From the Bud to the Bloom

On the Nature of Change, Desire, Fear, and Creatvity

Happy Spring! I hope you are enjoying a glorious return to life wherever you are. Below are some blooms at the Royal Botanical Garden, Edinburgh, which I visited last weekend.

I’m happy to say that I’m back in Scotland, where we’ve finally have had a couple of spring-like days. It’s hard to describe how I feel here compared to other places I’ve been since my journey started in September. I’ve been to so many beautiful places, but at the end of my stay, I have always been ready to move on. Edinburgh was different. I knew as soon as I stepped off the plane that it was different. And within two weeks I knew I wouldn’t want to leave. So I’m back for two months and have decided to apply for UK residency so that I can stay long-term. When I think about it, it’s hard to believe that I’ve found a place that I want to call home. But when I’m not thinking about it and just living my life here, it makes perfect sense.

Having reached this juncture of wanting to settle down, I’ve been thinking about how far I’ve come on my journey. Every once in a while, I’ll think, If my self a year or two ago could see me now! I intentionally stripped myself of any specific expectations for my trip, just the intention to remain as open as possible and to meet new people and to have new experiences. The result has been beyond my imaginings—because I couldn’t really imagine where it all might lead.

In a selfie I took recently I noticed how big and bright my smile was. I suppose that is where I was hoping my travels might lead me: to a sense of well-being and the ability to feel true joy again.

“We rise transformed, not healed or whole again.”—Carly Mountain, Descent and Rising: Women’s Stories and the Embodiment of the Inanna Myth

I once told my therapist that I felt like a broken plate. I felt shattered into a million pieces, and I didn’t know how to glue them back together again. She quibbled with my metaphor. Broken, cracked, or whole are rather reductive ways to think of ourselves, she said. She preferred the metaphor of a garden, with the idea being that you can till your soil and decide what to plant and how to nurture the plants you want to grow. It’s a lovely idea, although I’ve always had a rather brown thumb. I wasn’t entirely certain I could ensure that even metaphorical flowers would survive the summer.

I’ve been going back and reading my old journals to look at where I was at about this time a year or two ago. Here is what I wrote in mid-April 2022: “I’m starting to feel like a mosaic, made of shards and fragments—something beautiful and whole from what felt like a shattered plate. What shattered was my illusion of wholeness (or unity). And if I’m made up of these fragments, arranged in new configurations now, the mortar that is holding them all together is the infinite soul and unconditional love I’ve uncovered inside myself.” (I can talk more about these inner resources I’ve found in a future letter, if you’re interested.)

If I go back another year, to 2021, then I see in my journal the seeds of this journey—the intense, often overwhelming, longing I felt for something new, for transformation. That is where it all begins. For me, it was very painful, and I had to learn to sit with it and accept it. I couldn’t yet articulate what it was that I wanted, not in any specific way, but just recognizing and accepting the wanting opened the first door from which the rest of the journey unfolded.

The issue of longing and wanting has been with me ever since. Typically, when a nagging yearning comes up, we tend to push it away. We distract and numb ourselves with our screens, alcohol, shopping, spending time with friends—whatever takes it away or allows us to forget it for a little bit. But then it’s still there and we have to push it away all over again. So I’ve been trying to understand how to be with it, how to move through it, how to accept its presence in my life.

“Blessed be the longing that brought you here

And quickens your soul with wonder.”—John O’Donohue, “For Longing”

You won’t get far in your search to understand longing without confronting the Buddhist idea that desire, wanting, and longing are supposed to be the root of all suffering. Freud had similar views, not to mention Christianity. But trying to rid ourselves of these feelings, I slowly learned, is only another kind of avoidance, a denial of our true natures. One of my favorite Buddhist teachers, Mark Epstein, who is also a Western-trained psychotherapist, wrote a whole book about this: Open to Desire: The Truth About What the Buddha Really Thought. He thinks the Western translation of the Buddha’s noble truths as “Life is suffering and the cause of suffering is desire” is a gross over-simplification. (Note: I haven’t read the book, only heard him talk about it in various places.)

Epstein points out that we can never fully satisfy our desires, and that is the point at which they cause suffering. But it is important to keep them alive, for that is how we grow. Without desire—which he describes as the longing to connect, to others and to our true nature—there is no life, no love, no spirituality. It is the source of everything, really. Without it, we stagnate, we get stuck, we stop moving forward. This is where I was when suddenly my desires came raging forth, after a very long period of repression.

Epstein also suggests that desire is not something we can control but we can learn from it, particularly how not to cling or grasp. Clinging and grasping, trying to possess and hold onto something we want, is the real source of suffering because, as the Buddha says in another of the noble truths, nothing is permanent. We must accept this basic fact of life. Desire, not its fulfillment, is the essence of life. So contained within desire is necessarily disappointment. You can’t have one without the other. Letting go of the need to perfectly satisfy our desires, yet allowing the desires to still be there and pull us forward, that is really living.

I’ve heard Epstein liken the nature of healthy desire to the Japanese garden design principle of miegakure, or “hide and reveal.” As you stroll around the garden, you never see the whole thing. There may be a waterfall that you catch glimpses of, but you can’t stand in front of it and take it all in at once. (Below is a Japanese garden at the Royal Botanical Garden that I strolled through last weekend.)

I also find this a useful way of imagining ourselves, to return to my therapist’s idea of the self as garden. If the self is a garden, it is most accurately a Japanese stroll garden, of which we can get only glimpses. We may try to piece them together in our minds, but we can never grasp all of the self at once. Another part of my journey has been collecting bits and pieces of my “self,” adding them to the mosaic I am creating, which itself cannot magically constitute a new whole. It is, necessarily, an ongoing project, maybe more of a winding river or path, one that has no beginning and no ending, at least not ones that I can see.

I realized two years ago, as I thought about the idea of myself as a mosaic formed from the shards of my once-whole plate, that the plate that had shattered wasn’t really me. It was my ego-self, the self I had created in order to interact in the world. It was the me that I presented to the world and which I had mistakenly believed was all that I was. I had forgotten all about this insight until I was rereading my journals.

Then today, as I was rooting around for an article I could share with you by Mark Epstein on desire, I found this piece, in which he talks about how the ego starts to shatter in the face of desire. He uses the phrase “conditioned self,” which is essentially the ego. He writes,

“One of the primary reasons we fear desire so much is that it puts us in conflict with who we thought we were. The self that is established early in life in response to the needs of parents, family, and friends is not necessarily the self whose voice comes from within. . . . The conditioned self represents the survival strategy of a child dependent on the goodwill of parents, teachers, and family. It is created to be liked. Because the conditioned self starts to break down under pressure from the desiring self, we may be afraid of naming our desire even to ourselves, afraid of allowing ourselves to desire for fear of becoming suddenly unacceptable and alone, unsure of how we will be received. Desire can seem very dangerous.”

He also talks about how this drive to please others is particularly conditioned into women. Lots of great stuff here!

Another way of thinking about desire that has been very useful to me comes from the Trappist monk Thomas Merton:

"There is in us an instinct for newness, for renewal, for a liberation of creative power. We seek to awaken in ourselves a force which really changes our lives from within. And yet the same instinct tells us that this change is a recovery of that which is deepest, most original, most personal in ourselves. To be born again is not to become somebody else, but to become ourselves.”—Thomas Merton, Love and Living

Although Merton doesn’t use the word, the instinct he is talking about is essentially desire (in his case spiritual desire), which leads us not just into change but essentially back to ourselves. I keep hearing this about what Jessie Harrold calls “radical transformation”—that we are not transforming into someone new but returning to our true selves, the desiring self inside of the shell (or shield) of conformity that we have adopted in order to fit into this world.

[From the bud to the bloom, also at the Royal Botanical Garden:]

Merton also reminds us that this desiring self is the source of creativity. One of my favorite parts of Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic is where she talks about how one of the most basic human needs is to create. We are practically born with crayons in our hands. (The passage comes early in the book, as I recall). But that desire, that life force, is shamed out of us when someone tells us we can’t draw or we shouldn’t sing too loud or we should focus on more practical things, like making money.

At the heart of transformation is not only longing, but also fear. The two seem to enjoy hanging out together. As Epstein points out, desire is something we fear. And Gilbert writes about how fear is always with us when we sit down to write. It’s a passenger in the car, she says, but under no circumstances should it be allowed to take the wheel. There is wonderful passage about this in Big Magic.

Jessie Harrold, whom I’m working with as a life coach, told me that creativity and the amygdala are at odds. Creativity is the drive inside us that pushes us into new territories, and the amygdala is the lizard part of our brain, the oldest, deepest part that stores the basic hard-wiring we need to survive. That is where fear lives. We need fear. It helps keep us safe. But it does so by shutting down our prefrontal cortex, which is where creativity and critical thinking live. Essentially, the amygdala keeps us safe by pulling us back into conformity with the status quo. As psychologist Jena Field explains, “our amygdala evolved to be hypersensitive to novelty, uncertainty, and rejection in order to survive.” (Her essay is a great explanation of how the amygdala thwarts our creative drive. Just ignore the goofy graphics at the beginning.)

The good news, Field writes, is that “a stronger force can override our fear of failure: our fear of regret. Regret because we missed an opportunity, didn’t take the chance, didn’t believe in ourselves, and didn’t overcome our fear of failure (!) can actually motivate us to take the creative leap.” For me, it was the death of my much-younger brother in April 2021 that catapulted me over fears of failure into fears of regret. His life had ended much too soon. (He was 41.) Given my own health issues in recent years, I knew that at 51 it was now or never if I was going to change my life.

“Intuition pulls us forward. Then the mind comes in and says, ‘But you may not like it.’”—Christine Hassler

As this letter suggests, I’ve found many wonderful resources that have helped me along my winding journey, wherever it is I’m heading. I’d like to share one more with you, a podcast episode about fear and making changes in our lives.

Pursuing our desires means taking risks, sometimes big risks. One of my favorite life coaches/self-help gurus is Christine Hassler. She has a podcast with hundreds of coaching sessions. It is amazing how she can zero in on someone’s issue and give them ways to approach it and work through it—all in about a half hour. This one is great for thinking about what it means to take risks—and the costs of not taking them.

Hassler discusses fears about change, and also about how life can come along and make change for us. It’s better to choose our own change. Adulthood zaps the courage out of us because we follow a formula, she says, and our minds get used to automatically going to the negative possible outcomes. She also discusses tapping into the warrior woman inside of us who can handle change, or simply remembering the brave girl or young woman we used to be. This has been huge for me, realizing that it was only part of me that was afraid of change and that there were other parts of me that were clearly aching for it.

Perhaps you are also undergoing a change in your life. Even the smallest changes can be stressful. I’m always delighted to hear from you about what’s going on in your life, what you are thinking about, and if any part in my letter has resonated with you. If there is anything in particular that you’d like me to cover in future letters, or a type of resource you’re looking for, let me know. I’m gathering together the books, articles, podcasts, etc. that I have found useful in my journey, and I’ll be sharing more in upcoming letters.

I hope you are doing well and look forward to catching up with you again soon!

All the best,

Anne