Hope Podcast: Featuring Nicole Marie, MDiv Candidate

In this episode of the Hope Podcast, we hear from Nicole Marie, a third-year MDiv student at HDS. We discuss her relationship to hope, imagination, and mystery.

MICHAEL FUHRMAN: Welcome to the Hope Podcast, a podcast hosted by the Harvard Divinity School office of Religious and spiritual Life, where we talk to HDS students about their spiritual lives, what hope means to them, and how they work to cultivate it daily. My name is Michael Fuhrman, and today I sat down with third year master of Divinity candidate Nicole Marie. 

NICOLE MARIE: Thank you so much, Michael. What a delight to be here with you after these years. 

MICHAEL FUHRMAN: It's so exciting to have you. I know, 

NICOLE MARIE: Yep, I am Nicole Marie. I am moved here from Los Angeles, where I spent 20 years, and before that I grew up in Southern Oregon, in the mountains of Southern Oregon. And Yeah, came here. I was professionally an early childhood educator in a progressive early childhood education. I worked in the classroom for nine years. Then I mentored teachers for some more after that, and I know we're going to get more into spiritual autobiography, which is how I came here. But that's a little bit about me. 

MICHAEL FUHRMAN: Absolutely. And I find as someone who dabbles with education myself, that we often find ourselves coming back to education in our own ways as well. For us right now, that is higher education. And I feel like so many people that come to the Divinity School in some ways are motivated by both their professional life and experiences, but also those spiritual, religious lives that they have as well too. And so I'd be curious to hear from you, maybe what that spiritual autobiography or religious autobiography, as you best defined it, looks like to you? 

NICOLE MARIE: I think it's one of my favorite things about being in Divinity School is that we get to talk about it. I get really delighted anytime someone asked me the question. So thank you. Yeah. I think, going-- since we're talking a bit about education and children. I think of the most. The first personally formative spiritual moment was when I was in the fourth grade and I was standing at the foot of the ocean in Oregon, where the ocean is just insanely beautiful and rugged and wild, and it's always cloudy and rainy. 

But this day it was sunny and I had this ring that was a fake emerald ring because emeralds were my birthstone and it came from one of those candy machines. It was so cheap. And I was standing at the ocean looking at it crashing, and I was in so much awe that I took off my ring and I tossed it into the ocean in total reverence. And I think back to that memory often because I actually think that that's the closest description of my spiritual and religious life that there is. I'll talk more about what has held it, but I think I'm pretty much still that little girl who's tossing the ring into the ocean. 

Funnily enough, I felt really guilty because I thought I'd littered after that. So for years, this moment of transcendence and shame. But in a more practical way, I was raised in a small town, 13,000 people that had not one, but three new age shops. So I was surrounded by neo-pagans and just Angel cards and tarot and the Grateful Dead and then like a heavy dose of secularism, which would be probably like that. My best friend's dad was a Rabbi, so I spent every Friday with them doing Shabbat, and my mom, for a half a second, brought us to Catholic Church because she wanted us to have some experience of religion, but she didn't actually believe in it. So it was just a place for $0.25 donuts for me. 

And then I moved to Southern California, which is the land of unhinged spirituality in which everybody is experimenting. So I was a dancer-- I was a professional dancer in my 20s, and I found the ecstatic dance community there, which has been a seed here running that. And through there, just really in my 20s experimented a lot with shamanic meditation and kirtan and different yogic practices. Like all just-- it felt like very natural throughline from my childhood to really experiment and play with a lot of new age adjacent spiritualities. 

And then in my late 20s, I sort of hit a lot of suffering, as one does, and fell into Western insight Buddhist practice as a way to try to grapple with what it means to grow up and meet the complexities of one's life, and started going on retreats and becoming an intensive meditator. And then when I stopped suffering as much, I fell a little bit away from it, but never totally left it because I really fell in love with the depths of quiet that come on retreat and the mystery of how perception changes. 

And so about maybe 8, nine years ago now, there was a teacher, a friend of mine, recommended, and I started listening to his talks and he developed something called the soul making Dharma, which, as best as I can say, like cultivates moments like the one I had as a little girl on the beach. It's based in Buddhism and a particular interpretation and that-- but it focuses on what are we what's called fabricating in our senses. So how is that happening? And it tries to-- it's not meant to replace other Buddhist practice. It's just a little one you add in but it's meant to cultivate sacredness and divinity in lived experience. 

And it changed my whole sense of what life is, what existence is. It was like everything I always wanted. I just-- I have a hard time putting it into words in the depth of how radically my sense of the world I was living in who I am, who other people are, what this earth is, and that continues to unfold. So while I was doing then all that education stuff, I had all these other practices going on, and I kind of hit a mid-life moment where I was like, I would like to dive into this whole other half of me. And so I ended up here applied as a soul making Dharma minister. And that's a little bit. 

MICHAEL FUHRMAN: And now, welcome to year three of finding your way through that path. What sticks out to me in that autobiography is the use of the word play that you inserted. And what I love about that word is that, especially in the context of your spiritual autobiography, being caveated by this moment of you as a child, how sincere play can be. I find most people maybe approach that word with this sense of carefree, but I gather from the sense of what you're saying that play in the way that you engage in what many might see as multiple religious traditions, multiple things going on in your spiritual life that the play that's happening between these things is from a place of sincerity which I really appreciate as just an observer and liver and learner with you. 

And with that in mind that you've been sharing about soul-making Dharma being something that was really important to you and that led you to diving in here at the Divinity School. What were maybe some of the other motivations or ways that you found yourself here, specifically of some places not to advertise for Harvard Divinity School, but more so what a space like this was able to do for you, maybe both in looking as somebody who is a prospective student and now here in your third year, a current student? 

NICOLE MARIE: Yeah, that's a great question. First, first of all, very astute about the play. I appreciate you saying that. I just actually wrote in my thesis about play and its role in spirituality, so I appreciate that. Well, I'm finding myself like the reason I came was so multi-layered, there were-- there's professional reasons. And for example, feeling like I've been in education for a long time so people saw me as an educator, but I think I'd equally been committed to say things like meditation and dance and ritual, which I didn't even talk about. 

So there's some way in which coming has allowed people to see the other parts of me more seriously, like I was taking them seriously. But to everyone else, I was a preschool educator. So now I'm more both of those things. So just in a tangible, professional way, it's opened up like legitimizing. But I think, yeah, I also came quite intuitively, which I want to just speak to. Like really, I started reading a lot of people, they had all had come here and just in my soul making life, there was this sense that this was part of the path that needed to happen. And once I applied, a lot fell into place. And it turned out to be. 

And then what has happened here-- I think this is a weird thing, but it's like what is opened here is a sense of humble authority. It's like I feel having studied about religion, I feel more centered in my own religious and spiritual life. I recently was able to bring some critique to the communities I'm a part of on how it's organized in a way that felt like, oh, actually, I think I have some lenses here that could look at how this could be structured differently in a really loving way. 

But I think my sense of commitment to that has deepened through study somehow, even though I haven't been studying particularly about that it's like instead of being like, oh, I don't really like exactly this about this tradition. Instead, I'm able to be like, no, actually, I'm with you. And here are some ideas to bring that could make us better. So a sense of more engagement, more commitment and more willingness to participate in the unfolding of the tradition, one of the traditions I'm part of. 

MICHAEL FUHRMAN: I appreciate how you started that conversation with finding legitimacy between both the professional Nicole as you were working with preschool students, but then also like, deeply spiritual Nicole that is just as legitimate and has that same sort of humble authority that I hear you talking to. So I think it's inspiring to hear that it's not only inciting that confidence in the self image, but also then confidence enough to turn and use that as a place of authority as well too, I think is really beautiful. 

NICOLE MARIE: Yeah 

MICHAEL FUHRMAN: And so the container of this podcast and the thing that we're interested in here is that word hope that comes up in so many different contexts of our lives. It could look like care. It could look like faith. It's so different for so many different people. And so there's a curiosity here to know what hope means to you and maybe how you see that come up either in your professional life, in your spiritual practice, whatever feels like the most or closest to true version of maybe what hope means to you if you had any thoughts? 

NICOLE MARIE: Yeah. I appreciate this. I actually have been thinking a lot, not just because I knew we were going to have the conversation, but this idea of hope has been percolating in me. And it's interesting. So in that period of time when I was suffering and turned to Buddhism, I read a book by Pema Chodron, one of her most famous, I can't remember. And she-- and the only thing I remember from it is this passage where she's like, you have to give up hope. Hope is not-- hope is turning away from the reality of things. And I think it stuck with me because it shocked me. Nobody's like, give up hope. That's not usually it's the opposite. What sustains us, what keeps us going and hope. 

So I went back and reread the passage. I hadn't read it in years. And she's really very talking specifically about give up hope for a better self, because it can-- I think she's trying to say there can be something quite uncompassionate and actually ineffectual that if you're like, well, I just hope I'm going to become a better person. That's usually a bit of self-hatred in there and not actually effective for self-change. Hoping just-- so-- but I've been thinking a lot about it. Is it-- 

I was thinking about it in some relationships I was having where I was admittedly hoping somebody would change. I didn't like how they were being, and I was hoping and we had a difficult conversation in this relationship, and they asked me what I wanted. And I was like, I need to let hope die, actually, because it doesn't feel loving to you to keep hoping that you're going to be something that you're not. 

So in some ways, I can be quite suspicious of hope because and even and even as a priest, I was thinking about it as a preschool teacher. And I often think-- because then you think, well, hope on the political level, like to give up hope, does that mean I don't engage? That mean I kind of accept things as they are? Does that mean I am cynical? Like that's where when I take this idea, it kind of doesn't work or doesn't smell so good. 

And I often when I'm thinking about political things, go back to preschool classrooms because so much of what's political happens in those spaces. And I was like, well, if I think about a reoccurring conflict with children, does hope serve me in helping them move through it? And I was like, yes and no. And this is what I'm getting to. It doesn't actually hope help me if I'm like, man, every day you two kids, you fight and it's driving me nuts, I just hope you stop. Because that means I come into the conflict negotiation between them with an agenda. And that usually never helps them actually do the work that they need to do to find the solutions that will help them move through that problem. 

So I would say yeah, no hope can obscure us from the reality. And that the seeds to moving forward are often buried in the complexities of the reality of what's happening. And hope often takes us to some utopic place that doesn't exist yet. But then I was like, but if I really never hoped that those kids would get through it, or that some cultural conflict would get solved, I wouldn't keep working. 

So then I came to I think hope has to be in a really specific place, almost really diffuse in the peripheral vision and in this gentle sense that something good and beautiful and loving is possible. But as soon as that becomes concrete, I think it gets in the way. So that's how I understand hope right now. This-- it could almost be like a Yeah, something almost very far away and faint and yet pervasive and intimate. 

MICHAEL FUHRMAN: What I am noticing about that is potentially the idea that it plays a strong role in the imagination as well, too, both in the personal and the political, where we don't want to only have hope that these two children can find calmness in their differences, because we enjoy to be able to imagine or hope for the world where there is no conflict between those two. And then at an interpersonal level, having hope to imagine a quote unquote better version of the self, but not wanting to become too committed to that false illusion when we could be more at peace with the person that we are with the body that we're in and all those things. Do you have any immediate reaction? 

NICOLE MARIE: Yeah, when you said it's in the imagination, it's like, yeah, it's an imaginative function, hope, and soul-making actually is really closely linked to what's called the imaginal. And it's like the imagination can be both problematic or transcendent. I personally have experienced that. For me, it is how the divine speaks is through that transcendent function of the imagination. But I can also imagine you hate me right now, and then I'm in hell, basically. And so it's like, I think deep hope is in that. It has humility, coming back to humility. 

It's like, I actually don't know the answer. It's like when my hope thinks it knows the answer is usually when I'm in trouble. But if my hope is like a poise of the heart that stays open to the complexities of the moment and who's before me and the reality and staying present. When it functions that way, it's got for me a deeply mysterious quality to it. 

MICHAEL FUHRMAN: Well, I appreciate that-- both the context and the practice that happens as well too, in all that thinking and how you're obviously pulling from these different I'll call them spiritual wells that you have both in the personal but then also in those relational models that you've found or made or helped to build as well too. When you think about cultivating hope in this way, maybe to use your language, to keep the heart poised in that direction or in that mode. Are there any specific you could say, practices, rituals, writings or readings, things that help you move back towards that position? 

NICOLE MARIE: Yeah. I'm thinking of two that my meditation teacher Catherine gave, which I think are two variations of the same poise, but that I think both of them just popped into my mind. One I just heard her teach about in a retreat this June, which was to say I will withdraw the burden of having to understand you on my terms in relationship to anything other people, animals, the divine. 

So often, say with the conflict with children, I come thinking I know everything about what's going on right here. And that's like-- and I force the other, whoever the other is, the divine or you, Michael, to relate to me on the way that I think I do. And I think that's a really subtle kind of-- violence is a strong word, but I think, like and when I withdraw the burden of having to understand you on my terms, it's magic what can happen. So that's one. 

And then the other one that I think is adjacent is there was a practice of apologizing to the other if I've ever thought I could understand you or anything less than a mystery. And just quietly, not actually, but I do this a lot with plants and animals or even just non-sentient things that I think I could fully understand the depth of your mystery. And it's not as though I then replace it with some idea of what those things are, but to allow whatever other to stand in its full autonomy and depth and mystery, opens the heart in a way that provides the soft hope. It's not hope that's built on the idea that I know what's best. 

MICHAEL FUHRMAN: I think a life of mystery, imagination and play sounds like a wonderfully fruitful life, for sure. 

NICOLE MARIE: Yeah. Thank you. 

MICHAEL FUHRMAN: So thank you so much for sharing those different things with us. It sounds so exciting to get to find different opportunities to bring those into my own life. And maybe some people who might be listening might be interested in taking those into their own as well, too, as they approach, as you say, relationship with others or all things that we have. 

NICOLE MARIE: You're so good at finding the words that distill all those lots of words that I gave. Amazing. What a gift. Thank you. 

MICHAEL FUHRMAN: Well, Thank you so much for coming in and having a conversation with me today. I really appreciate it. And am both saddened and enlivened at the fact that we both get to graduate together this coming spring. And so Yeah, just thanks again. 

NICOLE MARIE: Thank you. You're very welcome. 

MICHAEL FUHRMAN: Yay. 

NICOLE MARIE: Yay. 

[LAUGHTER] 

So fun. 

MICHAEL FUHRMAN: So fun. 

NICOLE MARIE: It's my number one fantasy is being interviewed about things. Do that. I love it. I just love being interviewed. 

[BIRDS CHIRPING]