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Being Connected

I feel like I’m dying. I’m thirty-six years old, and I feel like I’m dying. I don’t have any terminal illness or anything, but there’s something happening, changing, shifting – something so profound that I can actually feel my body convulsing, or sometimes vibrating, with its energy. It’s as though my whole world, the way in which I’ve understood myself and the world is disintegrating. I feel as though I don’t know anything anymore. I look around as I walk through a crowd of people, feeling as though I’m watching a movie about another culture. And yet I’m in the place that I’ve called home for much of my life. I watch the sun paint the clouds pink and gold as it bids farewell for the day, and am filled with such awe that I’m as mesmerized as I probably was the first time I ever watched the dazzling light show in the sky at sunset.

 I fluctuate between grieving for what has been and marveling at what is. The tears and moan-filled cries rack my body so powerfully that I believe my body is going to simply disintegrate. For the first time in my life, I’m letting myself be held by the grief, in the grief. The waves arise and then ebb into a feeling of lightness and calm and wonder. I don’t understand what is happening to me. But I do know that somehow I’m dying.

I’m grieving for the world – the animals that are having their homes ripped away from them as we continue to build concrete boxes to “shelter” us. What is it we’re really trying to shelter ourselves from, anyhow? We live in containers that keep out the elements, the awesome power and the sweet, tender beauty of mother earth, the great mother, grandmother to us all. We navigate through life in tin boxes on concrete paths that lead to where everyone else seems to be going. But do these paths lead to where we really want to go?

We live our lives -- I’ve lived my life -- so disconnected from myself, from others, from the world, that opening the portal to feeling deeply connected brings with it tidal waves of grief and sadness. The great lament, some call it. The saddest part of all, perhaps, is that I know that someday I’ll forget again. I’ll forget what it feels like to be split wide open, fully exposed. To have my heart touched deeply by everyone and everything I come into contact with.

Contact. Touching with. Touching someone, something else. In this moment, I’m in contact with Source, with my heart’s deepest longings, with the pain and sadness and numbness that exists in the world, with the deer and the dragonflies and the scrub oak growing on the bank of the stream. And so much of the world we’ve constructed for ourselves doesn’t make any sense to me.

Why on earth would we choose to so isolate ourselves, from mother earth and father sky, from the ancestors, and each other, from future generations and what they are going to do with a world in which we’ve depleted so many of the natural resources and destroyed the wilderness by taming it for our own use or even amusement? I don’t understand. I don’t understand why I spent two years working such long hours in a building that I rarely saw the sun in the sky. Why I chose to live my life sitting in front of a computer screen and kidding myself into believing that by being there I was connected. That’s not what connected means to me anymore.

Being connected is about being who I am without trying to be different or judging myself or worrying about whether others judge me. It’s about letting myself be seen in all my imperfection, and loving the imperfection in us all. It’s about being with people and really listening with my heart to the things they believe and the things they ache for. It’s about supporting all of our quests to heal and learn and grow and nourish our souls. It’s about speaking my truth and speaking out when I know something isn’t right. It’s about living and creating from love, rather than out of fear. It’s about creating a safe space for others to be exactly who they are without feeling ashamed. It’s about loving and listening and accepting and embracing. It’s about saying “yes!” to whatever is. It’s about loving myself enough to listen with the ears of my heart to all the voices within myself speaking. And loving others enough to nudge and support them to do the same. It’s about living with intention and taking responsibility for the choices I’m making about how to live my life. And perhaps most importantly, it’s about forgiveness.

I’m writing this now because I know that someday I’ll forget. This is really a plea to myself to re-member. I’m ready to do whatever it takes this time to stay as connected as I possibly can. And in those times when I find that I have fallen asleep again, I’ll start by forgiving myself for having forgotten, and do what I need to do to remember again.

The softness of my sadness, the tears of my grief, are intermixed with the fire of anger about the ways in which we continue through the ignorance of our own wounding, to wound the people we love the most. Despite having good intention, if we aren’t willing to look within and confront and be with and begin to heal the wounds we carry within us, we unconsciously inflict the same wounds on our loved ones, particularly on our children. And when the wounds occur in childhood, the scars they leave run deep and the knot that is formed in the tree of our life becomes bigger and more powerful and more difficult to unwind.

I’m told that my wounds, my scars, bear gifts as well. It doesn’t feel that way in this moment. In this moment, I’m carried by the grief. I have a tendency to want to hurry through things, to run at the things I most fear, for somehow I believe that if I walk calmly toward them I’ll never make it all the way there. I’ve spent so much of my life focused on what I’m trying to accomplish, planning for what comes next, that I don’t give what is its due. Even now, I hear the voices within judging me for not having had a “real job” for over two years now and being a productive member of society. But I know that for me it’s not about having or even doing anymore. It’s about how I’m being in my life, about being real and open and honest about what is. It’s about being in this moment without wishing I were anywhere else. Even if this moment feels almost unbearably sad. So this time I’ll do my best not to hurry through it all. This time I’ll just sit and see what unfolds. The waves of grief feel like they’ll never end, just as my need to feel held seems to be a bottomless pit.

© 2003   This page was last updated on January 12, 2004

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