Best of 2018’s Week 33
“For once we pour ourselves into loving another person, it seems as if they take who we are with them when they go. And in Truth they take a deep part of us, but what feeds the heart from within is endless, and everything that is living heals.”
Mark Nepo
The Book of Awakening
August 17C is
I said to the Doc this week that I have a poet’s heart. C is the first true muse I’ve ever known. I have never attempted to love bomb her, but rather I’ve taken the risk to let me my heart singing to her. That vulnerability is easily abused and twisted.
My passion for C has always left me breathless. It has never wavered. I’ve shown her things about myself I never shared before. I shared things about my self I didn’t know I carried.
I weep as I type this. Not out of remorse or self-pity or morbid reflection but from emptiness. “For once we pour ourselves into loving another person,” write Mark Nepo, “it seems as if they take who we are with them when they go” and at the moment I am lost without Her.
I read the August 17th meditation from Mark Nepo and I’m reminded that, despite all the pain and anguish, both real and imagined, associated with the loss of my bond with C, it is a loss that should be celebrated for opening my heart to a truer and more meaningful passion and love.
It is never about C. Just as my betrayals et al are simply the Way of Thing and not the Thing, C too, is simply the Way of the Thing.
It isn’t simply C I want. It is not simply C I grieve.
It is all the things lost – the past, the present, the future – that I grieve. I want the future with C. I want the possibilities and the opportunities and the dreams and the hopes…and the losses too.
It cannot always be beautiful and safe and assured. There are always losses.
To have what I truly starve for requires risk, uncertainty and an emotional integrity. These things that matter to me do not just happen. Life must be learned and relearned over and over and over. What was true at 10 fails at 20 and what is true at 20 fails at 40 and so on.
Just as there can be no joy without sorrow, gain without loss, each life experience is fueled by both failure and successes. Learning requires failure and effort and more failure.
I poured myself into my life with C as never before. It remains the single most terrifying experience of my life and I would do it again despite the pain and loss of my winter of discontent because it was also the most amazing and powerful experience too.
I have embraced the pain, the loss, and the grieving. Not because I wallow in suffering but because of the pain, the loss, and the grieving my soul is open to a deeper and truer song of my heart. I would have sung it to C but she cannot, or will not, hear the song. She cannot, or will not, hear me.
All she hears is the echo from the bells rung by my betrayals. That is all she hears because that is all she listens to…or because as, someone reminded me this week, because her pride only hears the songs about her and not for her.
So, for now, I hurt, and the wounds heal…and whatever comes next will be even more beautiful with time and intention.
These are some of the personally significant messages, Tweets, pictures, memes, and miscellaneous posts from this past week.
Suffering makes an instrument of each of us, so that standing naked, holes and all, the Unseen vintalities can be heard through our simplified lives.
Mark Nepo
The Book of Awakening
August 17
Sometimes we can’t get what we want. While this can be disappointing and painful, it is only devastating if we stop there. The world thrives on Endless Possibilities. It is what makes nature a reservoir of Health. Yet if the heart is cramped or the Mind locks onto its pain, we can narrow wonder to a thread. In contradiction to the endless number of eggs that spawn a fish and the endless number of cells that Blossom to heal a wound, we can hold out the one thing we want as the only food. Here, crisis and Desperation are a short step.
It becomes a sorry occupation, beating oneself up for the one seed that didn’t take. It is an Insidious way: the more we refuse mystery, the more we feel responsible for all that befalls us. Indeed, the more we distract ourselves with analyzing strategies that failed, the more we avoid the true feelings of loss that no one can escape.
Even if we can accept this, none of us is exempt from the turmoil and pain that arises when what we want is love. For once we pour ourselves into loving another person, it seems as if they take who we are with them when they go. And in Truth they take a deep part of us, but what feeds the heart from within is endless, and everything that is living heals.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the beauty of trees. Their endless turns of bark and knobs of trunk make each look like a sage. Yet, amazingly, the skin of an old tree is no more than a living map of its scars. Can it be that the cuts turn scars and then the scars turn into beautiful notches in which things that fly can nest?
In every space opened when what we want gets away, a deeper place is cleared in which the Mysteries can sing. If we can only survive that pain of being emptied, we might yet know the joy of being sung through. Strangely and beautifully, each soul is a living flute being carved by life on Earth to sound a deeper and deeper song.
What comes to mind is that quote we’ve all heard, “you can never go home.” We must all take within us all the beauty, memories, experiences of those beloved to us and synthesize that which we cannot have what we once did. This is a profound grief.
Hugs to you during this painful time. You’ve got this. You are strong and will come through this even stronger.
❤️
I have no interest in going backward or living in the past. I have no interest in pretending it never happened or sweep it under the rug.
I have no illusions.