No, I’m talking about desire for anything. The simplest things.
I hope most of you haven’t had quite as extreme a
journey as mine in this area, but perhaps you may resonate to some degree or
another with one more area of self-editing: the erasing of desires almost
before you even have a chance to feel them.
I’m not going to try to describe or explain all the
threads I am untangling in this area, but in a nutshell, I’ve been living in
Law of Attraction hell. Who knows where
it starts…but the perfect storm of feelings of lack, loss of a sense of a benevolent Divine, and misalignment with one’s
real self, can wreak havoc on desire.
Early in your adulthood, you may think, “wow, that’s a nice coat” and
buy it, but between student loans and only a modest salary, such purchases
start to seem misguided. So you start to
train yourself, upon walking into nice department stores, only to buy things
that are on sale. As things deteriorate,
you only buy things on sale occasionally.
Then, you stop going to nice department stores entirely, and only to the
low end ones. Then, you rarely shop even
in those stores, relying on consignment shops and hand-me-downs from friends
(God bless them!) Catalogues? Forget about it!
I’ve long since stopped receiving any, because the companies gave up on
me. It was literally unbearable for me
to look at certain catalogues, because it didn’t matter whether items were
$19.95 or $199.95, they were out of my price range. I trained myself eventually not to even see beautiful clothes or jewelry or
household goods, much less to desire them.
And, of course, the less you see or desire these things, the less you
care whether you are part of the financial equation that might “earn” you
enough to buy more (someday I’ll talk more about that equation, but not today.)
For over 20 years, my wardrobe has consisted of
trousers and a cotton shirt. Sure, I
usually own several of both, but it has become a uniform of sorts, much as I
wore uniforms at my private schools in high school. At any given moment, I have usually owned
three pairs of footwear: sandals for summer, shoes for winter, and one pair of heavy
snow boots. I get my hair cut at
discount salons, buy almost no cosmetics and the very basic pharmacy items
(deodorant, dental care, shampoo), and, what?, the odd book or journal or impulse
item. My only concession to vanity has
been earrings. I rarely purchase them,
but friends and family seem to have figured out my slightly quirky taste in
drop earrings, and I love my little collection.
If, and I truly believe Abraham-Hicks and other authors
on this, the energy of the Universe, of life itself, is desire (the energy of growth, change, forward-movement), then I guess in a sense I have been a walking dead
woman. Well, let’s just say, “hibernating,”
just barely breathing enough in the cave to stay alive. Oh sure, I congratulated myself that I could
survive on less than anyone I know (and often with the help of friends, my
gratitude for which I can’t even express.) I congratulated myself that I was
out Buddha-ing the Buddhists, and self-mortifying better than all the saints
combined. People talk about leaving a
small footprint – I was leaving nearly no footprint. I focused on natural beauty, and tried to be
as good of an outdoorswoman as my friends in my northerly US homes, but it was all bogus. I don’t much
like the out-of-doors. If this is all
about telling the truth, that’s the truth.
Last year, when I was in Oxford, I visited the
Ashmolean Museum. I wandered around the
entire museum, spending the most time in the medieval room. But at some point I started to cry. For years, between living in rural areas and
not being able to afford the entrance fees to major museums when I was in a city, I rarely
experienced great art in person. To
suddenly be in the presence of so much of the kind of beauty that I resonate
with, in such a confined space – on the heels of having seen great sacred
spaces such as St. Paul’s Cathedral, King’s College Chapel, and Gloucester
Cathedral – was utterly overwhelming.
As I go through this process of rebirth, a curious
thing is happening. OK, I still can’t
seem to let even the smallest “desire” out of the box without quashing it. Even a trip to a discount store sends me into an anxiety attack. So I’m starting really, really modestly. I’m just trying to casually ask myself
open-ended queries. “Gosh, what would it
be like to get my hair cut at a really good salon? What would it be like to wear a beautiful
dress again? What would it be like to
wear (egad!) stockings? Nice shoes? Pearls, or expensive jewelry? What would it be like to own a masterpiece,
not have to paint one myself? What would
it be like to have a lovely home?” It
still terrifies me to want such things openly, because I can almost hear the
message “you can’t afford that” and the click-click-click of desires being shut
down. So by gently asking myself
how these things would feel, and
vaguely experiencing a warm, happy feeling, I’m trying (as a starting point) to just allow a tiny little source of oxygen into the cave, and to start
breathing that oxygen in. It is the
oxygen of life for me, the desire to be surrounded by (and create) a certain kind of beauty and sense of abundance, and not breathing it in brought me
close to death. I can’t even begin to know how it will happen, but at least this blurry image of me looking
gorgeous and surrounded by beautiful art and architecture gives me a starting
point as I look forward to Act Two!
