WINGS
My only choice these days is to expand enough to let something else exist alongside death. I seem to be starting to understand why they say the pain of loss never goes away, it just changes. I was always curious when someone would say that, it never goes away. What a devastating thing to hear when you’re in the most pain ever.
Now I am seeing that when this sort of pain carves its way through the soul, it leaves a deep cavern a lot like water raging through a canyon. Once the water makes its way through it forces the shape to be different and the canyon changes forever. Just like the canyon, when the loss of a loved one makes its way through the human soul, it changes things forever and there’s no way to forget this enormous forging or the one you loved who sent the water rushing. You are forever changed.
I keep waiting to have a shift out of this immense heaviness of grief. I am starting to realize grief doesn’t shift. It is dense. It is permanent. It is in all things. It doesn’t leave once it enters. It just expands one’s capacity by pushing against the walls of the self until there is more room for joy and acceptance to join in. Grief, joy, acceptance, and love coincide within the same soul.
It’s amazing how life is so fragile and yet the human soul can endure so much. It is truly amazing. All through life, I have gotten to experience the preparation for death. Life sent me a series of experiences that I now know were actually dying practices. The pain and disappointments life naturally brought were moments of letting go. They are small in comparison to the letting go I am doing now and the one I will do in my final hour. Every heartbreak, every disappointment, every sadness was carving me out deeper to accept and learn the ways of the larger death I am learning about now and the death I will face myself someday. I am grateful that when those pains of life came for me I did not turn away or numb myself or become bitter, closed, or angry. Through working sincerely on my own deep discomfort in life I have welcomed these preparations that have been provided to help me survive this moment.
The painting that Jennifer did for me of Koa as my angel is really really working on me. It says to me that I must expand enough to let some light in. I must be open to letting him take his new form in my life. So much needs to cleanse to do this. It is a complete metamorphosis. I can no longer remain naive or unaware of impermanence. I am shedding my most precious innocence. As I expand, my old ways of being and thinking are too small. They are transforming, expanding with every scream and every tear. This sort of metamorphosis does not take place through effort. There is NO energy for effort where I am now.
Like the butterfly in the cocoon, I am shelled in, learning to liquefy, letting myself be pulverized. I must just simply be with every moment and allow expansion to take place, accepting its timing. Every belief system, everything I thought was MINE, every hope or dream….. If I am able to successfully transform this energy, it will mean that I have completed the greatest surrender imaginable. I will have pushed against the walls of my soul and made more space for life to bring me back into its loving embrace.
It physically hurts to open enough to grow wings, to grow beyond my own imagination. It’s like being ripped apart by a great force of nature. It is a true dying practice. I am dancing in the polarity between the reality my boy is gone forever and the reality of death’s permanence and the promise of the spirit realm that I can now be with internally and eternally. I feel peace will come closer when I can expand enough to incorporate both understandings and just rest in the mystery. Again this expansion makes me feel like I will die myself. In those moments when it all comes into awareness, I can’t make myself believe I am going to survive. I just must breathe and wait until once again I see I survived that terrible moment or hour or day or month or year.
Sometimes I am in so much agony, I really really don’t think it will ever end. Then it does end and somewhere off in the distance, far away I can see a butterfly. A blue butterfly that took the time necessary to go within, allow, trust and break down the old form of life to begin anew.
It’s amazing how life is so fragile and yet the human soul can endure so much.
Truly amazing.
