What Moves In The Dark

For the last two springs, my dog Juniper has been engaged in a game of hide the bone with a coyote. Every morning we head out into the woods, and somewhere between the stump where I leave my coffee cup and the switchback that takes you down to our little creek, she b-lines to where she hid her bone the morning before, and it’s never there. Enter her sniff zoomies, frenetic and focused, darting around trying to locate the scent of where the bone has since been moved to.

The coyote, to which our game cam confirmed a couple years back, comes in the night, finds it, and moves it to a new spot. Juniper, dedicated to finding it again, traces the elusive scent, engaging with something out there she can’t quite see. She eventually finds it, considers it for a moment, and then takes her sweet time hiding it somewhere new. A wordless negotiation between a domesticated wolf and a wild one, neither of them fully realizing the relationship they are in.

In Los Angeles, my friend’s dog Hank recently played with a coyote that showed up in their backyard. At first they were nervous, but after they saw the coyote play-bowing toward Hank, they let it happen. The two began chasing each other in big looping circles, taking turns, pausing, adjusting, changing direction, playing.

What tickled me about it was the complete absence of preconception. Hank didn’t know it was a coyote. He had no category called “wild” versus “domestic,” “safe” versus “threatening,” “mine” versus “other.” He just saw something alive and moving and wanted to play. The coyote apparently felt the same way.

The separateness isn’t out there, in the yard between the dog and the coyote, it’s in us. A defense we construct so early we forget we’ve built it. Hank hadn’t gotten the memo yet and hopefully he never does. Maybe that’s one of the things about dogs, they keep forgetting to other the other.

I am someone who actively tends my inner world, not as a project to complete, but as a relationship I must show up for. I have learned that our inner life requires conditions to reveal itself: stillness, discipline, repetition, and willingness to stay. I have dedicated myself to these attributes, trying to build a life that includes ritual and movement, practices that create enough space and steadiness for what is submerged to rise. Not to be fixed or conquered, but to be met, and known.

These practices are informed by both my Buddhist upbringing and my training in psychology, both of which point to the same verity: the mind does not simply perceive the world; it shapes it. What we carry inside us, we inevitably see outside us. In the non-dual view that boundary between inside and outside is itself a kind of fiction. Inner and outer arising together, inseparable.

I have been trying to have a baby, and it hasn’t happened yet. I’m older, and there are no guarantees. Spring being spring, there are babies and pregnancies and new lives everywhere: the farmers market, my Instagram feed, in the bodies and arms of the humans I love. The understanding that you have to grieve the unlived life in order to inhabit the one you’re actually in has not stopped knocking, banging really, at my door.

And yet. When I let myself be opened by my grief, past the place where I think I can open, something strange and true makes itself known. The feeling that they are all my children too, every one of them.

Baldwin wrote that the children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe, and that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality. He was writing about Harlem in 1980, about political failure and collective abandonment. But the sentence opens past its occasion, it isn’t consolation. It’s a different ontology all together: a statement about what we actually are to one another, whether we feel it or not.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, writes that in her tradition there is no word for nature as a thing separate from us. The plants are not resources or scenery. In Potawatomi, the grammar itself refuses the separation: what English flattens into its; inert, outside, other, becomes instead a word that signals aliveness and participation, belonging to the same fabric of being. To name something this way is to already acknowledge that you are part of the same system, and it is part of you.

I think about this when I can’t locate the edge between my grief, and this absolutely intoxicating phenomenal world with all its beauty and seduction. Consider a molecule, even a single molecule does not exist independently. It is an emergence of protons and neutrons in relationship, nothing self-arising, nothing sealed off. Now scale that up. The mycorrhizal networks threading through the forest floor, the chemical signals trees send when they are under stress, the way Juniper and the coyote find each other, over and over again, year after year, in the woods. We are continually embedded in an invisible web whether we feel it or not. The question is do we have language for it, and does that aid us in the experience of remembering?

In graduate school, object relations theory both clicked and eluded me.

The part that resonated felt physical. Yes, of course we carry our early relationships inside us as living templates. Of course the way I experienced my mother's presence or absence became a kind of gravity I still move through. These inner representations are not memories exactly, but more like grooves: a felt sense of how love works and feels, how safe the world is, how much space we are allowed to take up. They shape how we experience ourselves and others long after the original relationships have changed or ended. We don't outgrow them, they become more like the water we swim in.

The harder part to reckon with is that we don’t just carry these templates, we throw them. We cast them outward onto the people standing right in front of us, and then we relate to what we’ve cast rather than to who is actually there. I see and feel this in my own life, and in my clients. The pain of this moment and the pain of a much older moment become indistinguishable, braided together so tightly that pulling them apart feels beside the point.

This is a condition of being alive, of having an interior life shaped by things we didn’t choose and couldn’t have known how to hold at the time. The unconscious isn’t a failure of self-knowledge, it’s just what it looks like to be a person moving through time, carrying the things that mattered. Most charged relationships are, at least partly, conversations we are having with ourselves, with pain we are already carrying.

The mother wound. The father wound. Our enduring vulnerabilities. The way a woman socialized to suppress her own authority might project onto a man something she hasn’t yet claimed in herself, what Jung called the animus, the unlived masculine, the seat of her own agency and creative power. She longs for him, pursues him, finds him somehow unattainable. Not because he is unattainable, but because what she is reaching for is her own unlived potential. He becomes a screen. The desire is real, the object of it, a mirror.

It isn’t only longing. Even when we try to change our partners, to “evolve” them into something more legible, sexy, or safe, there is always something older underneath the attempt. We are working with something deeper in ourselves through them.

A prayer to someone, something unattainable is a prayer to impermanence. A prayer to all the unlived lives, all the connection points we carry within us and haven’t yet found our way back to.

Buddhism has a core tenant for what I am reaching towards, dependent origination. Nothing arises independently. Every phenomenon, every self, every longing exists only in relationship to everything else. This arises because that arises, and this ceases because that ceases.

The baby I haven’t had doesn’t exist independently of the woman I am becoming in the waiting. My longing for her doesn’t exist independently of all the mothers who came before me, all the children already here, all the life that is already, ceaselessly, arising. The unlived life and the lived one are not opposites, they are co-arising and dependent.

And the projections, the wounds, the longing we thrown outward onto people mirroring our unmet selves: that too is dependent arising. The other we construct is not separate from us, and it never was. It arose from us, in relationship to us, because of us, and vice versa. When we pray to the unattainable, we are praying to a part of ourselves we haven’t yet been able to hold. The separateness we experience is real as an experience, it is not real as an absolute.

Which means the grief is real, the longing is real, and so is the web.

Juniper doesn’t know she is in relationship with the coyote. She just knows the bone moves, and she smells some intoxicating other. She adapts and keeps playing the game. And somewhere in those woods, a wild animal is tending to an invisible relationship, moving it, touching it, making it part of its own life.

We are already in each other’s lives. We are already moving each other’s bones in the dark, following a scent. The grief I carry for the lives I won’t, or haven’t yet lived is not separate from the life that is actually here. It arises with it, and it belongs to it.

Spring keeps insisting on all this fertility, all this new life: it isn’t asking me to stop wanting what I want, it is asking me to feel the web underneath the wanting. To let the boundary between my grief and all that life become a little more permeable. Like a molecule. Like a root system. Like a woman learning, slowly, that what she reaches for outside herself has always been inside her.

I am already a mother, and if I stand still long enough, I can feel her step forward.