Get Achingly Attached!
Lessons taught in Taos
In my workshops I often hear whispers of a participant who’d previously been in one or more of my offerings telling another who had never been with me: ‘Don’t get attached to what we are doing, she will make you change it’. She, refers to me. I time and again wish I didn’t, as my heart truly hurts hearing this, and in the same time, I welcome the opportunity, once again, to correct the pivotal misunderstanding, and say: Oh, please, please get attached. Wholeheartedly. And then I ask a few rhetorical questions, in hope to clarify my stance. So was the case in the retreat I just came back from a couple of days ago, in Taos, in the high desert, in the ‘Land of Enchantment’, New Mexico, where attachment to place is strong, most evident, and inevitable.
And so I ask:
Do you not get attached to a place knowing full well you will have to leave soon and go back to your ‘own land’, perhaps less enchanted?
Do you not fall in love with a person, remembering how your heart was crushed last time you gave your heart away so generously?
Do you not fall in love knowing full well that no love is perfect, that physical love ends, by death, yours or another? Or by separation?
Do you not engage in intimacy and closeness, a lingering kiss, in fear you might be possibly left in your bed in the crack of dawn, heavyhearted?
Do you not believe wholeheartedly that you belong with another, one hundred percent, also knowing in utter certainty that eventually you won’t?
Do you not raise children understanding that one day they’ll leave, and after that they’ll keep on leaving, and leaving, and leaving some more?
Do you not raise them to not need you, knowing that one day they’ll finally, and hopefully learn and actually no longer need you?
Do you not go on a quest to know yourself or another, knowing there is no way possible to fully attain such knowledge? Or improve greatly?
Do you not go to sleep, knowing you’ll have to wake up tomorrow? Do you not eat once more? Do you not shower again? Do you not make peace?
Do you not start anything knowing full well that everything ends? That everything changes? That despair and forgetfulness are imminent?
Do you not get wild yourself witnessing wild poppies in multiple colors, knowing their green lacy leaves will be beige or even brown tomorrow?
Do you not take in the flamboyant petals, inhale their intoxicating scents through your nostrils, allowing sticky yellow powder to latch onto the same nostrils?
In fear it’ll all evaporate in thin air a couple seconds later? And the buzz of creatures with fluttering wings will disappear as the sun goes down?
Do you not swim naked with pulsating jellyfish knowing they may be dangerous, that they might sting you? That this is a fantasy, among many others?
Do you not speak of the dead with the one who is alive in fear that the said death no longer be only yours but also belong to someone else?
Do you not write a story in worry that the words you use to tell it may become another one, entirely, leaving your heart raw, and utterly exposed?
Do you not take your small boat into the open waters while afraid you might end up in a different shore entirely than the one you came from?
And last I ask them:
Do you not get attached to a piece of paper you glue on a surface, knowing it’ll be covered with another? May be even before the gluing medium had fully dried?
And I answer: Yes we do. Of course we do. We do get attached wholly. Fully. Time and again. As we are still alive, and that’s what we do best: Get attached!
Again
Again
Again
Again
As humans do!
As humans make!
As humans live!
As humans love!
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Orly
This. Orly! Yes. Over here, nodding vigorously. I am most definitely an attach-ling! And I am always desperately crushed in the letting go. Letting go and something changing is inevitable. I think. Attached or not. I go heart all in to life. I must be made of glue. I seek to not live half-assed but to be filled in, colored in, and outside the lines so full of everything; exuberant to the point of implosion. Sometimes it all happens so fast, in the time it takes to take a breath. I fall in love or am in awe of something, or a place, or a moment, and I get attached to it, knowing full well that it won't last. And most often, I have no choice but to move forward. In art, I see something I get excited about, and then in a flash, I have to try it, see what happens, and then see what happens next. In art, the one thing that is true, you can do all the things and get attached to them, the pieces in front of you that are everything you hoped they could be, and you allow them to stay that way, and then you do it all over again, it's different, and you take it farther and farther away from how it began. In art, there are always do-overs. Moments of leaping right off the edge. Of being brave and taking flight. You allow pages of a canvas or a thing to have its freedom and, in the act of creating and getting attached over and over again, but still you take the next step. It's like when a toddler take it's first step you want them to keep going, regardless how tentative the steps maybe because that is the moment you get attached to and will always remember or when a child learns how to ride a bike and you are holding the bike and running beside them and you want them to tell you to let go, and for you to know almost instinctively when to let go and again you get attached to that moment but you'd never want to stop their momentum. Living is getting attached and letting go. That is the eternal experience in having a full life; the opposite of that would be complete indifference, I think, and I know I couldn't live that way. Just my humble ruminations on your thoughts.
I love and feel this one so much, Orly. I grew up a military brat and moved a lot. My poor brother always eased carefully into the move, only to finally be ripped from what finally felt like home to him. I learned to abandon the notion of 'home' long ago. To hold on for dear life for as long as I could, and let myself be flung to the next wild mess life would have ready for me.
All in!