...and many times I have come back down and found my old habits waiting for me, like the 'dirty laundry'. The messiness of my life. I didn't go to India. I stood stranded in Hot Springs, Arkansas, left by a friend of a friend, who was drunk, and when I walked into the Best Western, there was a huge statue of Ganesha. I fell immediately at his feet and prayed for a safe trip back to St. Louis. As I left the same building, I turned a corner, and there, 20 feet high, was a sparkling mosaic of Jesus. Jesus and Ganesha. I felt loved. I felt safe in my uncertainty. I spent the day in the park sitting in deep meditation, and when I went to get a bite to eat, the waitress looked at me like I was the sun. That was in 2007.
I've stood outside Whole Foods Grocery on Brentwood Blvd. in St. Louis, feeling unable to speak or even attempt a thought, after barely making it out of my car, because, while driving the experience of 'No Self' began. I disappeared. I was nowhere and everywhere. I was filled with immense grief and boundless joy at once. My face felt as if it would break from tears and smiles. I could not remember how to speak, when I called my father, afraid I would collapse right there on the sidewalk in ecstasy. The fear of finding myself rushed to a hospital, instead of allowed to exist in that beautiful space was so valid, I dared not go farther than to stand at the edge of the vastness, gazing out with a mixture of fear and wonder... That was in 2008.
I've walked in the park, gazing up at the moon, looking down at the bones of mice dropped by owls, and felt an indescribable peace. I've passed by the spot where a dead tree I dearly loved to sit under had finally been uprooted, and collapsed on the spot in grief. Only to be laughed at by a passing bycyclist, and realize, in that split second, how there was no seperation between her inability to feel the loss of wonder and mine to feel it.
I've walked underneath a huge Pin Oak, to see a tiny baby squirrel, foaming in agony with rabies, drop from the tree branch above, right in front of me. Missing my face by inches, as I stooped to cry with him, and hover my hands over his body, sending him Reiki, because I dare not touch him. I sat there, suffering with the squirrel, tears streaming down my face, as a carload of kids drove by and laughed at me. Then something miraculous happened: the foam on the squirrel's mouth dried up, and he rolled around and away for a bit. Then he began to clean himself. The palsied frenzy was over. Was it the Reiki I wondered? My then boyfriend showed up to tell me, in all selfishness, that we needed to get going, and it was, after all, just a squirrel. I felt compassion for him in his inability to feel oneness with the squirrel, just as I had been able to with the squirrel. I felt a quiet grace descend.
I was in Negril, Jamaica once, back on the cliffs, after having eaten a plate of scrambled eggs and mushrooms, and I saw at once how everything was divine, all illumined by grace. The plants and trees had luminous halos and auras. The roach on the wall became as beautiful as an irridescent beetle. All black and red with the intricate angles of its body. The waves of the ocean were me, and I had to restrain myself from diving into them from the 40 foot cliff wall, just because I wanted to merge back into the ocean. An sole almond fell from the tree above me, drawing me even deeper into the awareness that the sky was the ocean. That I was the ocean, and it was all 'The Same Sea', like the title of Amos Oz' book.
I fell asleep once on my living room floor, sick with salmonella poisoning, to awaken as my body became ablaze with light and sound, my internal eye focused on a wash of kaleidoscopic colors opening into the tunnel of my own spine. I felt carried on waves of bliss so far beyond any orgasm I've ever experienced, and then was heartbroken when the experience vanished. That was in 1996.
In 1996 as well, I experienced my mother's death as if I were with her, while I sat miles away on the toilet, crying with grief. I knew someone close to me was dying, as I cried in agony and fear. Then an immense peace came over me, and I went back to bed to rest in it.
I've had these experiences, and many others, only to come back to this life and it's mundanity, slipping back into old habits and ways of being. It isn't about spiritual attainment of a goal, or about enlightenment. I've had many moments of enlightenment where the presence of my divine nature and the world's was imminent. It is about not that, but holding the space for those moments as well as the ones where I and others have crashed and burned, where we want to cling so madly to the belief that somehow, soon, we will reach the top of some ladder's rungs and stay forever exalted, where we run so hard and fast from our shadows, and the darkness that we must necessarily contain with the light, that we think, conversely, any fall from grace is not just part of the cycle, but death.
It isn't death, it is the process of living. Like the opening and closing of butterflies' wings, like breath breathed and released and let go, if we are to truly be alive, we must let go, let the beautiful moment pass...enjoy it, then exhale it. And then rather than chide ourselves for not having become perfect, or not being able to keep the bliss, allow for these other moments of grief, anger, sadness, rage and anxiety to pass through. Not clinging to them either. Just being ready for joy AND sorrow. Breath and no breath. Delight and no light. It is this fear of exhaling completely and letting go into every single moment, whether painful or peaceful, that keeps the heart from opening. In order to truly breathe another breath into the heart, the last breath must be released. Like the monkey who grabs for candy in a jar, we can't get our fist back out until we let go.
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