Be Hungry

You're hungry, I know, said the dreambear, but you need to be hungry for more than food. More than sleep. We all go to sleep and will be asleep for a long time. Be hungry for what you have yet to do while you're awake.

Andrew Krivak (The Bear)

I sit in the Adirondack chair my father and I made together years ago. It is night, and I am quiet, settling into a wholeness I find only in solitude. I have been rereading passages from a beloved book, feeling the words envelop me in stillness, coming home to myself in a way I have not been able to do in the last while.

I turn the dreambear's admonition to "be hungry for what you have yet to do while you're awake" over in my mind. The words (from Krivak's beautiful novel, The Bear) are addressed to a girl who is walking, exhausted and brokenhearted, through deep loss. I read this book not long after my father died. When I look through my own written reflections from that time, I recognize how hollowed out I was, weary in body, mind and spirit. I wrote constantly, putting pen to paper to keep from disappearing completely into the void of grief.

The two years preceding his death were full and draining, and soon after he died, we went into lockdown. I'd lost some of my deep hungers by then, and only since the beginning of this year that have I felt able to reconnect with them. Since my birthday in February, I've poured myself into new projects with enthusiasm - energised and motivated.

But I feel fatigue setting in. Doubt and discouragement sometimes whisper at the edges of my awareness. That is why I sit tonight with the dreambear's words. What hungers drive my waking hours? I think about a couple of projects I've started - how inadequate I feel about my skills, how easily I could lay them aside. And I think about people whose work I admire - artists, writers, creatives - who show up daily to do the work they have chosen, to follow the hungers of their own hearts.

Am I hungry enough to persevere? Do I care deeply enough about the work I've begun to keep showing up, through the inevitable frustrations with how much I have to learn, and in spite of all the other demands calling for my attention, time and energy? I cannot look too far ahead, but I can choose today to continue; I can nourish my hunger by immersing myself in the work of others I admire and respect, and give up what dilutes and dulls the edge of my own desire.

Wishing you the gift of deep hungers,

Carri.