This morning my friend will go to a hospital and have a mascetomy. Last night I got the news that my step-father who has been in the hospital for six weeks because of a stroke actually has a brain tumour. Nuclear reactors in Japan are being rigged up with steel rails to hold their toxic innards from blowing apart. At work there are home-grown toxins that are leaching into my psyche making me wish I could put up yellow-tape and a sign that reads “Do not Enter Sign – Danger”. And all the while I walk through life side-by-side with my spirit child. Loss and Grace my constant companions.
My sleep has become disturbed. I have had my first real panic attack – a startling experience of my lungs shrivelling with an imagined fear. My breathe became shallow and my chest squeezed in on itself, compressing the terror that turns by a dark alchemy had turned into a corrosive chemical running in my veins.
This too is part of the experience of losing Heiko. Three years and a few months on from that terrible night of his death and the world has not stopped. I continue to be shocked by the appalling vulnerability of the human race – but why? Has there ever been a time when illness, death, natural disasters and political warfare has not been part of the landscape? It is happiness that baffles me now. Intact families, 50th wedding anniversaries, vacations, and retirement plans these are the things of real wonder.
I feel like the wizened old woman sitting on the side of the road. “Ah life” she says in one breathe. “Ah death”, she says in another. But then fear, nay terror, grows up inside me like an awful snake and I literally tremble at the spectre of death that I see all around me.
I am being called to cross the threshold again, again and again – the threshold from fear to love. It is as though I will be brought to fire over and over until the dross of superficial living is burned away. Deep is calling deep.
Below is a quote from Richard Rohr, a fransican monk, that I have been reading lately. He is talking here about how each of us is on a journey to becoming fully human. Paradoxically this means getting smaller, not bigger. When I feel fear it is my resistance to this reality. I have miscalculated something important – growing up is not about getting more stable, it is about stripping away. To become fully human we must let go of everything, even and especially the illusion of the separate self. I must get to work now but here is what he writes:
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Gabrielle
Oh Gabrielle, I am not walking your journey with you but I like to think that occasionally our paths cross so that I can give you a smile, a hug Of reassurance. You are alone but not always alone. love from venice, k.