Resurrection

I am aching to tell my story, the story of the countless times I have died, I have forgotten, I have been diminished and squandered, and the beauty of how something in me keeps bringing me back – whispering, nudging, opening places I would rather forget. I know it is not life itself that defeats me, but what I believe about life and I am in dire need of a new story – something I carry with conviction in a secret, sacred, untouchable place where my deepest loves can be seeded and all my fear and shame can decompose.

I once sat in a meditation so profound that my awareness rose one by one through all the spheres of body, feeling, mind, and beyond. All sense of this lifetime’s identity was gone and I was simply profoundly aware of an infinite, loving, emptiness. When I realized I had to come back to my body, I was struck with a desperate grief I had never known before. In that moment something in me vowed never to return until my life here has ended to spare me the pain of another separation.

I once fell in love with a man whose poetry kindled my muse such that my daily inner dialogue became song. We saw the oaks and the river, the milkweed and wingtip through the same eyes of metaphor and the world became animated in each small gesture with meaning both meant for us and for eternity. I hummed with a delicious awe and reverence for mystery as events and images and sentiments all rose and spun together on this thread that was uniquely mine and connected to everything that has ever existed. I was seeing myself, mySelf, as only a deeply reverent witness can – peering outward at it all and back inward through the images woven through the beloved words that flew between us. And my mind wanted more, it wanted deeper union, it wanted certainty our wounded skins can never promise. Our bond grew thin, burned, and was buried in bitter tears over losing contact with the part of me I can only know through its reflection.

I once gathered a circle of women and invited them each to speak of something tender and true, and for each of us to acknowledge how that creature moved in us. We unearthed a collective sorrow so deep, we collapsed in a pile of weeping, embracing, whispering trembling secrets that rose as pure and unrehearsed as bubbles simmering. We stood in a ring, arms entwining shoulders, envisioning our roots born of this naked communal sorrow burrowing deep into the earth to bind us no matter how far our feet wandered the earth. I departed vibrating with the profound nourishment of a previously unknown hunger, aching and restlessly searching for how I might find it again.

How is it that these moments find me? And how is it that I fall asleep into my life, asleep again to that most essential part of me? It needs to be remembered and nurtured in solitude. And it needs a portal through which to express, be cherished, and thereby look back on itself with the satisfaction of existing. For a thing that is not acknowledged is not of this world, and when that thing is the core of us, we wander ghostly, timid and ambivalent to this life. There is the fear of how to survive, the fear that lives in the body of all things seeking food, shelter, safety. If it overtakes us, we are consumed by insatiable greed, exploitation, consumption. Then there is the fear at the heart of each conscious thing that it is irrelevant, unnecessary, forgettable. And if it consumes us we become either absorbed in a shallow vanity or dissolved in a hazy, mechanical, somabulance.

My life appears to me as a wasteland devoid of portals for my essence to express and be cherished, so I am withering under the growing grief that what I am at my core is irrelevant and forgettable. It is easier to commit myself to the business of surviving, for that receives some accolades, but divorced from my vitality, there is no pleasure in any of it. It is a sullen duty I can devote a lifetime to without reward. When some event or encounter pierces the veil and I see how trapped I am by the business of survival – of the job to pay for food and shelter that demands every free moment be spent tending the addiction, isolation, and illness it created – I am not being melodramatic when I crumple on the floor at midnight in a heap of moaning that I am dying.

I am dying. Not my body – it is being showered with attention – but the forgotten essence at the core of me: that aperture through which I floated in infinite, loving, emptiness; through which I encountered myself in the flight of beloved metaphors; through which roots burrowed deep into the earth to find the feet of women attuned to this very same joy and sorrow. A hundred hearts can love me and a thousand tongues can speak of my worth, but if my lyrical voice is not unleashing the wonder and beauty of the vulnerable rawness of being alive, and being savored by some soul-thirsty witness then I am hidden from myself and marching the solemn gray road to death.

This is where stories have the power to kill. I was the one who let grief block that portal, who sighed: “Never again do I want to feel the pain of this loss”, who vowed she could not live without the communion she was gifted, who still rails against and resents the ebb and flow of union and separation that must invariably accompany the gift of a body. “Who could possibly,” I ask myself, “care enough about what I have to say to grant me all the access I need to food and shelter so I can follow this dialogue as deep and broad as it leads me? Or what,” I continue, “could I possibly do to secure food and shelter that would minimally interrupt or even nourish this conversation?” I am not the man who pitched a tent in the redwoods for a year to earn what he needed for food by translating the trees for hungry souls. Or am I? Do these sacrifices I make to calm my anxieties and to treat my disorders build a foundation for creation or simply deepen the wound? When is the sickness an invitation to pace ourselves, and when is it a vow to back away from life? And how do I know that the sense of union is destined to be lost, or that I must find a compatible survival dance in order for it to thrive?

This is where stories have the power to resurrect. Or perhaps they simply nourish the new life resurrected by grace, for I do not understand what in me fuels such deep despair at this separation or whispers so incessantly for me to turn inwards towards home. Whatever the reason, that solemn gray road to death is punctuated by potholes that jerk me with a stumble to look out at my surroundings and shiver. It is crisscrossed with flickers of colorful wings and fragmented melodies that reach me on the breeze. What I first encounter in those moments is grief and despair – a remembering in the swaddled depth of my numbness that I have lost something precious through some doing of my own and that life is not worth living without it. If I allow that pain to pierce me through, a trickle begins with the flavor of what it felt like to live what I loved, followed by the birthing contractions – the push towards and the withdrawal of hopelessness. That I choose to follow the flickers and fragments is a thing of wonder made possible by words. I must redeem my sleep as a catalyst through narrative, for we do not seek what we do not long for, and we do not long for what we have not lost. And in this way, grief shepherds us to the threshold we had closed between ourselves and what was unbearable to lose. If we allow it to consume us, the block is breached and we find ourselves encountering again what we truly are.

So I say to you as I am beginning to say to myself – do not scorn the reasons you turn away. And do not shut out the despair over what you have lost. Honor the human instinct to survive, and let sorrow lead you back to what is most precious to you even, and especially, when the perceived hopelessness of it breaks your heart. You do not need to lift it high in the heat of the day. With its caul still damp and shell not yet hardened, it is not safe to do so. Just whisper to it how precious it is, that it is your very life itself. Feed it your secrets and solitary attentions. It will teach you a melody you will begin to hear in others who can also see beyond this world, in others who are sure to treat it with the reverence it needs to grow. And as more souls gather round, you are all made stronger and ready to shine in more inhospitable places. But do not forget that this is a rare thing, a tender thing, a thing of healing in the hidden places in this world, and above all, the thing that heals you. Hold it as close as a yoke and you will be sustained through death itself.

Nancy