I am 'forcing' myself to write this post today–mostly because it’s not good enough, not right enough, not honest enough, to write only on the ‘good’ days. The days that feel like splendor and truth and grace and love. The day’s when a depth of perception and love shimmer through.
Today, I woke tired. And feel the intense energies it’s taken to arrive here in this moment of time.
Today, it’s the entirely human, Allannah. The personality self in her full measure.
Finally, my hands–after loads of hand cream and rubbing–are beginning to feel ‘normal’ again after all the sorting, packing, storing, and cleaning of preparing for this journey. Not to mention the number of bruises the hands and legs take from lifting boxes and more, even though I had lots of assistance. But the body’s time, the body’s needs catch up with us. And when I woke this morning in an Airbnb (Ray’s) just on the northern outskirts of Santa Fe so that Ruby and I could wake and walk into the landscape, I knew already the hours today would be different than the previous days of driving.
For some reason, I knew I was driving somewhat ‘directively’ to get to the southwest. For whatever reason, my spirit needed to be in this landscape, this open space couched in by the Sangre De Cristo and Santa Fe Mountains. I needed to look out over the dust and scrub and pine and wide sky.
Today, Ruby and I started our day as usual: rise, walk down the arroyo and throw a stick, then return, feed her, sit, meditate, listen to a channeled session by either Lee Harris or Paul Selig, then read a bit with coffee. Then it’s 10:00am or 10:30.
I wanted to slow all of this down today. I literally wanted ‘time’ to stop–to just stop moving, being…
Why?
Because no matter how much we do things for ourselves, know we’re doing something for ourselves, there’s always too a ‘love story’–whether its spiritual in nature, or friendships, or family related, professional, or romantic…
There’s always a love story…
We live in a world of connections.
And at our best, those connections are filled with the light and love of our connection to Source. At other moments, the sadness we experience around them, the confusion, the anger, the separation we feel is a reflection of ourselves being shown something about ourselves we may not want to see–because sometimes, it just downright hurts. Sometimes, the anger and confusion–like an angry lover or child–wants to have its way with us. And so we let it—at least internally for a while.
And we let it–not because we’re bad or wrong…but because we do love…as best we can…
And most of us, we try really not to let that anger and confusion and hurt splash out on others. We try not to ‘act out’ the emotions. Rather, we try to be the witness for ourselves: we try to witness what we are experiencing without needing to jump on its bandwagon and dump it all out into the world or the person or persons or situation it’s connected to. It doesn’t mean we don’t feel, experience, the emotion. We simply try to hold it, be a witness to it as it moves through us.
And if we’re really being conscious about it, awake about it, we can sometimes even not be judgmental towards ourselves in relation to the emotions–we simply hold them tenderly knowing that those energies are coursing through the body like little shock waves rippling out into and through our energetic field. We can allow them to release with calm, ease, grace…
To be our own witness–with tenderness, compassion, kindness…it’s a pretty powerful thing.
“I invite you in, Allannah, with open arms. I invite you in with love….”
And then to sit there and be with whoever the one she is at that moment who is hurting or in anger. To allow her to experience it and then to let it all go in the presence of our higher self as witness.
I wish I were better at it...
That’s what The Mindful Heart invites us to do when we are struggling with emotion–to invite ourselves in and ‘compassionate’ ourselves. Have compassion for ourselves–instead of trying to push it away or tamp it down or judge ourselves for having, experiencing, the emotions. Somehow, we think ‘being spiritual’ we shouldn’t have all the emotions, shouldn’t struggle with them. But that’s a false reality, a false truism. The Mindful Heart reminds us all the time that we need the full scale of emotions–all the notes–to truly know ourselves, to truly be able to sing the song of our Soul being.
I once heard a Buddhist monk say, “It’s not that we don’t experience the emotions–we experience them, are more conscious of experiencing them because we’re not acting them out, moving them out into the world; instead, we are being present to them and what wants to be released through them.” Thus, all the structures of the monastery, the daily routines, the focused attention on tasks, the monk’s habit–to help hold the flow of emotions in stillness without ushering them out towards others. Instead, to create, to wear a habit, to be a container to hold them, witness them, and see what they might be trying to show us.
But today, I’ve struggled to do any of that. I’ve had to ‘fight’ wanting to write a brief, concise, email: “I am so angry at you… And even more angry at myself.” So, instead, I'm writing here...choosing me, choosing Love instead...
Love–it can do that to you. Or, we can do that to ourselves…
It doesn’t matter if it’s a mother, a son, a husband, a friend, a co-worker, or a romantic partner…It’s the connection that actually shows us the love and sets up the opportunity for growth and insight–and usually not about the other but about ourselves.
I have heard the “Zs”, channeled by Lee Harris, say, that many of us are in love with the potential of another, the potential of what exists between two human beings–but that we’re actually not seeing, looking at the actions or lack of actions themselves, what really exists, so we operate in expectations that have no grounded reality, we operate through a potential ideal. Well, if there were a Grand Canyon of ‘potential’, believe-me-you, I took a beautiful reverse, inward, twisting dive right off the potential high diving platform. I’d say, I probably scored pretty high on the perfection score–I stayed in that dive a very long time… too long…
But what I want to say too…is that I do not regret it…none of it...
What I want to say is that I don’t feel a need to forgive this man…it’s more about me… acknowledging the gifts of the relationship, acknowledging what I needed to learn, and what the relationship was and wasn’t. Nobody gets off the hook–he’ll have to deal with his own participation in the relationship–and there was a relationship, one deep in potential….One deep with love… but neither he, nor I, could seem to pull ourselves out of ‘the potential’ and into the real…
And let me be clear…part of my anger with myself is that I knew months ago that I was suppose to drive west–I just didn’t know why, so I kept putting it off in favor of this “potential”… I chose to stay in what I called “my little box of time’ in my initial post, “The Open Door.” Because so many times, he would come into my life but then eventually disappear again… I chose to stay hoping he’d show up on my doorstep, step into my home and sit with me on the deck and watch the sunset…
In August, I knew I was suppose to go West…I knew it in my body... I just didn’t understand why and I knew it would mean letting this ‘potential’ go… and simultaneously, right on cue, “he re-appeared…” and then in November, disappeared again…a well worn pattern…rhythm I knew deeply. But the truth is, he’s never really gone…I feel him out there all the time…I feel the love and the connection… and it’s beautiful…but I understand now…I don’t need to act on it…I don't need to want it, or need it, or need to have it be more…
I don't need to keep aligning myself to the lack, the suffering experienced due to the lack of it not actualizing in the way I wanted it to.
And here is what I hope I'm finally truly embodying: connection, Love, it’s so much larger, more expansive than 'relationship'…so much larger and so, so rich with Love… And while a part of me knew this…all of me didn’t… part of me was still trying to say that “love”–to feel it in all its gloriousness–required an object other than myself… but we are love…we are the one we have been searching for…each of us, each of our individual selves… we think we know this…or I should rightly say, I thought I knew this…but it’s something we have to know all the time, not just once in a while, we have to keep on choosing to know it, be it…so that finally we can Be love…
What we really want is the connection, the connection to Source, Love…. I've heard Lee Harris's "the Z's" say this, and the "Guides" channeled by Paul Selig.... I've heard it a hundred times.... the other person is a gift, a choice offered, but is not ‘it’…and if we allow ourselves to have LOVE first with ourselves and with Source…‘love’ with another does not undo us so much, does not crush us, does not throw us off into the Grand Canyon of potential into free fall internally… Love of the true self, our higher self, holds this other love....
And the truth is, this person helped me learn this… I learned to finally choose me… In so many ways I have chosen me in my life because I’ve known we are the only ones who can choose us…but the idea of love, a committed partnership, was still something ‘out there’ instead of inside me…and in this way…I never chose it first with myself… that I am enough for Love to be, shine, exist…to flow through….
We think we know this… we ‘think’ we know… We say, “Oh, yeah, I get it…” and then we meet someone and all that of which we supposedly ‘knew’ goes out the window… (and right on cue enters the Grand Canyon of potential)….
But let me say this again…. I don’t regret any of it… not the sorrow, the pain, the feeling of being ‘rejected’…. I don’t…because I participated in it, I chose it unconsciously and even consciously at times… and what I learned in so many ways was ‘unconditional love…’ Not the love that lets someone off the hook or walk all over another, or hurt someone, or the love that refuses to see the negativity or abuse… but the unconditional love for myself... The worst this man did was not use his words… and so it was all left up to me… and that’s a lot…that’s a big one…but that’s his to deal with…not mine…
And I will never say he is not beautiful, kind, good, sensitive and full of love…. I felt his love…he simply couldn’t act on it…and I’ll never really know why…we can’t know the interior experience of another…. And I know he’s far more judgmental of himself than I will ever be… I did see this and that was part of the wound that attracted me, the wound in both of us…our capacity to be fiercely independent and also to be our own greatest critics....
And there is the emotion of sadness and also the beautiful truth…the sadness is kinder now... And more important, the connection…the Love is…Sometimes others just aren't ready to choose it with us, or can’t share it with us it in the way we want them to…
When I began to really allow myself to see this… I wrote the following for him… It still stands as true today as it did back in October…
“When I lived in Alaska outside of Fairbanks, I used to make a practice of hiking out into the woods, forest preserve or designated wilderness, for an entire day without map, without compass, only with my body. I stopped doing that when I moved back east, but in 2007 I started doing it again in the tamer Catskills: spending a better part of the day before in meditation, reflection and writing, then heading off at sunrise—no trail, no compass, no bearings but the sun, the hours of daylight, the terrain, and the deep listening to the earth itself. Hours out, then hours listening back, and could I get back by sundown, the last light tipping over the tops of trees. It is a practice of deep listening, of feeling, a practice that at one time, so many knew…to know a land, a territory by feel, smell, touch, sound, intuition...
I live now on the edge of hundreds of acres of state land, forests, in the Catskills, and a couple of times a year, I make this same journey—up the woods and mountain (Overlook Mountain only over 3 thousand ft. elevation) outback my home and far from any trail system, and then down into the hundreds of acres of forest on the other side, with only time, the sun, and the land itself rising up into the sound of my own being. I made this journey a couple of days ago after turning 60 and this year found a beautiful waterfall I’ve never seen before. Alone out there–probably seldom seen, seldom experienced except by all the trees, the birds and animals that rest in its roaring. And I wondered, “How many hours does the water flow before it’s witnessed by humans?” A calculation I could not make standing near it, and one I doubted neither the stream nor the animals and plants around it calculated, but simply knew in their bodies.
Standing there and watching Ruby frolic in the stream's flow, I thought of a book’s title by a writer who influenced me when young: A New Path to the Waterfall by Raymond Carver. Each of us—a new path cut through the forest. The waterfall–the simple flow of Being… And it goes on, the gift of Being–flowing, feeding unaware so many hundreds of acres, so many trees, so many animals. Giving without thanks. Giving without asking to give, without knowing a purpose other than Being–to simply flow, Be… Everything else an agreement, a choice…
I had forgotten that just because one loved…it didn’t mean that another–even if they felt the love–would choose love…agree to the love…
My deepest apologies for forgetting that…”
_________
And so Ruby and I…we’re on this journey…not because of him... but because it was a journey that I knew I was getting ready to take in August but wouldn’t allow myself to choose then… because somehow I was still somehow ‘hoping,’ still in “potential…”.
This journey was meant to happen long ago…I just didn’t want to see it, but twice in the last two years, I’d been told by two intuitives that I’d be taking this journey… I just somehow kept brushing it aside, not wanting to hear it… because I wanted a ‘why’, a reason… and I wanted instead to stay inside my own little box of constructed time, my own vision of how I wanted everything to unfold and happen…and waiting…hoping…because it feels safer there, doesn't it?
And the thing is, I was preparing, learning, waiting, and growing…but just not in the ways I’d imagined…not in the ways, I was conscious of...but in ways far more splendid…far more compassionate and full of Love than I could have ever imagined...
________
The afternoon sun is up and Ruby and I are going hiking…. She is still carrying her ‘Woodstock stick’…. When she’s ready, she’ll drop it and refuse to pick it up again…I’ve seen her do this so many times…choose a stick from one place and carry it to another location… and then one day, she simply says, “I’m done, I’m done with that story… that stick…” And no matter how hard I might try to cajole her, she won’t pick the stick up again….
I’ll let her decide how far she wants to take this one…its her story…her stick….
In gratitude…
Allannah
As always, Santa Fe and the landscape has been such a gift...