My First Days in the Wilderness

 

by Sara Sharpe

 

I went into the Wilderness only when I was too broken to do anything else. I was so sick and sad (and tired and lost) that I could hardly function. I didn’t know what to do when I got there, but I was desperate enough to go anyway, and willful enough not to leave until I found some relief.

 

At that point in my life, the thoughts in my head were so toxic and heavy that I was crumbling beneath the weight of them. I was crippled by huge amounts of guilt and shame. Additionally, I was poor and lonely, and I had a series of projects that hadn’t gone anywhere. I had heaps and heaps of empirical PROOF that I was failing in every conceivable way. I was also profoundly heartbroken. As time went on, I got sicker and sicker. There were days—a lot of days—when I couldn’t get out of bed.

 

And then one day I dragged my ass to the little stone chapel at Montgomery Bell State Park in Tennessee, very near where I live. (I still have no memory of how I ended up there in the first place.) I sat there for hours. I sat there, in all my brokenness, until I felt a shift within. When I walked into the chapel I don’t think I noticed anything around me. It’s doubtful that I heard a single bird sing. But when I left that day, I looked up and I saw the sky and the trees and the immense beauty around me for the first time in a long time. I can’t begin to tell you how relieved I was to see and feel such beauty again, though I hadn’t been aware I’d been missing it. Predictably, I suppose, by the time I went to bed that night, I felt dark and miserable again.

 

So I went back the next day. And the next. I brought the books that spoke to me and I prayed. I talked to my broken, wild selves. Sometimes so much pain surfaced that I cried and cried. Sometimes—often, in the beginning—I was too sick and tired to sit up, so I slept in the church pews. Sometimes I allowed myself to imagine a better life, and sometimes I just sat and enjoyed the profound quietude. One way or another, I sat there every day, tenaciously, until I felt a shift within. I refused to leave that little chapel until “it” happened—until the Light broke through—and it almost always did, eventually. When it did, it wasn’t subtle. It was sudden, palpable, and always a tremendous relief. It felt like Light piercing my heart, and once it happened, the world looked like a very, very different place, and I felt hopeful again.

 

In those early days the internal change lasted for only a few hours at best. I couldn’t sustain it. So sometimes I went to the little chapel twice a day. (Some days, though not many, I couldn’t get to a better place no matter how hard I tried, and I surrendered to feeling terrible all day. This still happens occasionally, of course – but it didn’t and doesn’t happen very often.)

 

Like anything else, my practice got easier. Each day I would enter the chapel, sit in my spot (third pew back, right side, close to the aisle) and let whatever pain I was feeling bubble to the surface. I went to the heart of whatever darkness I was feeling and I learned to let the Light in. I developed a practice that worked for me. In addition to silent meditation, I developed ways of dealing, systematically, with my wild selves. After a few months, my internal state seemed to change automatically, as soon as I got to the chapel. I often felt such a surge of joy and gratitude when I walked through the doors that I burst into ecstatic tears the minute I walked through them. And I can tell you this: the sort of deep and profound joy that comes from within? Nothing—no worldly experience—can compare. (It was around this time that a dear friend introduced me to the sufi poet Hafiz, which meant that I had company in that exalted place!)

 

And now? The shift in me seems quite permanent. Which is not to say that I feel great every day or that I don’t still struggle – I do. But not, very often, in a way that threatens to throw me seriously off course. And if I do feel particularly funky, I get to the chapel immediately. Or I turn off my phone, turn off my computer, and do the work here in my living room; Harder, because of potential distractions, but absolutely possible.

 

When I say that there are no accidents, that the entire universe is conspiring to help you (and has been since the day you were born)—I say that not because it’s an intellectual idea or spiritual precept that I have adopted for the sake of convenience. I say it because that is the unalienable (so far as I am concerned) Truth that I found in the Wilderness. That is the message that the Light brings, along with the message that we are never alone. But that’s neither here nor there, as yet.

 

For now, you just have to find your way in. And you will, when you want to experience profound change at an accelerated pace, or when you are tired enough of feeling badly, or when you no longer have a choice. When that time comes—when you decide that you are tired of feeling hopeless, here’s what you can do:·

 

• Make time.·

• Find your “chapel” which, of course, doesn’t have to be an actual chapel. Find any space that feels somehow sacred to you. Ask to be led there, and you will be.·

• Be tenacious. Don’t leave your sacred space each day until you feel an internal shift. It will take you a while to figure out how to bring about (or allow?) such a shift, but you will. It will get easier with time.·

• Entertain the idea that my rather audacious proclamation—the one which says, “Ask to be led there and you will be”—might not be crazy after all. In other words, be at least willing to consider the possibility that there is some magic in this world.·

• Take in the books and poems that pierce your heart. (They will again—be patient!)·

• Take, also, Absolute Accountability and· Love.

 

Always, love.

 

Don’t worry if those last two prescripts don’t make sense to you now. They will in time.

 

That’s it. You don’t have to figure out what to do with your life or how to walk away from any one person, for instance. When you’re ready, when you are tired enough of the darkness, you will step into the Wilderness and make time to let the Light in. Everything else will then fall into place, eventually.