January 9th, 2013

For several days I have been struggling with an energy that I couldn’t quite grasp. It felt like it was asking me to meet my death again. As I sat in meditation I thought of Saffy and Freckles, and the chickens. Robert was not upstairs in the carriage house. He was on vacation in Hawaii. There was no one here but me and twenty-three animal spirits. If this meeting with My Maker were to ask for more than ego death, if it were to ask for my physical life, no one would be here to find my body, and free and feed the little souls of my dear friends, and they would suffer. So I delayed, and as I did the energy built. The energy was calling me from a depth of despair, a layer of life’s unmet experience that I had not yet opened enough to feel.

Last night I knew that Robert would return in the morning. There was an opening and I would delay no longer. I closed up the house, turned the heat down for the night, pulled the plugs on the electronics, and headed to my bedroom and my meditation chair. I was already in Conscious Oneness walking down the hall.

Questions fell into the Oneness. What is real for me right now? What is here? I could feel my sinuses draining down the back of my throat and the layers of excess around the middle of my short-waisted body. I felt over-full, stuffed like a hunter’s trophy, uncomfortable, unnatural, not vibrating with life. I felt deeply into the burn of the drainage and watched carefully as the story of me expanded. I saw my cheek with the two red, scaly spots that won’t go away. As I observed, I had a sense of being buried deep within the earth and realized I had been a television zombie for too long, not really alive, buried life within a parade of glitzy stories. I ached. I know there is much I am here to do and yet, I have no direction, the direction for my next step obscured.

I sat in the paradox of doing and non-doing. I sat with the deep desire to shift and change my reality – my body shape, sinuses that drain as if on cue each evening, the marks so prominent on my cheeks, the occasionally recurring jaw pain, the lack of work, a growing need to contribute – wanting it all to heal, wanting it to be something different. What is it I want? What is it I fear? I sat in the long, empty silence and waited.

And there it was, the fear that I won’t be loved again, that I am not pretty enough, that what I am others will not want. A fear that I lack what is required in this world to be loved. As I sat with that, the awareness deepened and opened into another level … that who I am needs love, that who I am is not love and I will forever be in search of this elusive thing called love.

Watching the dance of pain and suffering was effortless as I sat with it and felt it without conditions. I watched this dramatization, this movie called life and realized that death is not the greatest fear. The greatest fear is that I am not love. Since I am not love, I need to find love, and cannot. My heart ached with the recognition, for myself and for all others. The ache opened into the clarity that the belief that I am not love is the truth behind original sin.

This knowledge brought with it a deep tenderness. My heart burned with a fiery compassion for all of us stationed on planet earth. What an amazing place this is. How difficult? How painful? I am committed to feeling it all and yet, this pain had remained buried.

Sitting with the truth, I felt myself falling through a tunnel of light. At the top of the tunnel I knew who and what I am. There was a pure recognition and absolute knowing. I am the all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful being. I am the energetic creative force. I am Love in its most potent form. As I slid through the tunnel, the remembering peeled away, layer by layer like peeling a carrot, until I landed with full-blown amnesia, in the body and in the belief that I am this body. It was the proverbial fall from grace.

There is always more, more to understand, more to peel away. What Grace this is. I am so grateful, not for the disturbance of pain and suffering, but for the fact that I am called to keep doing the work, that I am given to stay in this uncomfortable, disturbed place so that Grace may find me and show me that beyond the relationship called ‘I and other’ is the unquestioned remembrance of This I Am.