Untamed - Glennon Doyle Page 0,43
can use to increase her likelihood of getting found and thriving is this:
She must find herself a Touch Tree.
A Touch Tree is one recognizable, strong, large tree that becomes the lost one’s home base. She can adventure out into the woods as long as she returns to her Touch Tree—again and again. This perpetual returning will keep her from getting too far gone.
* * *
I’ve spent much of my life lost in the woods of pain, relationships, religion, career, service, success, and failure. Looking back on those times, I can trace my lostness back to a decision to make something outside myself my Touch Tree. An identity. A set of beliefs. An institution. Aspirational ideals. A job. Another person. A list of rules. Approval. An old version of myself.
Now when I feel lost, I remember that I am not the woods. I am my own tree. So I return to myself and reinhabit myself. As I do, I feel my chin rise and my body straighten.
I reach deeply into the rich soil beneath me, made up of every girl and woman I’ve ever been, every face I’ve loved, every love I’ve lost, every place I’ve been, every conversation I’ve had, every book I’ve read and song I’ve sung, everything, everything, crumbling and mixing and decomposing underneath. Nothing wasted. My entire past there, holding me up and feeding me now. All of this too low for anyone else to see, just there for me to draw from. Then up and up all the way to my branches, my imagination, too high for anyone else to see—reaching beyond, growing toward the light and warmth. Then the middle, the trunk, the only part of me entirely visible to the world. Pulpy and soft inside, just tough enough on the outside to protect and hold me. Exposed and safe.
I am as ancient as the earth I’m planted in and as new as my tiniest bloom. I am my own Touch Tree: strong, singular, alive. Still growing.
I have everything I need, beneath me, above me, inside me.
I am never gonna lose me.
Just as I was about to fall asleep the other night, I heard a faint knock on my bedroom door. “Come in,” I said.
Tish walked into my room and stopped at my bedside watery-eyed, apologetic. “What’s wrong, baby?”
“I’m scared.”
“Of what?”
“Everything. But nothing. It’s not that anything’s wrong, really. It’s just—I’m all by myself in here. In my body. I’m just…lonely or something. I forget during the day, when I’m busy, but at night, in bed, I remember. I’m all alone in here. It’s scary.”
Tish climbed into my bed. We laid our heads on one pillow and looked directly into each other’s eyes. We were searching, trying to find ourselves in each other, trying to blur the lines between us. We’ve been trying to blur them since the doctor first put Tish into my arms and I said, “Hi, angel.” Since I first leaned over and tried to breathe her into my own lungs. Since I first put my mouth next to hers and tried to swallow her sweet warm breath and make it mine. Since my molars would ache when I played with her toes and I’d understand why some animals eat their young. Tish and I have been trying to collapse the gap her birth created between us since we turned from one body into two. But our separation keeps getting wider with each step, each word, each passing year. Slipping, slipping. Hold my hand, honey. Come in. I’m scared, Mommy.
I brushed a strand of her hair from her cheek and whispered, “I feel lonely in this skin, too. Remember when we were at the beach today, and we were watching that little girl wade into the waves and collect seawater in her little plastic buckets? Sometimes I feel like I’m one of those buckets of sea, next to other buckets of sea. Wishing we could pour into each other, mix together somehow, so we’re not so separate. But we always have these buckets between us.”
Tish has always understood metaphors best. (That thing you feel but can’t see, baby, is like that thing you can see.) She listened as I told her about the buckets, and her gold-brown canyon eyes widened. She whispered back, “Yeah. It’s like that.”
I told her that maybe when we were born, we were poured from our source into these tiny body buckets. When we die, we’ll be emptied back out and return to that big source