Setting Scraps of Light on Fire

Scraps of light through the adobe ruins next to the grove

Today is my one year blogoversary.  It is this and only this that has finally gotten me to sit down and write a post.  I have missed blogging and think about it almost every day, but my life has become so full of other things that I haven't had the inspiration.  To find some, I walked over to the church today, but there were too many people around so I ended up in the grove, where I sat and wrote this post by hand.   I have found myself sitting in the grove more often lately than in the church courtyard.  It's green again, although the mass graves of trees are still untended.

So much has happened since I last posted, that I don't know where to begin.  Should I tell you about my busy life?  The immense sense of loss and sadness I've been feeling?  Should I talk about how disconnected I've become from my writing?  

Or maybe I should try to be more positive, and tell you about my discoveries about bats, or the white cat I keep seeing, or my lemon tree dream.  But all these things are moments that have passed, inspirations that have faded in the face of too much work.

I'm not happy.  I know I need to just accept the way my life is right now, surrender to it.  Believe me, I'm working on that moment by moment, but there is a very sad little girl inside me who wants to come out and play.  And I don't know what to tell her to make her stop banging on the door.

And I realize how much I miss you all, my blogging friends.  It's not only the writing that I miss, it's the community, the support.  I feel very alone in my life these days, very much like I'm carrying a heavy burden by myself.  Stumbling and faltering under it.

But life goes on, and I just keep taking the next step.  At times I have glimpses of all this as a journey of significance, but mostly it just feels like stumbling in the dark.  I get tired of trying to hang onto the scraps of light that are tossed me.  I get mad at God for not giving me more, and then I'm ashamed for feeling that way.

And that's why I need - NEED - to write about those scraps, because it's the only way for me to hold onto them as guides, as reminders of the greater journey, the better story.  I need to tell you about last week when I had both a butterfly and a dragonfly on my finger in the same day.  They were both trapped in my house at different points, and I freed them.  

I need to tell you about dreaming of a sugarlaced lemon tree so glorious that gazing up into it was like eating the sun.

I need to tell you about the lessons bats have been trying to teach me about surrender and rebirth, about echolocation, in which bats navigate in the dark by using their voices to create sounds that reverberate off objects - the ability to see with the ears, to hear with the voice.  Because by telling you, I have a greater chance of really learning the lessons, internalizing and integrating them.  I too hear with my voice.  I learn by teaching.

And now, just by writing all this, I feel lighter, happier, inspired, free.  It occurs to me that this post follows a similar structure to some of the biblical psalms that start out with a lament and end with praise because by writing the lament the psalmist has seen the joy again.

Now I see that the writing I haven't been doing had hardened around me like ice, that scraps of light left unshared leave me cold, and once that happens, I have to write into the cold to break through it.

The fire must be tended or it dies out.  The fire must be fed, and for me that means writing it. 

Self-Trotter

I'm losing my religion.  No, I'm not talking about Christianity.  That's a religion I could never "lose" because it's written into my soul.  My understanding and expression of it can and does deepen and change and grow, but what is essential in it cannot be lost, because, in the words of A Course in Miracles, "Nothing real can be threatened."

What I'm losing is the religion of "I need a partner to be complete," which is probably the most popular religion in the world, with the most convincing propaganda.  "Can't live without you," "You complete me," "You are my everything," are just a portion of its liturgy.

This process began several months ago with a short but powerful dream.  I was driving to my sort-of-sometimes-partner's house with the familiar feeling of anticipation and anxiety.  I need to see him.  What if he's not there?  What if he's with a woman?  It was nighttime, and there was a massive thunderstorm going on.  I could barely see the dirt road that leads to his place, and feared I would drive off the side into the ditch.  I was forced to slow down almost to the point of stopping, but was determined to go on.  I had to get there.  But all of a sudden, there was a huge flash of lightning that encompassed the whole scene.  I found myself enveloped and completely stopped by blinding light.  And in that moment, I just surrendered to it.  I gave up.  It was as though a voice deep inside me was saying, Stop this nonsense.  You are already here.  This light is what you want, and you are in it.  BE in it.  And I became very still and felt something akin to ecstasy in that living, permeating light.  I woke up.

The significance  and experience of this dream was so incredibly simple and obvious, so powerful, that it has remained prominent in my mind even though I didn't write it down and it was months ago.  But it's only now that I'm really starting to live its message, to truly be in that light without trying to get anywhere else.

And this has left me in a strange new space that keeps unfolding.  Until the other day, I couldn't say anything about it, but thanks to some blogging and other friends, I've found some words for it.  One thing I see now is that it's not even relationships I've been addicted to, but THINKING about relationships.  Since kindergarten, there's always been some boy on my mind.  Always.  And I get it now, that the need is to define myself against someone else.  Do I exist if you don't?  Hmmm.  I've realized that the only times I wasn't thinking about a boy, I was thinking about someone who might be mad at me, or someone I'm mad at.  It's about conflict, distance.  Needing to define my own existence as apart from, NOT together with someone else's, as it might appear.  Pure ego crap, to put it bluntly.

So now here I am, no longer a slave to those thoughts.  Now how do I define myself?  Well, I haven't been.  Which is why I've had nothing to say.  I've been deconstructed, I have no walls to bounce off, just free floating.  And I'm very aware that no matter what I say, I'm just making up stories, none of which are ultimately true.  And yet, as Kate put it in a comment on my last post, writing is the way to "know my insides."  The stories are not true, but can contain truth, as it much as truth CAN be contained.  And even more to the point, they construct meaning, a way of understanding.  Language has its limits, but can, at its best, point to truth.    

Jennifer and I had a conversation the other day about the limits of language, and how some words are just not adequate for what they describe.  The specific word in question was "recovery."  I don't think this word does justice to what it defines.  As Jennifer said, it implies a mask, a re-covering.  Once your light is uncovered, why re-cover it?  The word we agreed was better is "remembering," as in remembering who you really are, as in re-membering.  Sorting out and recreating the members of your being.  This is what's happening to me now.

I'm amazed at how quickly after re-entering the blogosphere, I gained inspiration and understanding through my blogging friends.  On Claire's blog the other day, she posted a quote about "inner geography," a term I immediately resonated with.  It gave me the language, the analogy to begin describing where I am.  It's as though I'm standing on the mountaintop of my inner geography for the first time in my life, exhausted and exhilarated from the climb, totally, gloriously alone, surveying my whole landscape.  But it all looks strange and unfamiliar from this vantage point, and I feel detached from it - I'm not IN it, consumed by it anymore.

The paradoxical beauty of this is that when I'm outdoors now, when I'm sitting in the grove by the church, for instance, I am oh so much more fully IN the grass, the sky, the birdsong, the breeze.

In Claire's post, she discussed an upcoming trip she's taking.  That woman is always going somewhere new in the world, and I admitted my envy of her being a globe-trotter.  She came back and said that I was a "self-trotter."  Yes.  I am traveling the world of myself, which is the world.  I'm in it, and it's everywhere in me.  Hallelujah.  As Rumi said, "To praise the sun is to praise your own eyes."  Hallelujah indeed.

A Sacrifice of Praise

Life is amazing.  Just when you think there's nothing left, no hope, no color, no meaning, you get a glorious surprise.  We say and we shape and we dance around everything, always trying to reconnect, always working, always penetrating, only to find that we actually did know the whole time what we knew.

I'm here to say that life is good.  Because it's life.  All the horror in the world is to show us the way beyond horror.  All the buttons our loved ones push are to show us the buttons so we can leave them alone.  All the brokenness points to the wholeness that has always and will always exist, and only exists.  Does this make any sense?  Why have a world like this?  It can seem a cruel joke, but the only ripe option is to trust.  To embrace the mystery.  To become the beloved.

I love and I love and I love.  There is nowhere else to go.  Every blooming thing is a gift, if I know how to unwrap it.  And thankfully, everyone and everything shows me how.  Hallelujah.