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The Lonesomeness in the Sparks
There is one sentence from Their Eyes Were Watching God that has lived inside me for more than twenty years.
“The lonesomeness in the sparks make them hunt for one another.” ~ Zora Neale Hurston
I first encountered those words as a high school student.
I couldn’t have explained why they mattered then.
I only knew they felt true.
Now, years later, I think I finally understand.
Human beings spend much of life searching for one another.
We often tell ourselves we’re searching for love.
Or friendship.
Or belonging.
But I wonder if what we’re really searching for is recognition.
Someone who can see the spark beneath our mud.
Trauma has a way of making us believe that our wounds are our identity.
We hide.
We perform.
We protect ourselves.
We build identities around staying safe.
Then one day someone looks at us with extraordinary compassion.
A therapist.
A teacher.
A dear friend.
A partner.
A yoga instructor.
And somehow, without fixing us, they remind us that we are more than the story we’ve been telling ourselves.
Nothing has changed.
And yet everything has.
Because for one brief moment, someone looked through the dirty window instead of at it.
Our nervous systems regulate one another.
Long before we understand ourselves cognitively, we experience safety through relationship.
Perhaps this is why healing almost always involves another person somewhere along the journey.
Not because they rescue us.
Because they remember our light while we are still forgetting it.
I’ve begun to think this may be one of the deepest callings we have as human beings.
Not to change one another.
Not to save one another.
Simply to become the kind of people who can recognize the spark beneath someone else’s fear.
To look beyond the mud.
To speak to the light.
Maybe that is what compassion really is.
And maybe that is why the sparks have always hunted for one another.
Not because they are incomplete.
But because light has a remarkable way of recognizing itself.
~
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