Loving Our Roots Into Being
by Catharine Clarke

What more likely calls us to question ourselves than our own failures? The worldly kind halts us, asking us to feel the depth of our disappointment, to own the expectation that preceded it, to check our idealism, to challenge our longing. We might say, halfheartedly, "Well, I guess it just wasn't meant to be," yet who among us does not seek to find her place in the world, to give the gifts she's come to give, to truly matter?

Our more personal failures may let down a friend, neglect or disappoint our child, betray a partner, abandon something dear to us. Here we've failed others and ourselves, and it seems a lifetime cannot redeem it.

Sacred traditions remind us to "stay in the moment," where we are most alive, to trust the natural flow of life, to accept the good with the bad, to be gentle with ourselves. Yet, when we fail, seldom do we open our hearts to receive it, to allow new life to buzz within us, to trust something sweet will be made from something bitter. More likely we question our choices, our paths, ourselves. Underneath it all, failure rattles our self-value and quickens our control. And what must we control? Our fear of not measuring up, not being enough, not mattering? Mattering. Not making something of ourselves in the world's measure but embodying the essence of our being, making it real, living it... even when we want to disappear, cannot bear exposing the vulnerability of it all.

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