You came like a bolt of lightning in the form of a man. You gazed into my eyes and showed me myself. You quieted my mind and dropped me into Awareness. You held my hand and coursed through me like a river of pulsing vibration. You came into me and shook me with pleasure. You told me all you know and showed me who I am. You glimpsed the future and revealed the past. You broke through my illusions and unveiled the truth. You created miracles and so did I. Together, we were a miracle. Together, we were God seeing God, Goddess staring into the eyes of Goddess, witnessing Creation Itself, Stillness Incarnate. We merged together, one Unibeing, one Mind, one Heart, one Body. We became heaven on earth, the Godself celebrating the Godself, Shiva dancing with Shakti, wholeness embodied, skipping hand in hand on the beach like magical children with enjoyment bodies of light.
We created together—a baby, masterpieces of art, scientific discoveries, books filled with wisdom, the ecstasy of a dance, epiphanies bubbling up like waves in the ocean, crashing on the shore into explosions of understanding. Love erupted from the heart and birthed itself in intimate embraces that activated our bodies and quieted our minds. You grounded me. I inspired you. You stilled me and showed me the truth of my Beingness. I became your muse, leaping you into the world and into the truth of your creativity and genius. I fell in love. You fell in love too.
And then you left me, dying to all that We were. You as one man and then another ran off and left me, leaving me heartbroken and abandoned, shattered and despairing. You left me as others I loved too, disappearing into death. A brain tumor took you from me. You fell into the ocean and was swept out to sea. A rock slide crashed down a mountain and crushed you. They dropped a bomb on you, and you left me. Your form disappeared, leaving behind only half of me, hurt, listless and sore, like a wound with a body that doesn’t know how to move, like a heart bleeding out, hemorrhaging life force through the gaping hole in the center of me. You disappeared from my gaze, the two eyes that beheld me closed forever. I weep, grief-stricken, rejected, alone. You cracked me open and left me with the gash in my heart. You just left. How dare you.
Now down into the dark night I go, groping through the shadows of what I thought would last forever, lost . . . lost . . . lost . . . abandoning me like all the others who have abandoned me before. Who has my back here in this hell of darkness? Why have You forsaken me when I need You most? What am I doing here? What am I supposed to learn? How am I meant to grow? Who will comfort me when this pain sears through me like a hot sword of truth, cutting away the illusion of safety and certainty, bringing me face to face with the illusory nature of all I hold dear? How will I handle this vulnerability of love, the gut-wrenching rawness in the center of my chest, this recognition that all that I cherish might be swept from me by a careless and indifferent tsunami? How will I keep my heart open when the world feels so unsafe?
You have betrayed me when I trusted you, disappearing just as you showed Yourself to me in all your most buoyant, exuberant glory. Why would you show me what’s possible only to rip it from me? Why is this happening? Please help me understand.
Down I go again, deeper into tears and loss, bursting into the contractions of my heart, like labor pains I can only breathe through as they rip through me again and again. Breathe in life. Breathe out death. Breathe in life. Breathe out death.
As I descend from the heart to the gut, sound escapes, like the howl of an animal, wounded and trapped, guttural and suffering, the sound of something that can’t get free, something that yearns to end the pain but knows it must keep going into the dark night, yet this animal is afraid for its life. If it stays trapped, it suffers. If it breaks free, it dies.
There is no way out but to go deeper into the shadow, and so it drops down from the gut into the pelvis, into the womb of all creation, where the pain of losing You is a hurting thing, a tender thing, a pain so primal it can’t speak. It can only cry from the core, shaking my body and rocking my heart with its waves of pain. I cannot fight it for it is bigger than me, so as with labor, I surrender into it. Resistance does no good, so I give up trying to fight it, defeated. Fighting the pain only guts me more. As much as I don’t want to, I let it take me over, like a lover that thrusts into me, penetrating me with what I can hardly bear. Only somehow, I bear it as it pierces me. I am undone.
Breathe in life. Breathe out death. Breathe in life. Breathe out death. Breathe in life. Breathe out death. Breathe in life. Breathe out death. Just one more breath and maybe I can make it through this, just this one breath, and so I breathe in life, breathe out death and pray pray pray “Take me help me take me help me” only I can’t hear You. I can’t see You.
Resist nothing. Reject nothing. Be with what is. Relax into it. Let it burn through you. Feel the heat as it fires you from within. Breathe out the heat. Breathe in the cool air of the morning rain. Breathe out the fire. Breathe in the kernel of peace that arises like grace.
Oh, my. There it was—just for a second, that morsel of a balm, that bit of respite like the gull that flies in silence through the navel of the tempest. And then I am the gull, and there are no wings to beat, only a floating flight and an awareness of Being. I rest. My body stops shaking. My heart stops its palpitations and relaxes into an even thumping. My mind is quiet of all its noise. For just a moment, I am mindful. I am heartful. I am bodyful.
And then a laugh erupts, just a giggle at first and then something that arises deeper from inside the belly. I am laughing at myself. I am laughing at You. I am hysterical for how I go on and on about how you left me and what a hurt little princess I am, how you rejected me, how you died to me and violated me, how you betrayed my trust and disappeared after showing me who I was, after showing me who You are.
Ouch. Oh, my. Oh, darling. What if it is I who rejected you? What if, in my delusion, I am the one who forgot who You are, my God, my Goddess? What if it is I who keep rejecting You, moment after moment, day after day, when You are right here, heartbroken like me that I have forgotten Who You Are when You have never left me? What if I am the betrayer who rejects the One I most love with my ignorance, unconscious of my deep forgetting?
What if nobody ever left me when I was a little girl who just wanted love? What if You did not forsake me when you promised to stay and then disappeared? What if You never abandoned me like I thought you did? What if You have been here all along, through all the men who come and go, through all the humans who are born and then die? What if it is I who left you, my love? Have I been rejecting You, God/Goddess of my heart? Have I been the abandoner when all I want is to be One with You?
Oh oh oh. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Oh. Shame. No, shame doesn’t help. Don’t let shame grab on. Remorse. No, that doesn’t help either. Accept. Accept. Accept. Resist nothing. Accept everything. We are all doing the fucking best we can. It is hard to be human. I am doing my best. You are doing your best through me. We are doing our best.
Breathe in life. Breathe out death. Breathe in life. Breathe out death.
I feel that you don’t judge me one bit. You smile this sweet smile, so tender, like a mother whose child is sometimes naughty, but so dear, so tender and mischievous and sometimes forgetful. You hold me in vast arms of unconditional love the way I never do with You. You hold no grudge. You withhold no love. You only clasp me in your arms and whisper, “Resist nothing. Accept everything. Embrace this Life and just say YES.” You blow softly in my ear, “Shhhhh . . . Shhhh . . . ”
I exhale. Finally.
Is this what happens when we feel the Original Wound, when You made Me and then hid from me Who I Am? Every time I feel abandoned by those I love, is it really that I am abandoning My Creator? Oh . . . the grief surfaces again. That hurts deep. That wounds deep. I have forgotten Who I Am, and it shows up every time I grieve, and yet I will keep loving, keep losing. This is my life now. I wish I would never forget, but I am so human. I hurt deep when it feels like You—You in all Your forms—leave me.
Maybe this is a blessing, this dark night of the soul. Maybe it is only here that we find one another, that we crack through comfort and the illusion of certainty, that we come face to face against what we most fear, when we are left with nothing but the Truth and it is here that we shatter the illusion of separation and enter the age of reunion, when You and I are One again—and we remember Who We Really Are.
What if You never left me, through all those abandoned broken hearts and all those painful deaths? What if You have been here all along? What if I don’t have to leave you ever again? What if I can never ever forget?
Maybe I will forget less often now that I have seen You in Me and the Oneness in all things, and I will bury this knowingness in the pulse of my heart so that maybe with each burst of blood, it will shoot through me like a reminder.
You are Me. I am You. We are never apart. I will try to remember.
In Love,
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