After weeks of furnishing our new office, Sarah Lu and I filled a diffuser and watched it bubble over onto our new-to-us table. I guess we need a new one, I said. A couple of days later I realized a small plastic insert — sitting right next to the diffuser the whole time — had been missing. Sarah Lu reflected that putting this space together was kind of like that diffuser: we were boiling over until we found the piece that made the whole machine work.

It’s not like new things just replace old things. It’s more that they grow from the ruins the past has created. The ruins we are living in now.

We had committed to the antidotes before we found the space, but once we were in it, the old instincts came back — the driven need to furnish, to make viable, to survive. Survival matters of course. And it takes real work and energy to create spaces worthy of the task of creating antidotes. But returning again and again to a philosophy that says: decision making is clear, affected parties are consulted, the leadership of frontline communities is respected and nurtured — this is working toward a different relationship with survival itself.

My body no longer believes in the old answers. As a dream recently reflected back to me, the Patergold of the past — that certainty you can trust instead of trusting yourself, the father who promises gold, the system that will finally save you — no longer lives in my bones the way it once did. And so working toward an antidote to the poison we grew up in feels like a good use of my individuating years.

One thing I have learned from years of sitting with people week after week is that there is no answer to suffering. The certainty that a technique or philosophy will eventually cure our pain is part of the problem we are living. We don’t need another answer. We need spaces.

The experiment is not to replace one either/or with another. It is to work toward a relationship with self and other that is not based on certainty but on the instinct of becoming. Trusting ourselves and each other when we are uncertain means tolerating the discomfort of not knowing. Somewhere between control and chaos is a self — and a community — in process.

Heart Marrow Counseling started in capitalism because that is where we are. But what we hope to build is a community based space where rest and restoration engenders community.

In the spirit of becoming, I’ll keep you posted.

Naomi Baker, LMFT