Someone reading this makes me feel less lonely

Paula Jaya, dancer, body therapist, seeker, finder, wrote this:

But.

I need to tell you desperately who I am and how am I doing. Because telling you might help me feel I exist, as a specific being, in a specific and meaningful situation and not as the entanglement of contradictory feelings, narratives and points of view I feel right now. I feel quite lonely and lost within myself. 

I just got back home from an amazing week of family gathering, where I was a mother, with her baby and his grandmother, spending quality time together, in a beautiful city, in a beautiful and very organized godmother’s house, enjoying being. I knew exactly who I was and what I had to do to be able to share myself and to have meaningful and fulfilling interactions with everyone around. I looked in the mirror and felt clear and good! Now I am back home.

I live in an Ecovillage nested in the mountains of Minas Gerais, Brazil. With a handful of neighbors and half an hour away from the closest town, two hours away from the closest city and four and a half hours away from the closest Metropole. And, it is much harder to know who I am. How to use my time. What to do.

We are trying to create an alternative way of living, which would include sharing the decisions of how to create this space together with the other people involved, communicating in empathetic ways, growing our own organic food, planting trees and forests, celebrating life with art, music, dance and rituals, living in harmony with ourselves, each other and with nature. That is all written down in our Vision as a group.

As a nomad I thought I had found my ideal home! We also celebrate diversity and are always searching for ways to embrace the others’ point of view. But. I realized I need people around. We are only five grown-ups and two babies living here. And there is a lot of work. We do not have time to be together because each of us has to organize his own life, earn his income, tend the house chores, the babies, the couple. No parties, no celebrations, little intimacy.

I am exaggerating, every now and then the rest of the group that still lives in the city comes and we have a great time together, meaningful meetings creating more visions and listening to each other’s point of view, playing music, sharing hugs and massages, and giving workshops in sustainable holistic living.

But. Then everyone goes home to the city and the five of us find ourselves again in this very small and busy community.

I realized this last trip to the city that I need more interactions with people. People make me feel alive. I am a person that feels fulfilled when I am helping someone be more comfortable with himself. That is when I feel comfortable.

But. Here the trees around me do not need me, they are thriving. The birds are doing very well thank you. The river is flowing its course to the waterfall. The other people living in the Ecovillage are either too busy or too clear about who they are and what they need to do to be comfortable, and my baby, yes he needs me, but. The satisfaction in fulfilling his needs does not fulfill my own need of intellectual, philosophical, theoretical nourishment. I love thinking about life, looking at life and sharing what I see, thinking of the best ways to live, what makes a happy life, how to attain that, together. When I share about life and its meanings with a meaningful partner life feels rich, vibrant, full of amazing possibilities. I feel the tenderness of being human, of not knowing, I feel the richness and thrill of being a seeker, of seeking together, because we have each other, we are in the same boat, in this unknown ocean of existence, sharing visions and feelings for each other with our commonalities and our different points of views

But, when I am alone in this task of looking at life, and seeing ALL the possibilities, ALL the options, ALL the points of view I feel absolutely lonely, lost, a nothing in an a void, surrounded by nothing and at the whim of all the strong currents and winds that blow from eternity to nowhere.

Writing this and knowing that someone will read it makes me feel less alone.

Thank you.