TMI alert. Do you ever have — wait, let me rephrase — I am having one of those spells where I’m just feeling disconnected from Self, from the love I know is always all around me. I’m traveling in a beautiful warm faraway place (“Thailand! Yay!”) and I realize I am so freaking lucky and blessed to have this opportunity, but in truth, inside, I am feeling rather lonely, disconnected, isolated.

I’ve been flying solo for so long (most of my life, in truth), and while that often works for me in profound ways — leaving me feeling free to connect authentically with the world around me as it presents itself, unrestrained by that which is not me — I am beginning to feel like it’s been too many years since I have felt held in the warm embrace of loving relationship, something/someone I could fully lean into, be fully vulnerable with. Flying solo means an awful lot of responsibility, taking care of myself at all times while often caring for others too, as I often deeply love to do. (Though as I re-read that, it seems to apply to flying partnered too, so I guess nobody gets out unscathed.)

And even though I truly feel amazingly connected to a world-wide tribe of incredible people and communities, and feel deeply blessed to travel the world offering my brain, my soul, my healing gifts and being touched and moved by people and life all around the planet — well, there’s a shadow side to all that, there really is.

When I return home — to my gorgeous, quiet forest retreat in the hills of rural New England — I often return to reckon with the reality of having been gone so long that, while I’ve been off nurturing and being nourished by my global community, I’ve missed big pieces of what makes life worth living: sharing with my oldest friends the marriage ceremonies of their children, the deaths of their parents, the daily comings and goings that comprise the foundation of so much of the ongoing depths and intimacies of life.

Oh, and by the way: here’s the to do list of homesteading stuff that’s been demanding your attention while you’ve been away. Welcome home! Um, cool, I’ll try to get to all that while I’m home this week, before the next tour or road trip starts. Ack!

Lately, I’ve been feeling again an inner yearning for partnership, at the deepest and most profound of levels. In recent years, that yearning has been tempered by the sheer brutality unleashed by/experienced with my former partner in the wreckage of my last attempt at doing that with one other person. The sad truth is, I don’t *entirely* trust people anymore to not be selfish pricks when the chips are down — I’ve seen it, felt it, too many times. I live and engage with the world with, in some ways, a deeply loving, open heart — but in ways difficult and mysterious to truly understand, I’m afraid my heart is much more protected, even closed, than I can even see, certainly more than I wish it was. And part of my own cross to bear is, I seem to pre-emptively protect myself in ways that are, no doubt, partially causative of the very isolation I am feeling in moments like these. What a pisser! How my own conscious or unconscious moves toward self-protection are partially (largely? entirely?) responsible for the very loneliness I most desire relief from. Fuck!

It’s like a perfect storm, all conspiring to hammer the point home. In a way I guess that’s great, because it does rather focus one on the work at hand. But still.

Anyway, I hope those for whom this was TMI peeled off paragraphs ago, and only those readers remain who might have a drop of compassion, not just for me but for all of us who wrassle with the inner tigers of loneliness, depression, despair. We are not alone, no matter what it sometimes feels like on days like these. Strange days indeed. Most peculiar, Mama.

Onward, through the fog…

stairway to heaven?