Jane A. Rothfeld

When I was 24, I returned to live in my childhood home and started working at a cheese and gourmet food shop two towns away. I felt defeated. For six years, I had tried to craft my interests to fit the mold my parents and community insisted was mandatory to my success, but it had not worked. My one true love was God and achieving God-realization. No school taught that. No school can teach that. I didn’t need a degree to get closer to God.

I watched as my peers graduated college, then professional schools, and started careers and families while I earned minimum wage cutting wedges of cheese, voraciously reading books about spiritual saints and masters in my spare time.

Why was I so intensely drawn to this? Was it to avoid the responsibilities of adulthood, as some suggested? What could I do with this passion in the world given that I felt no connection to existing religions and the potential jobs they offered?

One day at the cheese shop, Mimi Fogel walked in. Mimi Fogel was Freddy Fogel’s mother. Freddy was my childhood boyfriend. Freddy and I had fallen in love when I was five. The Fogel home was like a beating heart in my five-year-old world and Mimi was its matriarch.

Shortly after my sixth birthday, my family moved away from the apartment complex we shared with the Fogels. In the midst of our love affair Freddy and I were separated. Apart from one brief meeting of the families shortly after they too moved, I did not see the Fogels again.

And so, many years later, while standing behind a counter wrapping cheese, I once again saw Mimi Fogel. Disbelief and joy ricocheted in my chest as I heard her unmistakable voice. We exchanged words of surprise and delight.

Knowing nothing of my secret passion — God and brie do not pair well — Mimi told me this: “You were always such an abstract thinker. Even at 4 yrs. old, you used to sit in the back of the car and talk about God and the cosmos.”

Unbeknownst to her, among the wheels of Jarlsberg and sacks of gourmet coffee, Mimi Fogel gave me back a piece of my self that completed an inner puzzle I had been desperately trying to assemble without even knowing it. I realized my love of God was even older than I. I had come into life already brimming with it. It wasn’t an aberration or childish frivolity. It was part of my core. It was solid.

Despite all the pressures of being a seeker of spiritual truth (pick any era on Earth and you’ll find pressures) I remain true to this quest. I know the state of absolute freedom is the essence of every person. It is the place from which each one of us originated and it is the place-less place to which each of us will inevitably return. I hold this vision in my heart and hands not only for myself, but for you, whether you are my dear reader or my esteemed coaching client.

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