearnings away or haven’t chosen to recognize them as such. If I open the gifts of my yearning, the hope, my warped belief taunts, will vaporize.

It is so interesting that AugustMoon13 arrives right on the year anniversary of my melanoma and very close to the two year anniversary of the darkest day of my life, September 30, 2011. On that same day, a giant sequoia fell along the trail of 100 Giants at the Sequoia National Monument.

My hypothesis is my heart was squeezed flat by my circumstance at that same moment that giant tree fell.

Because of my melanoma, I stepped aside from a lot of my usual activities and cocooned with myself and my children. I stopped my involvement in theater, I stopped working with coaching clients, I stopped teaching almost all of my classes.

Here I am, writing at Workhouse Arts Center. This was once a notorious prison where suffragists were force fed and held illegally. Now, it is a space for artists to thrive.

This choice allowed me the space to if not examine my choices with a searchlight and a magnifying glass, it did allow me to gently watch the unopened boxes accumulate.

 

That’s where I am now. Sitting here, surrounded by unopened gifts of hope which I now know will not vaporize, just like hope will not vaporize for you, either.

The quotes from all these glorious women writers appear to be written with the yearnings aimed at another human being to complete her in some way. My yearnings are not for another, my yearnings are for me to come even more deeply into myself and to continue to examine, gently, what I offer the world in me simply being me using the gifts of my unique circumstances and my one-of-a-kind way of looking at the world.

I look at the last quarter of 2013 with a completely different perspective I looked at the last quarter of 2012.

In 2012 I yearned to surrender and retreat, to not be compelled to be responsible to anyone or anything beyond myself and my children.

In the last quarter of 2013, I am looking toward the “What can I do with what I have in the circumstances I find myself in?”

I am facing at least one more surgery. I don’t want to retreat this time nor do I want to surrender nor do I want to fight. I want to stand, strong, with gifts opened and unopened, knowing each gift of yearning offers me and my world more light and love and hope and authenticity than I can put into words right now.

 

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