The Homesick Spirit

Lessons on loneliness, love and death

I saw my friend Tom at his house a few weeks ago. He brewed us stovetop coffee and offered me toast. We sat in his living room and talked about herbs and gardening and love. Hours passed as quietly as water in a gentle stream and eventually we turned to conversations about darkness and this conversation provided me with a sort of Dawn.

In my previous blog I said I acquired many lessons from my dark winter, lessons I could not yet articulate. I needed to wait for the dust to settle, for my gentle and frost burned face to soften beneath the sun. The words came to me at Tom’s while the sky darkened and the scent of petrichor lifted into his bedroom window. I came home, sat under mid-afternoon lamplight, burned incense and smoked some hash while I collected my thoughts. Here is what I received:

My chronic pain is not entirely physical. Much is rooted in energy. My soul is bruised. I have always known this but now I understand it. My womb is a portal. It aches (agonises) uncharacteristically when I am heartbroken. It’s a theme, consistent and reliable. I hold it up to my ear like a shell and listen to what it has to say. It tells me not to be afraid of love and family. It asks me to want it. I say, okay womb, fine. But first you have to stop screaming. I like my life and if you don’t stop wanting what you don’t have we can’t be friends. I have plenty. I am abundant. I play the song ‘Stop Your Tears’ by Aldous Harding and it grieves, settles, comfortably empty, for the first time in my life. Then, it dances to ‘We’re Going To Be Friends’ by The White Stripes, a song that returned to my consciousness during a mad bonfire giggle with new friends. I am aligning. Following my pain like a road map.

Our spirit is physical like a song or a conversation or an idea. Emotions are the evidence that the spirit was awake. Trauma is the fist that meets the eye of the spirit. Hope is the firelight that meets the skin of the spirit. Love is the kiss that meets the lips of the spirit. There is a spirit mirror to all things corporeal. The spirit’s scars are spite or bitterness. The atmospheric headache is the experience of anxiety when walking into a room immediately after two people have had an argument.

I was much closer to death than life this winter. My Gods are more like melodies than archetypes. I worship spiders. I return to my knitting and become one.

Being sick has made me more animal. I am aware of what my animal body needs. As a teenager, I used to be all spirit. Of late, I have been all body. April, dear April, melted the winter from me and allowed me to conjoin. I am human again: body and soul.

The recent quiet has shown me that to be human is to be alone. Perhaps that is the point. But I do not think the spirit is mono. I don’t think that whatever we are before we are human is alone. Spiritual Oneness is a popular belief. I agree with it. I think this is why romantic love is so often governed by the merging of bodies. Two people get as close to being one as possible, so much so that we are inside each other’s bodies. Anything that can reach, reaches. Anything that can contain, contains. The product of this is a merged being: a child. It must be a great shock to finally become one entity and that entity is not you, but them. Separate. Being human can feel like one long reaching to relieve ourselves of our aloneness.

We love, love, love and never find ourselves in the same dream.

To quote Grandma Death, “every living creature on earth dies alone.” The conclusion for us all is an act we can only experience alone.

Earth is so isolated. As far as we know there is nothing else. This must mean something. We all feel alone. It is so significantly human that I have come to believe it is not something to avoid but something to experience. Perhaps we come into a human body to take a break from the Oneness. Death is a disintegration of body, a returning to before life. The spirit is unleashed, unformed and reconnects to the cosmic web after experiencing a true aloneness.

But the spirit is homesick. It cannot be denied its true form. And such is a love that is energised by the very fact it can never complete its fusion. This burning to become one creates desire, an undying flame. So perhaps death is that last gift, the final lonesome tunnel. We’ll transition, learn to let go of all that we came to love and grieve it until we are beyond human again and realise that what we are grieving is simply just the animal bodies of all things cosmic.

We cannot neglect the homesick spirit. We cannot deny it’s true form. Just as our organic bodies must consume the elements of its organic environment to survive - food, water, oxygen, warmth - the spirit must, too. And that is the music, the art, the literature, the intimate.

If our spirit is not nourished, seen, honoured and healed, it, too, will cripple.

So while we experience our aloneness we must keep our spirit healthy. We must share our human experiences to make the most of them. We must love and lose. We must paint and write. We must eat and drink. We must experience the organic soul. We must breathe a peaceful sigh in the knowledge that our home is far from here but we are not needed there for a while.

Things I liked this month:

Song: ‘The Spirit is Carnal’ by Nina Winder-Lind

Album: All of This is Chance by Lisa O’Neill

Book: The Farthest Shore by Ursula K. Le Guin

Film/TV: Season 1 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Poem: ‘Chenille’ by James Dickey