Honoring Your Hungers: The Secret to Satisfaction
The worst secrets
are the ones
you don’t know
you’re keeping
that settle
in your
bones and
seep into
those hard
white spaces
that are alive
with growing
and breaking.
–dena parker duke
excerpt from “It Is”, In Your Bones
Secrets go hand in hand with hungers. Hungers often come with shame because we are compelled to hide them, which is how they become our secrets. Labeling our hungers as addictions seems almost unspeakable, yet there is a lot to be learned by what we find most unspeakable, by what we are ashamed of. I will always be grateful for poetry and lyrics because they helped me put into words what I couldn’t otherwise utter. They were also the only things anchoring me to deep goodness underneath all that was dark and painful. However, it took decades for me to share my poetry. After In Your Bones came out, I had to work through a lot of shame over sharing my deep, dark secrets. I described shame personified like dogs we feel compelled to carry around in bags. We often don’t realize we can set shame down and get it “out of the bag” like the old saying about cats, which also applies to our secrets. Freeing our secrets, listening to our hungers, and setting down our shame allows us to find legitimate ways to get our needs met. This can lead us to real satisfaction.
Shame
Big eyes that stare and lips that
pout and whine all through
the night keeping the
gaslight lit.
But, it can be set down;
not fed; ignored
and tuned out;
ties cut; flames
blown.
–dena parker duke
excerpt from “Shame”, In Your Bones
What are you deeply hungry for? So hungry, in fact, that you might be tempted to hide that fact away in shame? Let’s liberate our secrets and hungers, setting them free. Here are some of mine:
I am hungry to enjoy food, but not let food own me. The Diet Culture Rebel blog inspired me to connect eating to my actual hunger instead of what other people think of my body. It’s so sad that so many of our secrets and shames are tied to food when it is simply there to sustain and nourish us. How many other things in our lives are there to serve us, yet we become servants to them?
I am hungry to dance. I have lived with a great big rubber band ball of emotions for a long time. It’s taken almost a lifetime to pull it apart and feel what I’m feeling. That’s why I love to dance. Dancing feels like unrolling and dropping everything standing in the way of joy.
A woman may…feel she will die if she doesn’t dance naked in a thunderstorm [and] return home ink-stained, paint-stained, tear-stained, moon stained.
–Clarissa Pinkola Estes, The Women Who Run With Wolves
I’ve had family hunger for as long as I can remember, complete with the fantasy of myself surrounded by the perfect family. After almost a lifetime of hiding that hunger, I am happy to report that I recently got plugged into the famed 12-Step Program AA uses. Not much of a drinker, I have used the program to learn how to reparent myself with a safe space for all the various parts of me, my “inner family.” It’s never too late to reparent yourself and to know there are fellow travelers and guides along the way. As a result, my dreams for having a happy family are being born out inside me. As my brother-in-law always says, “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood”! This has been a game changer, and even though it would make a perfect “secret,” I am happy to share it with anyone who will listen.
We are standing on the precipice of disaster if we
don’t embrace the fact that we are truly
surrounded by a new, improved definition
of what it means to be related.
–dena parker duke
excerpt from “Facebook Family”, When You Know
I’m hungry for family and dancing, at the same time! I had a deep longing to dance at my son’s wedding party. Between Covid-19, cancellations, hard feelings, new plans, and a mushroom trek that turned into a week's stay in the hospital for my husband, it never happened. Someone said they were sorry I didn’t have an audience to dance for, but the truth was, I longed for the presence of this new family to dance with. And I longed to celebrate this new, bigger safety net of family ties, especially with my sweet son. I got obsessed with envisioning us dancing to LunchMoney Lewis - Mama (Lyric Video), having everything melt away, leaving nothing but love and belonging. But as it got closer, I felt myself pick up that bag of shame. The shame of trying to impose a song that on the surface sounded like it was just about me and one, that on top of that, was tied to my hungers, my secrets. However, when I heard in the lyrics that this is for all the mamas, I was reminded how tied we all are to a network of mamas, a network of hungers to be nurtured, fed, and protected. When I saw a beautiful picture of my son with his new mama-in-law at the event, I felt blessed and relieved that he had other mamas to draw from when I couldn’t be or wouldn’t be there. I realized that he was going about the work to parent himself and place himself in the family of things, as beloved poet Mary Oliver states as a place available to us all. He gave me permission to let the day be about love even though we wouldn’t be with him. In doing so, he assured us that he was finding his own ways to be cared for in a world where our hungers often have to be fed in creative and innovative ways. As Thomas Moore says in Care of the Soul, we can all “mother” (and “father”) ourselves if we need to through music, literature and poetry, other relationships, learning to nurture ourselves, and so on.
Whoever you are, no matter
how lonely,
the world offers itself
to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese,
harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing
your place
in the family of things.
—Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese”
I am hungry for my own mama-love. Being obsessed with that song and dancing to it alone made that clear. Trauma often involves something essential being taken from you. In my case, it was words. While many words were being thrown around growing up, mine were not among them. For years I thought that the remedy for this was, as Maya Angelou so eloquently states in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, to find my voice and speak up. Eventually I learned it was more complicated than that. I didn’t know until recently that there were even more secrets than I thought and that took a greater toll than I knew. Many things were kept from me. While others might have seen this as providing me with protection, I’m only beginning to unravel how damaging what is not said can be. All my childhood days were filled with fear, not because something terrible happened every day. It was fear of the unknown. It was an unnamed sense of dread. Fear of slipping up or something slipping out. It was hard straining to hear and to not hear, the fear of being the youngest and having to bear witness to everyone else’s traumas. The fear of unspoken truth was a heavy blanket laid over everything. Unfortunately, my mother was a great source of this silence. Although she was a sweet soul she just couldn’t bring herself to speak the unspeakable. I grew up screaming inside and asked her for help in every silent way I could. After my siblings were gone I couldn’t even make eye contact with her anymore. I longed for someone to track me down and loudly haul me out of danger. I lived for action and words. I chose to rail against anything even close to a secret. I found out that her parents decided early on to shield their children from hearing any arguments. If they had them (which surely they must have) they kept them secret. She was defenseless at 19 when she married without any problem solving skills. This made me hunger for something she could simply never give me, which I would have to find elsewhere and learn to give to myself. And, of course, my heart goes out to her and all the secret shame she had to bear on her own, the many hungers she, too, must have carried.
If we are lucky enough to be able to see our hungers for what they are they can point us directly to the things we need most. The problem is when they get veiled in secrecy and hidden it’s difficult to set them free and get them “out of the bags” we carry around, sometimes for a lifetime. But we can be free of them, and in doing so, expose them and find ways to feed them openly without hurting ourselves. It is something we have control over, with the help of our higher power as we know it (as AA teaches). We can find and be our [own] clock, our compass, our captain. Don’t ever lose that or hide it, but if you do, it is possible to find it again.
May it be so.
How to Live
Our addictions will honestly be the death of us,
left unchecked becoming a drip that eats
away at our power and strips our rock hard
resolve rendering it powerless and pitted.
They take something we once loved and set it so
high on a pedestal that it can’t possibly satisfy and
all we can do is bite, snort, chug, and buy more
until we are consumed by our own ruthless cravings.
It’s when we habitually go past the point of full that we
lose touch with enough, or when we ignore our own
pangs of hunger or thirsting for all that nourishes and
quenches and completes us that we lose
our clock, our compass, our captain.
If we let them reign we are saying
it’s done, impossible, finished.
If we don’t, then maybe we can get on
with the raw satisfaction of living.
–dena parker duke, When You Know
You have everything inside
that you need right
now.
It has always been within you
from the very
beginning.
It doesn’t have to take
a lifetime for you to
know.
But it’s ok if it does because
it’s not going
anywhere.
–dena parker duke, excerpt from “All the Time”, Tiny Lights
