A funny thing happened on the way to my future life.
I resisted.
I kicked and screamed.
I bit my fist.
Even as my feet moved me forward, I turned my face away.
I dulled my eyes and stuffed myself with cereal: an old story from when I was a girl. A familiar destructive comfort. Artifice.
Still looking for footing there, in the old way, even as the Earth moved within to expose
a vacuum.
Isn't it funny?
How we spend days, nights, years asking for change. How we vision board it. We dance with it. We call it in. Hell, I've even demanded it from God with a vengeant fist shake. No wonder that fist is in my own mouth, now.
And then it comes. It comes to those who call: in sweeping motion. Like a riptide. The dream arrives, perhaps slips in through a window or back door, and asks you
to Let Go,
again,
of everything you thought you knew.
Of the relationships you love.
Of familiar environments.
Of stories of sameness.
Of everything so far you've been.
Except that deeper truth. A whispering. Your own longing for freedom and self-mastery.
This is a process. An analysis of shedding layers. An experiment of building trust inside a world of refracted illusion.
Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better. - Rainer Maria Rilke
Good Grief
Life is dreaming itself through you.
The truest passions of your heart belong to Life. Holy Desires, governed by the One Organism.
There's little to do but align with life, lubricate your vessel, and act naturally, through the vehicle of inspiration.
Warm and wet the channel of yourself, that Life may pass through uninhibited.
Merge with the Mystery of Transformation.
Let your little self grieve!
My dreams have called me to them, and I am responding. Layers upon layers of fear, anxiety, disbelief have worked themselves up through my awareness. I was sick with colds and stomach flu. My lungs got constricted, then spongy. For weeks I could not take a full breath without encountering an accumulation of 'stuff.' I felt there was material within holding on, and that I couldn't move it or access it.
Then I went away from home to a retreat, in a land where ancient rocks confront you with yourself. I was alone. I trained and meditated in a temple. In sitting, a wellspring rose up, and finally broke the surface.
I wailed there, held in the silence. Stories of broken sisterhood; trends passed down. Sadness. Betrayal. Projection. Entrapment. The pain of separation and loss.
Emotion is water; it cleanses body, mind, spirit, beyond. Material stays trapped in the psyche unless it's allowed to spring rise to the surface when the time has come. There, with the rocks and a stunning doula as my witness, the pain from these happenings left my body. I felt it dissipate into the atmosphere. Absorbed by the boulders surrounding: our memory-keepers and protectors.
Ensconced and shiny,
I was giving birth.
Charon, in a rust-colored skiff
crossing the River Styx
To territory I can't know ahead of time.
Something I can only Live into.