An Alchemy of Mud and Mystery

Wondering about longing, spirituality, and belonging

Recently, I was sitting with my coffee and my journal wondering about longing.

I wondered about what I long for: love, safety, belonging, joy, peace, meaning. All the usuals. But more than that, I wondered about where and how I was trying to find them. And I realized this question was living in me, through me, in a way I had not been fully aware of.

The kind of spirituality I was offered as a child taught me that the answer to my longing lived in the other world. I thought of the saying that “we all have a god-shaped hole in our hearts.” I don’t like this saying. At all. It seems dangerous.

I’ve seen it be used to minimize, dismiss, and bypass our very real human experiences. I’ve seen it be used to justify violent neglect of our wild and precious lives. For some of us, it invokes a very rigid idea of this mystery we sometimes call god, and in that way may feel like spiritual violence.

And yet, I think it came to mind because I know that something of what I long for is otherworldly, that longing both draws me deeper into my humanity and points me toward mysteries beyond my human experience.

I sense this deep in my bones: Longing needs to touch and meet my earthly life and cannot be filled with transcendence and, on the other hand, even if every earthly thing I long for were offered to me, I would still be left longing.

I’ve seen the dangers of trying to satiate our longings with spirit or mystery alone ~ to attempt to transcend this body and this earth and to rise above it all into some kind of untainted spiritual glory. I’ve also known the dangers of trying to satiate our longings with only what is earthly, material, and temporary ~ I’ve seen the shattering that comes with trying to hold something vast and wild in a tiny glass vial.

I have known the kind of spirituality that helps me escape being here and takes me away from my body and earth. And now, more and more, I know a kind of spirituality that makes it possible for me to relax enough to deeply and fully be here.

It is an alchemy of mud and mystery.

And in this alchemical dance, longing is a powerful compass.

Like a web of lighthouses, longing calls me into many worlds and reminds me relentlessly of my belonging in them all. Longing reminds me that I belong to mud and mystery. I am made of both.

I want to be fully human and deeply experience this aspect of Nature. I want to continually and fiercely say YES to being here. And, also, I am filled with longing for the invisible mysteries swirling in the space between protons and electrons and at the center of every black hole.

I am body and dream.

I am bone and story.

I am water and spirit.

I am flesh and I am imagination.

I am an alchemy of worlds.

An alchemy of mud and mystery.

Longing is not an emptiness to be filled. Longing is an opening that keeps me in communion with my belonging.

So, that morning as I finished my first cup of coffee and prepared to put down my pen, make breakfast, and feed the animals, I breathed into this alchemy of mud and mystery. For me, it is not easy to dance this alchemical dance. But I love it.

May we find a deep exhale:

We are mud and mystery.

We are already home.