A long one today, but just had to say it... (And people dealing with chronic illness may find value in some of this) In truth, I died on that fateful afternoon in late February, 2012. Me - the person I was in my life before that day, my options and possibilities, the things I would do and the ways I would be shaped by the doing of them - all the ways I had learned to live my life, the things I relied on, took for granted, so many of the things that made me me - they died. What do you do when you can no longer count on your body, your place in the world, or who you thought you were? What was left on that fateful day was a broken body and a fiercely intact spirit. Oh - even my spirit, for a moment, it took a hit, but the incredible thing is, coming face to face with it - with Death, it only strengthened something deep inside me. For I stood before Death and said Take what you want. I surrender, if that is what is meant to be here. But if it is not - if I am not finished, if there is more to learn and more to do, and if I still have a calling on this earth, then you must know - I do NOT, in fact, surrender to you! I stand before you naked, sometimes prostrate, mind clear and heart open, despite my suffering. And I accept you, if this is what is meant to be. But I do not have all the answers yet, I cant see what is meant to be, and so, Death, Im sorry, but you must wait with me. Death said nothing, only slightly nodded with a knowing look in his eye, (the silence almost deafening). That countenance we cannot avoid facing was terrifying. But only for a moment, and then I smiled a small smile at him (hubris would not be wise in that place:). I stood before him naked and with no lies, ready for him if he wanted to take me, and in doing so, I saw that the terror he wields was a flash and an illusion. If you know any old myths, like the Hindu Goddess Kali, you will know what I mean. Kali rides a dark horse, carries the heads of enemies swinging from her belt, and wields her sword held high in the air, ready to cut down evil wherever she goes. She was once beautiful, and kind, but she adopted that terrible countenance in order to trick everyone! She couldnt be soft and beautiful and get her job done, so she adopted the face of a demon, and in the process gave herself the power to bring evil prostrate before her. For a moment I felt sorry for death, needing to terrify everyone. I stood before him and saw him for what he was. Behind you, I thought, is infinite, indescribable beauty. Ive seen it before, in rare glimpses. Its what our poets and mystics and saints always talked about! We yearn for it, we forget to believe in it, we forget it is here, now, we forget we are a part of it, we forget it is us! And oh my goodness, is it beautiful! And here it is, threaded through me, threaded through everything, and there is nothing to fear at all! I simply thought these things, in a flash, but he heard me anyway, and I saw a look of respect briefly cross his countenance. I had never begged him, never said, not yet! I just said - You know, I see the everything and I know there is nothing to fear, and I will accept whatever is right here. He said nothing back to me at all. But I got then that what I once was indeed had to die. I would never be able to return to my old life. In fact, I would be stripped bare and beaten. I would be humiliated by peoples judgment of invisible disease. I would face social justice issues of which Id never dreamed. I would court hopelessness and death as the physical became utterly unbearable. And yet... I would be true to something deeper than all of it, deeper than this physical torment and the frail part of being alive, of being human. The truth is, the person I was died in late 2012, and though I suffer, I think perhaps, that was a good thing. Because what remained, despite incredible physical limitations and pain, was the essence of everything. And I know now - all healing is possible. All healing is possible. And I am proof of this. For the chronically ill, that doesnt mean that our physical bodies will go back to the state of health we once knew. No, no matter our yearning, no matter how many times we come to our wits end, no matter how valiant we are or how hard we try, our bodies, our spirits, our lives - they may have different plans for us. Over some things, indeed, we have little or no control. (And yet still, we must try, for in the trying, if we are courageous and never become bitter, we only become stronger, no matter what.) And yet, even in broken bodies - all healing is possible. Knowing the truth of this, of our existence (and I always knew it, but I didnt quite trust that knowing, until I got sick) has made me stronger than all broken systems, all people without integrity, stronger than all judgment, all the madness, all the lies, and all the loss and trauma of our world. I may not be able to touch pleasure, to know simple ease, to eat most foods, to love or laugh with abandon or be free of severe physical limitations just yet. (And maybe I will never be free, in regards to some of those things.) For I am still in the valley of the shadow of death, merely due to the sheer physical and how objectively deeply wearing it is. And I have a journey ahead of me, and on parts of that journey I have learned I have no control, zero say. (And I had to be beaten down to accept this, Im so damn stubborn. I, too, was addicted to the heroic in life). And on other parts of that journey, I have much control, much say, and it is completely up to me to rise to the occasion, repeatedly, until I know how to stand and stay standing, even through intense physical suffering. (I see many chronically ill people who dont get this, and who suffer all the more because of it, and my heart goes out to them.) So no - I may not yet know the pleasures of the well, or the freedom you so take for granted - and I took it for granted too - we all do. I may not have the luxury of stressing over the little things, the freedom with which you move every day, but I will know small pleasures again. I will recover at least some of what I lost - just not the life I had, and I know now that continuing to live it could have killed me. For whatever reason, my life requires radical honesty of me. It just does. So does my body, and that is my path, even in the perils of a lying world. This world - it so wants to fit all of us into tiny boxes. Safe boxes, distracted boxes, normal ways of doing things boxes. But increasingly, those boxes are being returned to the dictates of survival - and this, after the American Dream and the briefest period of building a middle class where we freed ourselves from those dictates and became the envy of the world. And it wasnt perfect, but it had real promise, and we proved, that with much tweaking, more than mere survival is possible. We PROVED this. And now, in the world post that dream, our survival is increasingly defined by...corporations. Our very reality is so deeply shaped by these entities we cannot see straight, much less understand how much they are corralling us, telling us how to be, what to think, giving us dark dreams about our inability to get by. My god - what have we done to ourselves, creating these things, and nominating a Supreme Court that makes that dark and sickening dream reality? Tiny boxes about, unfortunately, and we put each other in them all the time, unthinkingly. For example, the well want a happy ending for the ill (understandably, and thank you!). Our family members and friends want things to go back to normal, for there to be a resolution, because no one likes living in chronic uncertainty, and few in the world of the well understand how to begin to relate to the ill. Because underneath it all, aside from the huge losses our loved ones also incur (which are real and very hard on everyone) we are also too much of a reminder of the inevitable. We are a living reminder of weakness, of vulnerability, of, well...death. And so, especially in the minds of our allopathic doctors, who are trained in medical school to forget they have a heart that is not merely mechanical, to forget that soul and spirit exist and are as much a part of health and healing and our journeys in life as anything - to forget that social justice is a huge component in wellness and illness and that people who lack resources CANNOT get well completely on their own - in their minds, there must be something mentally wrong with us. The same goes with our family and friends who have never truly encountered devastating illness, the kind that doesnt resolve itself in either recovery or death, and who, on some level, dont want to be inconvenienced by the radical changes it demands of all of us. (For healing is NOT just physical, it is physical, emotional, spiritual and at the level of soul, and it requires we have the space to be honest - and for so many families, honesty is terrifying!) It is also hard on those of our friends who live more on surfaces - relying on the capacities of the physical as distractions from deeper work, or who are simply living their lives (and good for them, they should, and our illnesses are not their responsibility, and if how weve had to change is too much for them, well, that is where they are in life, and friendships sometimes end.) Some of these people just fade away, not judging us, and that is ok. But others, to justify their own inability to face certain realities, want to believe that there is some flaw in us, some kind of weakness - as if we dont really want to heal badly enough. And ahh, what bullshit! Sorry to swear here, but that is the truth of it. Of course we want to heal! Of course we do not choose deep suffering - my goodness! But the way the world works, it requires good health. (Even as we create systems that assault the health of all of us.) Our world is survival of the fittest, and our society, which prizes Darwins theories so much (as they serve so well for predatory capitalism!), has failed to evolve in this regard past the animal world. Herds of gazelle or deer and prides of lions - they leave their wounded behind to die - some of them even kill their own for their aims. But we - we have been given the gift of opposable thumbs and consciousness. We have the capacity to build an incredible world and to evolve far beyond this state of leaving our own to suffer and die, or killing our own for our aims. We have the capacity to make a world where all basic needs of shelter, food and health care are met for every human being, and we have the capacity to create our world in such a way that in the most important ways, it frees all of us! Oh, not from the hard work of survival at its most basic, of course. There is no nirvana in the limitations of the physical - we still have to plow the fields, find places for waste, clean up our environment, deal with the consequences od decades of policies that ensure a difficult future - and wed have to build a system of ensuring the myriad requirements of survival are handled on a mass scale - preferably, finally without slave labor - yes, we have practical, very real and challenging things to deal with. But the fact is, were completely capable of creating workable, sustainable systems on this planet, systems that free all of us, to some extent at least, to have the room to discover what it even means to be alive, to have the time to revel in life, to have the space, the safety, to love it, and to make room for hopes and dreams and being big - as big as we possibly can be - which means never, ever, needing to make others small. Ever. Not at home, not in the workplace, not to hoard resources. Never. Making others small is petty, ugly, and based in insecurity and fear and it is utterly unnecessary - but most people dont yet know this. Or, they may know it, but they keep ahold of it, because in our world, which relentlessly makes people feel powerless, making others feel small is a momentary kind of power. But it not real, it is just sad. (And heres something you can use to say to yourself when someone is trying to make you feel small: Every time you need to make other people feel small in order to make yourself feel good, you just reveal your fear - the places you have yet to deal with, in being human, in being in your particular life, with all youve had to face. And I ache for you but I will not tolerate your doing this, just so you know. I see through it, and it cannot diminish me, no matter the constraints in my own life.). You may not be able to say it aloud, but think it, because its true. And dont you think the better part of 300 million people - the ones who arent at the top of the heap, pathologically stepping on everyone else - need to read and remind themselves of the above paragraph? Dont you think weve become so accustomed to this way of being in our regular, everyday world, that we fail to question it, while it makes all of us feel like shit? And makes people turn to prozac? And to being inauthentic? Until the whole world is built on a pile of sand, between our needs for survival, our fears, and our collective refusal to evolve, our world becomes ever more steeped in soft and passive lies, lies that drive us to doctors and midlife crises, and to a chronic feeling of malaise, from which we need to find escape... Dont you think 300 million people could stand to wake up in this way? It is pollyanna to think we could take down walls built of lies? To think we could overcome tremendous fears and greed? To think we could make room for all of us to be big, not in the ways weve been conditioned imagine are big (ie, riches and fame) but in authentic ways? Is it hopelessly naive to think that 300 million (Im leaving room for the most recalcitrant ones:) people in a nation might heed a call to awaken from this bad dream, to see one another with new eyes, to stop reflexively judging the invisible, to make room for differences and quirks and all our brokenness and amazingness at once? Is it fanciful to think a revolution could be based on this? Not on New Age, pollyanna, Nirvana bullshit - but on the nitty gritty rawness, awfulness, incredibleness, uncertainty, beauty and strength it means to be human. Not on pie-in-the-sky laws of attraction, but on real dreaming arising out of actual consideration of our complex circumstances, real solutions coming from the best minds and best people of our time - with commitment on ALL of our parts to reaching them. Maybe its crazy to think these things are possible. But this is who I am. This is my spirit speaking, beyond the prison and the illusions of the physical, outside our manic stream of life, momentarily protected in my own illness by my partner and a few friends, with no guarantees whatsoever for the future, and no simple or clear way to plan for how to survive my own, because that is my path, and I accept it. Our world, and our systems, and our fears make us small. But they are illusions. The saints and poets and mystics who spoke of this - they are not so far from us after all. They are not out there whack jobs who appeal only to our religious, to students, and to misfits. It is far more out there to maniacally destroy an entire planet, to harm the lives of billions, to cause mass extinctions, to cause incalculable suffering - all in the name of greed, and of systems weve convinced ourselves are normal and sane - just the way things are done It is far, far more crazy to blindly adhere to these things, to continue them at this pace, and to defend them. To say NO MORE - in body, in heart, in mind, and in every action we can feasibly muster - that is the sanest thing of all. To utter yes, to breathe a huge collective sigh of YES to our futures, to dreaming better than this, to having vision - THAT would be the sanest, the most incredible thing of all -and to believe it is possbible for us to do this - well that, that is an act of radically believing in us, and that, that takes the greatest courage of all, because it takes showing up, naked, without all the lies, and a willingness to stand in collective uncertainty, without ego, and to allow for a dance and a process that is greater than all of us. THAT, that would be sanity, THAT would be an honoring of the gift of consciousness, a recognition of who we are, as human beings. Oh, to peel off the layers of our collective madness and to stand briefly in the sunlight once again, before putting the gloves on, and getting down to business. The real business of doing the hard work of fixing - well - nearly everything. Because we are worth it. Because all healing is possible. Because a world that is not steeped in our madness is our right. Because we are made to create a world that has room for all of us, of this I have no doubt.
Posted on: Mon, 19 May 2014 20:35:43 +0000
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