Ilmestys
“God? A surface of ice anchored to laughter. That was God.”
Turn your private pain into something that enlightens you. Every malady is a lesson striving to be understood by your spirit.
Today I created a safe place to cry. I lit a candle before sunrise and a wand of incense that smelled like yellow. I placed it in Ganesha's hand and sat wrapped in my white blanket at His feet. My hands in my lap caught the tears that made it past my chin. I woke up wet and wondering why I am here.
Why am I here?
I want so badly to be seen and loved and belong.
I want so badly to feel necessary and valuable.
I want so badly to possess what is ephemeral.
Him- and my furious heart that never lies!
I need to go into the disquiet that threatens to break every container I've ever created.
I'm sitting in a heap of broken eggshells. Sticky by the yolk, snot runs into my tears.
I was born to a woman named Joe under a red light when the moon waned and the trees were wet with late summer. She held my head and whispered the softest songs into my skin. She wove a tapestry of love around my body with her words. I could not see past the bucket of blackness I purged from my body. The white of my dress glowed in her hands.
I wanted to be back inside of her and fill myself with Him to hold onto the feeling of being with someone. Belonging. How do you fill yourself with that desire?
I purge to remind myself of the bleakness of being and my exhaustion is unnecessary. There is a way to hold and be held. I do not know how to embrace both.
The paradox binds me and it will also be the one to set me free.
You are free, he says. I know, I say.
But I'm not.
I've tied myself to him with my wounds from past lovers. Joe left me on the ground on all fours, where I heaved and heaved and spat up parts of my soul. The Shadow.
But I need that too!
I need everything- I need all of it- it is all OF ME and who am I without it?
I wish I could slither on my belly without hands or feet that remind me of the grief of being human.
I wish I could lay on Joe's lap with her hands in my hair and in her eyes; I see all the ways we could make love and be together forever.
Instead, she helped me recline and layered me with feathers and stones and a blanket of silver threads. She brushed my hair and kissed my face with her fingertips and rang bells above and below until Sheba appeared and danced between the rocks where the water and sand swayed with her hips.
The desert was where I was meant to be, and now I do not know where to go. Sheba, don't desert me; I need you to tell me what to do.
Joe would not speak. I blacked out and came to with a mouth of saliva I did not know what to do with, so I swallowed.
Word and world are separated by one letter, one line.
Why do you believe?
Why bother with a God that doesn't exist on earth?
Why worry about the outcome if we are not around to experience it?
If faith is believing in the unseen, I am a most devoted person.
I never see him and cannot physically be with him and yet he is the loudest song in my heart.
Joe left me. She had to. This is the way it must be. I stood up on my own and walked with my feet bare to the stage, where I sat and sang with the harp and guitar. That is all I have: that note of belonging is a song we all gather to create.
I do not know what my message is. I do not know what the story is. I am in a dark, deep discovery process. I am sad and suffering and no matter how much caffeine I consume, I cannot shake the feeling of being alone.
We are born alone and we die alone and yet we belong to something so much greater.
It is close now, the ending. Days. Perhaps less. Ganesha sat with me today and reminded me of how one thing must be destroyed for something else to appear.
Have faith, in what- in yourself.
Have faith in the mystery of what is FELT that cannot be dissected, discussed, or destroyed.
Have faith in the love, in the pure sensation of being seen and received for exactly what you are at that moment.
All you have is that moment; he tells you you are free, babe.
You are free.
Photo source.
