Fractured Healing

Once upon a time, it seemed logical and self-evident that a "broken" heart (stumbling in grief and anger, incapable of keeping a decent rhythm) should never answer The Door until it wiped its nose, put on a game face and somehow pulled itself together...maybe became purer, more bloodless.

Much as I'd like to claim nice manners passed on down through Boston relatives and such, hammered in by parents and Catholic school, this was never the real reason I avoided "spiritual" contact in the midst of existential pain and freakishness. Truth is, I couldn't hear God, opportunity, guides or omens over the screaming, howling, motion-sickness of my own thoughts. If I did--if I caught a tiny whisper of that still, small voice--I ignored it, because I expected it to be someone or something else. And, I was afraid. To look. To open the door, and face what I thought was Other. For a long time, I was like the women at church when I was a very small girl, heads veiled and bowed, so that the beauty of tresses lit by stained glass, and the violence, despair, sensuality and questions stayed secret. (For God's sake.)

It isn't just we ex-schoolgirls feeling rejected and dismissed, dwarfed by the great cycle of life/death, overwhelmingly powerless and ashamed when unable to access some strong, stable, acceptable persona of last week, month or decade. Everyone human, when "our" person, place or thing goes missing, experiences the vulnerability of seeming incompleteness. It's part of the story.

In all my terrible moments of fear or anguish (except once or twice, when I became literally unconscious), there was still a level of psyche that knew a kind of wholeness, even while things were flying apart--the level that glanced at The Door. It heard the thoughts that said things like, "Man, when I calm down, I really need to meditate--get to the bottom of this--surrender. Not right now. Spirit won't like me. I'm a mess. Cover your head, Woman! Sheesh." It paid no heed, blissfully impartial to all the voice-pitching.

During the latest adventures, by grace, exhaustion or both/neither, that level expanded to include more and more of my odd strata and disparate, naked parts. It happened that I went deep, deep into the incredibly painful moments, inept and embarrassed. I heard this knocking, and something "became" each element of my encounter with Itself...maybe a sobbing breath, a tightening of the chest and fists, thoughts racing through in full battle gear. There was a story of a crazy woman trying to shovel away an avalanche of shit with a teaspoon, looking around for a cosmic piece of heavy equipment to get the job actually done. Naturally, a story of a two-dimensional victim with a cartoon utensil ends pretty badly...so she seeks a different scene, stage, page. Something noticed this. 

Something.

Deep in pain, not a thing is "wrong". Loss and longing well up like lava, outline becoming inline, full, not a speck out of place. My chest tightens and releases, heart bear-hugged, tears spilling. My hands reach for themselves. Each action is whole and complete, in Itself-which-is-myself. Thoughts are sharp and jagged as obsidian, with opaline poetry in their depths, not looking for anything but what they are. There is no "I" while this is going on, no person to collect all these wildly improper pieces of life and glue them into a coherent, cohesive "Maria". There is no controlling the spasm, or even any desire to end it.

End, it does--a minute or an hour, exactly so.

The welling and flushing, from start to finish, is absolute--a total playing-out of elements, fractalling throughout this body to the sky, through the earth, into the multiverses. My attention is unbroken everywhere it is, because Awareness cannot be taken apart, and is indeed brought alive by the fact that it continually points here. 

I can no longer pretend that it's an aspiration. It's all over me--I'm swimming in it, and getting out of it is hopeless. A melding has happened, or some kind of dissolution--a healing.

It is not polite, sterile or pretty. It is not politically, morally or socially correct. It may wait for an answer to its pounding on one's fortifications, but may also knock down the walls, disguised as tides of offal, granting the dreaded burying--the better to get one "stuck", stranded in a darkness so heavy that even the imagination is stopped up tight. No. Way. Out. This is it. In that acceptance of my entire partiality, the many degrees of shattering throughout the eruption of my life--the intimate wholeness became so much more than another "experience" in a pile of them. It was revealed, not just as the context for a life-story, but as that which has the capacity to unclench a fist and hold the black opal up to the light, wordlessly blessing itself in the colors blowing out like nebulae in deep space...so much loving, deep space, I have never seen!

From here, at the keyboard, I can speak trite things...hindsight is 20/20. I was never broken, never incomplete. I should have answered the damn door long ago. An angel may have been there, instead. Whatever. Admitting the ugly, reclaiming the divorced fragments of soul, slowing down the explosion so that the gorgeous death of one into many can be really witnessed--that is also the point. From here, I can see that I didn't need to repair my face, my marriage, my life. In the moment, out of the story, each piece is a piece of beauty, perfectly whole. Nothing needs restoring. The door answers itself, in good time, and wholeness stands in the very midst of the mess...whereupon She disarms, pulls off the veil, offers her sleeve for your nose, sips your tears. The roar becomes a song, a lullaby, a new landscape.

Love!