Mutual Longing

[Wish I knew the photographer so I could credit!]

I never thought of “longing” as a powerful force in my life, much less giving in to its yearning, searching nature as a way to move my life toward “higher possibilities of love and truth” — until I was introduced to Patricia Albere’s spiritual work. “Longing arises,” she explained, “from a dimension that is deeper than your individual sense of self — deeper than your soul — deeper than just personal needs and desires. It arises from the unknown and comes through us into this world.” Following this impulse, when I really leaned in, not denying the longing, I was drawn into this welcoming, transforming, melting-away space — not unlike the experience when I lose myself in the wild of Mother Nature’s world — as if I was being lifted by the pull of something, something serene and loving. I learned to pay close attention because “when you begin to feel the longing, you can sense that it’s a two-way affair,” Albere added. “Something is longing for you and through you, and that is where the immense power (and beauty) lie.”

When first participating in Patricia Albere’s work with a group online, there was this immediate awareness of something dissolving: ego, personal identity, that “I know, I know” voice, even needing to know what it all meant. It felt “beyond thinking.” It was clear that something original and vital was at work here and I wanted to be fully available to experience what was calling me forth — gently nudging me to surrender to my own longing. Any individual identity felt like an obstacle to the deep connection with another so generously available in this expansive space. In the words of songwriter-sage Leonard Cohen: “The less there was of me, the happier I got.”

Of course, this level of surrender is not always easy. We can be so committed to our individual awakening that we find it difficult, even a bit disorienting to put aside our egoic self, our personality, our “structured self,” to be able to connect deeply with another, allowing for some other possibility, no separateness — this new vision for mutual awakening. And it takes practice, together — no solo journey here! The moment I let go of that protective, personal “identity” I’d wrapped myself in, something precious and intimate appeared, like a homecoming, something “experienced as multidimensional, finite, and eternal,” as Albere described — a “shared unity.” Collaborative, nurturing, generous…lovingly mutual.

This potential of interconnectedness and oneness as an experience “is now emerging for more and more of us at the frontier of human development,” Albere wrote. However, “this new dimension of love and more evolved consciousness needs our surrender and our wholehearted cooperation.” And in the growing Mutual Awakening global community, we are doing just that, readily surrendering to this possibility — like an “evolutionary impulse that calls us to a new order of love and relating.” What she calls “evolutionary relationships.” “The reason we are able to influence each other so deeply is that our souls are innately permeable to one another,” as Patricia Albere said. “While each of us are distinct individuals, we also interface with each other in a field of unlimited possibilities.”

We live in a “network of mutuality” is how the Reverend Dr. King saw it.

“In a real sense all life is inter-related,” wrote Martin Luther King, Jr. “All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be,” King explained. “This is the inter-related structure of reality.” And Mother Nature shows us the wisdom of “inter-related” relationships at the heart of all life.

When experiencing this “network of mutuality,” these “evolutionary relationships,” as Dr. King and Patricia Albere expressed, I imagined the intertwining roots in a forest: connecting, communicating; symbiotic, “in search of merging,” as author Robert Macfarlane mused about his exploration of the forests’ underground. Mother Nature reveals how everything is interconnected and interdependent. Take mycorrhizas — the supportive network of partnerships formed by trees and fungi underground, communicating a life-force language within a dark, but lively ecosystem. “It is itself a collaboration or entanglement,” explained Macfarlane in Underland: A Deep Time Journey. “The relationship between mycorrhizal fungi and the plants they connect is ancient — around 450 million years old — and largely one of mutualism.” (I love the expansive feel of “mutualism.” There is a sense that nothing or no one is left out…we all belong, we’re all intimately connected.) “Mutualism,” Macfarlane continued, “is a subset of symbiosis in which there exists between organisms a prolonged relationship that is interdependent and reciprocally beneficial.” (Sounds like a lovely way to live!)

[Wish I knew the photographer/artist so I could credit!]

Forest ecologist Dr. Suzanne Simard shares that human beings still have much to learn from “the beautiful structures and finely adapted languages of the forest network” that live in the earth just beneath our feet. The depictions from her book, Finding the Mother Tree, show how this “bustling community” of roots and superfine, thread-like hyphae — an “underground social network” — links it all, gives it life, and sustains the humanity living above it. “When one tugs at a single thing in nature,” John Muir said, “he finds it attached to the rest of the world.”

But humanity got disconnected, we forgot about “mutualism,” we lost ourselves. And this disconnect from our living, breathing universe has created a world in brutal disarray. The echoes of Rachel Carson are now penetrating our consciousness: “In nature nothing exists alone.” At last we’re being awakened by a fresh, original, more evolved energy that is moving into our world. We’re reconnecting with this “network of mutuality,” truly seeing the other. We are now becoming aware how our attention on our individual growth (once key inside an old paradigm where we were ‘finding our authentic self’) simply reenforced our separateness from each other, taking us further away from the oneness that visionaries have long predicted. We now see that underneath all of our blustering, noisy personal identity — structured to keep us separate and strained, with egos intact — there is a mutual longing to connect deeply with the genuineness of another; that unique, even divine quality we each brought into the world to express. Take a deep breath and just listen to the stillness in the connection. Here we are drawn into something intimate, shared, expansive; here we are summoned by a universal love.

Metaphysics weighs in. We have entered a new paradigm of human consciousness, the Ninth Wave of creation, as Dr. Carl J. Calleman defines it, opening a “new evolutionary force.” Here, “we are breaking free of the isolated bubble of the ego…learning surrender.” There is no separation — within ourselves, from others, from nature, or from the Divine — “we see the unity in all things.” In this “Era of Fulfillment” that calls forth our highest potential, Calleman continues, it becomes clear “that everything is connected with everything else.” Here, “unity consciousness” is not only possible, but it is the “destiny of humanity.” And here, as Patricia Albere teaches, we cross a threshold into shared oneness, into a future already present, a new future where the “primary force is love,” calling to those ready to hear. Another visionary, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, said it this way a hundred years earlier: “Love alone can bring us to the threshold of another universe.”

Robert Macfarlane’s experiences in nature prompted his remembrance of something he called “long love.” When researching for his Underland book, he enjoyed a moment lying on the forest floor on top of the intricate, relational network of intertwined life below and looking up into a different — but just as miraculously intelligent — relationship of gently overlapping tree branches and crowns, interacting, naturally sharing the space together. “I remember,” he shared, “something Louis de Bernières has written about a relationship that endured into old age: ‘we had roots that grew toward each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.’” This story evoked a personal recollection for Macfarlane about his own marriage; he wrote:

As someone lucky to live in a long love, I recognize that gradual growing-towards and subterranean intertwining; the sharing of both happiness and pain. I think of good love as something that roots, not rots, over time, and of the hyphae that are weaving through the ground below me, reaching out through the soil in search of mergings. Theirs, too, seems to me then a version of love’s work.

“Long love,” “good love,” “love’s work” — Macfarlane’s expressions reach deep into our hearts, releasing the longing held there. Is “long love” what we’re all after in this brief human lifetime? Connecting in relationships of all stripes, short or long, but long on love. “Good love” — giving it, receiving it, it all becomes one…a source of happiness, like a joyful recognition. Doing “love’s work”…the reason we’re all here, together.

I fall in love when I’m in the thick of nature, nurtured by the dirt I’m walking on, the air that carries me, the smells that take me to new places and old dreams — dreams ready for restoration — surrendering to the yearning within them. I’m wrapped in this mutual love affair. The longed-for sanctuary is open and welcoming and holy, filled with a lit beauty “in search of mergings.” “Long love,” “good love,” “love’s work”…all that we need to experience from above and below and beyond, connecting within and through this interweaving of all relationships in this new universe together. We merge with the longing that keeps moving us toward mutual love — full and rich and ripe with life, vibrating with the frequency of the Divine. ~

[Deep appreciation to Patricia Albere, Leonard Cohen, The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert Macfarlane, Dr. Suzanne Simard, John Muir, Rachel Carson, Dr. Carl J. Calleman, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and Louis de Bernières for their words of connection and love.]