The Feeling We can Never Find

pausing to appreciate the pressure of being alive.

First(click here): a song for you, because music is my love language.

I overheard someone say, "I'm looking for a feeling I can't find," and I wanted to shout back, "ME TOO!". I've been looking for a feeling I can't find my whole life. Everything I do is in some way to touch this feeling— tenuous hours of writing, mothering and loving another human being, moving to the country, and long walks alone in the forest— all in hopes of reaching some ineffable realization. It seems the root of every action I yen for a certain feeling that I can't seem to name or find, but it's real and present in every one of my moments, and like a rainbow dissolves into the mist or stretches farther into the view the closer I try to get to it.

I pause to make conscious this push, or is it a pull? And thank whatever this feeling is, this seeking, for it takes my hand and causes me to do all sorts of beautiful and loving things. It is an invisible pressure, always urging gentle, kind things like, "how do you love?" "What crumb of bread can you share today?" "What is the shape of your heart?". Perhaps we never arrive inside this feeling. Maybe it is the seed of us, just pushing its way through the soil, the spine, bending and reaching for greater and greater heights in the name of seeing a thousand sunsets and sunrises.