The other morning I walked outside to gather more logs for the wood stove. The air was crisp and windy with the early signs of Spring. The juniper pollen was starting to stir. Before I made it to the wood pile, I saw Crom — A.’s 22-year-old white gelding — galloping across the field between our ranch houses; behind him, Stella, the camel-colored Great Dane, was in full pursuit.
For a number of minutes, I watched these two impressive animals move their forms in play-acting theater that was on the scale of the New Mexican landscape. Crom — all 18 hands of him — was bucking and rearing; Stella — a 125-pound lioness on the desert plain — was hunting. Sandia Mountain colored the horizon behind them in the distance. I didn’t reach for my camera but rather just let the scene soak in. Finally they wore themselves out, I ran into the fray and grabbed Stella’s collar, leashed her and walked her to the barn. Crom trailed behind, victorious.
In those brief moments that morning, all our basic instincts and needs were so easily on display. First, my human need to make fire, then the dog’s need to chase and the horse’s need for show.
I have been learning over these last cold months of winter on the ranch about my own needs. At the most basic level, I have learned what I really need: heat, other people, empathy, loving care, nature, gentleness, intellectual stimulation. And the growth curve has been steep about not just having awareness of my needs, but also taking them seriously (and understanding the stakes when they are unmet.)
While I have come to make friends with these needs that reside in my first, second and even third chakras (e.g. survival needs), I have had a harder time with serving higher-order needs — say the fifth and sixth chakras. Those are things like expression of my truth (fifth chakra) and acceptance of my intuitive wisdom (sixth chakra).
One of the things this voyage into the desert has shown me, too, is what needs are actually mine to own and what have been circumstantial. I have even been little surprised to find out that one of my needs to own, is, in fact, accomplishment.
This is a need I have disavowed for many years, writing it off as something that had been projected on to me by elite schools, bosses, ambitious parents and so on. I have at time, felt like a pawn in someone else’s needs to serve their ambitions. You know, the kind of thing that might lead you to say “Go fuck yourself!” while lighting a cigarette and getting your nose pierced. Yet I played along for reasons related to survival. So now, as a mid-life adult, it has been a project to tease out what is my ambition and what has been the ambitions of others.
The desert — and so much other work here — is a wonderful clarifying tool.
I have come to see that I have my very own bespoke need for accomplishment — through my writing, through my professional work, through financial security, through my service to the world. I am unwilling — and maybe even unable — to relinquish that. Yet reconciling that with the more simple and spiritual life I also need has been….interesting.
One of the spiritual teachers I like very much, Adyashanti, talks about finding our true nature; in 12 Step recovery we aim toward the promise of “To thine own self be true.” (Also, thank you Shakespeare.) In other words, how can we serve our own needs with valor?
And so it is that when the student is willing, the teacher appears. Two ideas grabbed my attention this week as I grappled with the tensions between these inner callings and outer circumstances, and my shimmy towards the light.
I’ll park these ideas with you now to contemplate until we meet again:
Can both things be true?
“Each being in this world must find the set of opportunities fitted to its nature.” - Lewis Hyde
And to end the story about stepping outside in the crisp morning air? After I brought Stella and Crom back to the barn, I finally made it to the wood pile. At the moment it is high and neatly stacked, a fact that makes me happy and, to be honest, a little spendy with the wood. I have heated up the casita to 75 degrees inside, a project that can take hours to accomplish — but the heat is warm and comforting.
A met need is a beautiful thing.