Exile and Finding Your Way Back

Go Your Own Road by Alltelleringet on Deviant Art







Continuing to listen to David Whyte's The Three Marriages, and today's message that stuck was about feeling seperated--even exiled--from what feeds your passions and speaks to your soul. He discussed how sometimes that experience increases one's desire to know and write about it...i.e. Jack Kerouac, "who never owned a car and kept going home to mother" wrote so passionately about the freedom of the open road. 

 

All this hit me in the context of my work: I am a total Jung Geek. I graduated from an amazing Jungian oriented school, then was ejected out of that womb-like place into the cold and harsh world. (Oh, the pain!)Oh sure, I have been through periods of doubt, wondering if, indeed, it was all just a lot of self-indulgent bullshit, but ultimately, I keep coming back to it and feeling even more certain that there is something really important there. (Notwithstanding the eye rolling of certain friends who have moved beyond Jung to non-dual awareness, etc....WHATever.) So, that being said, I have spent my entire professional career working in an environment that primarily values a very different approach to therapy. VERY. Without going into shop talk, let's just say I was a little bit of a fish out of water. And always wondering what the heck I was doing there, gasping for breath. What I was doing was slowly but surely reconciling and even integrating two very different approaches to the human psyche. AND, pertinent to the stuff in paragraph one, longing to return to my true love someday. That longing kept me reading and studying, taking workshops and seminars, doing my own work with Jungian flair--so to speak. And maybe it preserved my love for that path, precisely because I have been somewhat exiled from it. I have recently found an ability to bring the richness and wisdom of that path into the harried, crisis-oriented, overworked/underpaid world of non-profit mental health.

 

What's my point here? For anyone feeling despair that you cannot do the work you love, feel that you are trapped by young children, mortgages, debt, etc. (do you hear me singing chick and undead girl?), nurture your love and longing for what your true work is in whatever way you can. If you don't know what your true work is, nurture whatever gives you joy (as opposed to pleasure--so I'm not talking about MAC). Even if it is small potatoes now, it can stay alive inside you and feed you when you are being starved to death by whatever system is grinding you beneath it's wheels. (yes, I can be a little dramatic...deal with it.) Small potates can be very tasty. Eventually, you will see the opening and be able to walk through it to get to the really big potatoes. (hmmm...sometimes I choose a metaphor and just run with it, even when it is not that great...)

 

So. here is the rest of the Whyte poem from yesterday, which speaks perfectly to this whole thing...about moving toward what you love in small ways when the big ways are not visible or possible right now.

START CLOSE IN

Start close in,

don't take the second step

or the third,

start with the first

thing

close in,

the step you don't want to take.

Start with

the ground

you know,

the pale ground

beneath your feet,

your own

way of starting

the conversation.

Start with your own

question,

give up on other

people's questions,

don't let them

smother something

simple.

To find

another's voice

follow

your own voice,

wait until

that voice

becomes a

private ear

listening

to another.

Start right now

take a small step

you can call your own

don't follow

someone else's

heroics, be humble

and focused,

start close in,

don't mistake

that other

for your own.

Start close in,

don't take the second step

or the third,

start with the first

thing

close in,

the step you don't want to take.

David Whyte ~

from River Flow: New and Selected Poems