How To Feed A Hungry Heart

As a young mother, I spent a lot of time contemplating the meaning of home – for many of us, the place we dream will hold us in belonging and encourage our “becoming.”  And as all mothers do, I devoted myself to creating one full of warmth, imagination, and unconditional love for my son.

Yes, there were times when I longed for the ready silence and solitude of my earlier, motherless, state;  to feel out of touch with one’s deepest self is a recipe for existential loneliness, wherever we are in our life.  And if we are totally honest, we know that loneliness does lurk at times in the midst of big noisy families, crowded holidays, and inside of marriage, not only among the single, the widowed, the outcast.

Yet, there is a quantum difference between the pushes and pulls of interdependent “home life” and the radical loneliness that afflicts so many today.  Homes change, especially for women, especially across the life cycle.  Empty nests and echoing rooms are lonely places. Though I had known a good deal about change before I became a mother – career moves, new projects, friendships, cities – somehow I lost sight of its inevitability.   So when it appeared in forms I didn’t choose, it was easy to lose my footing for a time.  This is particularly true for those who live in homes largely devoid of other voices, especially young voices.  And it is even more intensely true, as we approach the iconic holiday of abundance and togetherness, Thanksgiving.

Our stomachs today are full, but our hearts are hungry.  Our souls seek fellow travelers, who share our attraction to kayaking, or wine collecting, or trolling art museums on rainy days.  And some days, we come up empty-handed.

During the years when I was contemplating these matters intensely, I wrote in A Sabbath Life: One Women’s Search for Wholeness, “A good home allows us to grow, to put on additions, to shut down wings and clear out closets, to shape a life that is coherent with our private truths…”

What I couldn’t see then is that there would be time when I could no longer “shape” life, no longer control outcomes, as easily as I once churned out chocolate chip cookies.

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Can this Thanksgiving, I wonder, be a time when we listen more deeply to what our loneliness may be telling us?

What if, instead of focusing on food and fuss, we use the holiday to feed the hunger in our hearts – and the hearts of others?

Is it possible, for instance, that if we release our clinging to the same and familiar, we might see that our dwellings have become too small for us?  Do we need to not only clear out closets but to change our view entirely?

I have always been drawn to the final section of Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s timeless classic, Gift from the Sea.  There, as she anticipates the last chapters of a well-lived life, she speculates on the image of the Paper Nautilus as a possible metaphor for women, once their children and careers are over, but life’s open waters still beckon.

A nautilus is a “cradle for the young,” writes Lindbergh.  When the eggs hatch and the young swim away, the mother leaves her shell and begins another life.

“Woman must come of age by herself,” Lindbergh continues in the same chapter.  “This is the essence of ‘coming of age’ – to learn how to stand alone…She must find her true center alone.  She must become whole.”

I think of what this might look like for even just a day — say, Thanksgiving.

I discover that it helps to remember those who have taken up this challenge before me.

I have known those who invite foreign students who have no place to go, or serve meals at homeless shelters, or go to work in the ER.    Others head to the Vienna Christmas markets, or for a weekend by the sea.

And sometimes, as has happened to me this year, circumstances just land in our lap.

My Thanksgiving will be different this year – in all the best ways.  No jockeying among the older generation of women over turf.  No fussing over who will welcome the pets and who will triumph over the choice of stuffing.

I am joining a fond but extended set of relations, my husband’s cousin’s children and in-laws, as well as a handful of newcomers.  We will eat lobster, not turkey.  We will get to know one another in new ways.  And we will play listening games:  What is your best travel memory?  The stupidest prank you played as a kid?  Even in anticipation, my heart is fed.

Before that meal, I am going to take a long walk, and forage for dried grasses for my home altar, as I did the very first Thanksgiving of my married life, when my husband was stuck at a desk filing a news story and I discovered a beautiful lane in a town I had never been in before.  It is a memory I will never forget.   It was a foretaste, I see now, of becoming a woman who can stand alone.

And I’m going to think about two men, elderly and childless, who make soup and stew and scones for people they don’t know, who visit shut-ins, and care for the lonely, diving into the world’s lack and need with chicken and marmalade, generosity, grace, and quiet joy every week of their lives.

In her sharp little book of bright wisdom, Brave Enough, Cheryl Strayed writes a great antidote to loneliness.

You must love in order to be loved.

You must be inclusive in order to feel yourself among the included.

You must give in order to receive.

This can be very hard when one is feeling lonely.  But it is not impossible, if we enter into the times of change in our lives equipped with a nautilus, a good soup recipe, and these words from David Whyte:

“Loneliness is the place from which we pay real attention to voices other than our own; being alone allows us to find the healing power in the other.  The shortest line in the briefest e-mail can heal, embolden, welcome home and enliven the most isolated identity.”

I wish you an abundance of what truly feeds you this Thanksgiving.