Juxtapositioning

Ghost

24 years ago a ghost roamed the rooms of a newly-purchased newly-built house, walking, walking, as there was something lost and the walking would help with the remembering. A ghost pacing miles of grey carpeting that stretched in every direction. A ghost that sat silently under white walls that loomed overhead. A ghost that looked out with blank eyes upon a bare yard, pre-landscaping. The ghost had dreams and longings but they thinned impossibly gossamer, invisible in the hot desert sun.

Six months later the ghost escaped into the bright sun. The bare walls could no longer contain the ghost and she no longer swallowed handfuls of pills hoping to not wake up. Was it an escape, really? Or was it out of the frying pan and into the fire? Twenty-four years of fire.

This week I read words penned nearly two years ago in a tumbled fresh April when there was sureness, and fire, and direction. I remember now what that felt like. Strong. Brave. Beautiful. And I feel sad, oh so sad, that I had forgotten. I had forgotten where my center was. I had forgotten the voice. I had forgotten what it felt like to gently surrender into a world of goodness and hope. I had forgotten, maybe, where I came from.

This week the ghost came back. A warning, perhaps. I feel its breath at the back of my neck, waiting. Twenty-four years ago I ran. This is not then. This is now.

I know my task. To gather in close. To open my eyes. To listen. To remember. And then to sing.

Tiger

“Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?” – William Blake

Tiger has come to me. He first made his presence known in a ritual that emerged after weeks of Bagua Chung, a circular practice that feels to me like part dance and part stalking meditation. Tiger kept appearing. Often I rode on his back in the last minutes of the Bagua walk, and he stayed and spoke to me during my meditation afterwards. Eventually I received the message to welcome Tiger more formally into my heart and being in nonordinary reality. I was to give up the power animal who had protected me since ever I began walking in dreamtime with wide-awake eyes, and to embrace Tiger, now calling to me daily, insistently, powerfully.

There was indeed a ritual, and Rabbit retreated to make space for Tiger, now Magical Tiger because, well, there is Magic.

And I have since then waited for other changes to emerge in me as a result of this shift, to make themselves known to me so that we too can be friends, these changes and I.

I cannot now separate a time when Tiger was not my protector. It seems to have always been so. Rabbit? That animal belonged to anther person.

Tiger is also my lover. This is, undeniably, the strangest and yet most compelling nonordinary reality relationship I have had. And yet there is also nothing strange whatsoever about it. Tiger is my lover, and in loving I become Tiger.

Tiger is sister to the Moon, symbol of passion, of power, and of sensuality. I can feel the Tigerness awakening in me, and I am comforted in knowing that there is a path to walk in this meditation we call life, and that I have allies to walk with me. I am not alone.

He

He is a good, loving man. I have lived a long time in search of him, of the man who melts me, of the man who loves me like no other, of the man who is himself such a magical being that I weep from the beauty of his magic and from how magical I feel when I am with him. I have lived and I have loved and none of the life or love was like this. Destiny.

This man, the one I see my sunset with, the one I see in my dreams, the one I felt and knew and received months before we were ever even in the same city. This good, loving man. He feeds my heart, nourishes my soul, calls me to be my magical self, receives my inner being, my warrior queen nature.

And oh, how I love this man.

One

One year ago today, my life changed.

It happened in the evening. I was in Houston where a client had flown me to work with her and her clients for a week, Houston where it was still summer and still humid. I was in Houston still processing the recent formality to the inevitable slow painful unraveling of the previous three-plus years spent with a boy-man that morphed into ten teary shower minutes feeling what it might be like to be me if I had always felt loved. I was in Houston feeling my Self for perhaps the first time, my Self tall and pale among the Chinese community I stayed in and shopped in that week that cemented the sense of alienation and solitude I had brought with me.

It happened in the evening, in Houston. I was sleeping on the hard hotel bed and awoke, hard. I was no longer alone. I felt something with me — someone? — and it felt wonderful. A palpable presence. An energetic force. My heart twined the feeling into arms and lips and I lay curled on that hard bed, no longer alone. Loved.

The feeling followed me home.

I thought it would dissipate, disappear, disintegrate, but it did not.

Weeks went by. Then more than a month. At first I was determined to attach a face, a name, arms and lips to the feeling but after several wrong turns and missteps I decided to let it go. To be content with the feeling, the ghost-arms, the love from somewhere, and to continue moving on and being me.

After that it didn’t take long for him to find me.

One year ago, my heart opened. One year ago, I began to believe. One year ago, I wept from feeling beauty. One year ago, I started walking to where I now stand, hand in hand with my soulmate, embracing the feeling, wanting more and more.

And my Soulmate writes this on my laptop — yes I am allowing him to contribute to my writing for the first time — “I love you with all my heart and Soul – and it is scary to even write this… but I am WITH you, Soulmate!”

One whole year he has been with me so far. And we are. One.

Tightrope

Two years ago I learned to play a Wii Sports game. It consisted of atempting to traverse thin twine stretched between the roof of one impossibly high building and another while purple creatures with bear-trap mouths snapped at my ankles. Even though I played while standing in the relative safety of my own first-floor livingroom, the game poked some of my more unreasonable fears right in the eye, fears like becoming caught in a bear trap and having to chew off my own leg or being unable to prevent my legs from inexplicably jumping me right off the top of a very tall building. Consequently, I wasn’t very good at the game.

Once I imagined I would be very good at walking a tightrope. The Flying Wallendas made a dramatic and unfortunate splash when I was a teenager, but you could see how easy it probably was. All you had to do was carefully place one foot in front of the other while holding a long pole. Why, anyone could do that! It’s no more difficult than walking. The height thing bothered me, though, since by then I was refusing to go up ladders or anything higher than a small stack of cats.

So it’s odd to find myself in this place now, feeling that I am stretched impossibly thin and impossibly far from the ground. There’s no safety net. I don’t know the rules. And the last thing I want is to have to chew my own leg off. I sit and breathe and remember what my heart tells me and wonder if it is enough, if I can find balance.

Spectrum

I’ve been teetering between two ends of what sometimes seems like a vast spectrum. Black and white. Good and bad. I try to squeeze my dualistic world into at least the gentler version, yin and yang, but it evades me. When at one end of the spectrum all I feel is the lack of the other. Pain. Emptiness. Heart-hurt.

The way through this, I know, is twofold.

One, I can believe in the concept of annica. Impermanence. What I hold in my hand today, in my heart, is fleeting. It will pass. The spectrum expands with me inside it, and I melt into one end from the other.

Two,  I can work toward thinking in a more non-dualistic manner. Advaita. I can believe that the black, the bad, is not inherently black or bad but that only my perception of lack creates such pain when I am at that end of the spectrum.

Perhaps it is not a spectrum at all but a path. A labyrinthine path. Sometimes we pass one another on that path, feeling oh-so-close, and then, still on the path but occupying different points, we move apart again, bound perhaps in an endless vector that leads us yet again to oh-so-closeness.

Pathway

There is a way through. In the dark times, all I can see are the walls that close in around me, the fears that fill me with dread, the gross inadequacies of my wounded heart and soul. In those times it is sometimes all I can do to take a breath, and another. Anything beyond breath is simply too heavy, too hard.

I have been offered a path. A hand. A heart, tender and afraid as my own. And I am encouraged that this pathway may be the one that forever keeps the walls from closing in so tightly. This pathway, the one that is being created and crafted and emerges from the promise of sustainability and wonderment, may be what I need to stand on to finally reach the stars overhead.

I hold this path, a nascent bird-heart beating, fluttering, between my hands and his. If we breathe on it, it may grow.

Adrift

My feet are still floating free, unmoored. The horizon shifts every time I gaze into the waning sun. All I can do is look inside and try to breathe, every breath catching in my exploding heart. Soon I am pieces, shattered remnants, adrift on the current. Exposed. Ungathered. Withering.

Or, floating, my feet tangle in miles of kelp, deep green Medusa hair ensnaring my ankles, drawing me down. A long stream of bubbles surfaces, each one merging with the wind, rising into gray clouds drawn closely down, adrift.

Or, my breath floats around me, encircling me, motionless. Last night’s dinner sits on the stove top, encrusted, unwanted. Laundry waits in corners. Silent dry tears fill a bathtub, an ocean, adrift.

Loving

I think I am beginning to feel what love is.

You would think, wouldn’t you, that after spending as many years on the planet as I have, I would have already known what love really felt like, but no. Not being loved like this. Not loving like this.

Oh, I had an idea about love. Many ideas. An ideal. A dream. A destiny.

And I loved, as best I could. With my whole heart, the part that was open. I really did. I loved and was loved to the best of my ability at the time.

I also knew a lot about what love is not. My heart stretched across the distance between the one (what love is) and the other (what love is not), stretching so thin and so tight that it snapped, thread ends dangling into space. Now I am taking up those gossamer threads and weaving them into a beautiful tapestry, strand by strand and color by color, my heart becoming more alive and more filled in every breath, every kiss, every intertwined beat.

And loving, and being loved, fills me. I am challenged and entranced. I want more: more love, more to love. Sometimes I feel dwarfed by the enormity of possibility, feeling this whole heart beating next to mine, feeling my whole self warmed by its presence. It is so big and I am so small. And other times I close doors because I fear they will close of their own accord, leaving me gasping and sobbing, alone, on the other side. But mostly I breathe and laugh and receive, feeling my cells fill with sparkles, beaming them out again into the universes multiplying beside me, feeling the warm reverberations deep in my soul that tell me I am walking with destiny.

Drowning

The waves crash around me, sucking me under. I cannot breathe. Water fills my eyes my ears my nose my mouth and I scream but there is no one there to hear, just the relentless surf, the pounding waves, taking me farther and farther from the safety of shore.

I long for a place to put my feet. A stone. A post. A step. My feet long for firm sand, but all I feel is ceaseless motion, spinning, vertigo. My heart runs red into a pool around me and my throat cries soundless gasping wails. Tears become rivers, oceans, becoming the endless waves that roll over me, crushing me, carrying me out into the current.

Dreams echo the unending uncertainty. There is no solace in sleep, no respite. Look inward, she says. Feel your heart beat. My heart bursts sixty times a minute, shaking me to my core, and I am sure that the sound echoes across vast mountains and galaxies.

Stand still. Wait. Listen.