Holding On

You never know how much you are holding onto until life removes what you were holding onto.

Seems strange doesn’t it?

When Kenny died, when life removed the beautiful man I was holding onto, I was stuck by how much I was holding onto his life, how I clung to hopes for a miracle cure, a sudden and complete reversal of fortune. If I was good enough, if I learned enough, sacrificed it all, if I could just demonstrate all that in my heart I knew to be true, I could save him.

He died … and on that April day when he left this world, I was left holding onto nothing. It wasn’t until weeks later that I realized how much I had been holding onto and the price it had exacted.

Holding on drained me. It instigated a cycle of fight and flight. I wasn’t smart enough to flee. I was in an ongoing argument with reality, a dog eat dog fist fight with divinely orchestrated uncaused and unreproachable unfolding.

You see, I had it wrong. Divinely Orchestrated doesn’t mean that life is always working out in my favor, that everything will be all right, at least not all right as mind, as ego, believes all right to be. It means that life is orchestrated, out of my control, is the natural organic activity of consciousness, can be trusted to unfold in precision, and is effortless to me when I step out of the cage. Even while in the cage, brawling for all I’m worth, I grapple with shadows, concepts and ideas, delusionary illusions of self-grandeur … beyond tiring, exhausting nerves and immune systems, the will to fight and will to live.

Religions and gurus paint life as sunshine and roses when you do it right. Doing it right is the big hoax, the hand-me-down yet self-installed control button of materialism, of separation syndrome.

That’s what I was holding onto. The hope that I could figure out how to do it right … in time. A couple problems with that, and they are big ones. The first: I am not, this I that seems to be Amaya, is not the doer. She’s a dream in Godmind. There is no way for her to do anything, let alone do it right. Godmind is the doer, the dreamer, the divine uncaused orchestration — so big a phrase that it is absolutely indescribable. The only way to truly understand what it means is to recognize I am It. It is I. It alone Is.

The second: that tricky little concept of time. We’ll save that for a later post when I have the time

What are you holding onto? In what ways are you arguing with reality? Is it working? I don’t imagine if someone had told me the truth back then that I could have heard it. It wasn’t until Ken was gone and the grief deeply entered that I began to remember what I already knew and just wouldn’t admit. The truth was too hard to accept. To truly accept that I couldn’t control whether he lived or died, that in fact I couldn’t control anything was just not the salve this heart yearned for, perhaps needed, but definitely not wanted. I didn’t realize then how grace would descend the instant I genuinely let go. I just wanted him to live.

It took that … and more … to demolish this one’s fealty to that wily sense of control. You’d think that would have been enough to demonstrate the futility but it wasn’t. So much has to fall apart, or so it was with me, so much that we don’t even know we carry.

Be gentle with yourselves. Love the process, if only a little bit. It’s the journey my friends, the unending, ever-surprising, ride of a lifetime. Not unlike a plane trip, once you take your seat and the doors close, whatcha gonna do? You’re on it for the duration so you might as well enjoy the ride, hands-free and alive. Roaring with delight or arguing with your experience, either way, you’re on the ride.