There is a pain wedged beneath my ribs, radiating like heat into the rest of my body. My heart rests on it. Together, they make a formidable weight.
I want to banish the pain. Obliterate it. Erase it.
All of my energy turns towards it, intense and focused. The rest of me is left feeling tired, weak, drained.
I drag myself around. Then I remember this is also a gateway, this pain. It is a gateway into discovering, as I have so many times before, only to promptly forget anew, that there is no separation between that pain and me. There is no me versus it.
I pass through the gateway, armed with all of my “going on an adventure” gear, including my curiosity. And the pain begins softening, dissolving into my tissue.
For days now, I have been seeing, feeling, receiving reminders from within me, and also from outside myself, to recognize that clearing and focusing my mind is not sufficient to produce the results I am desiring. For that, I must engage the energy of creation, the energy of what already exists just beyond my perception.
I have learned this before. I think I should know it, do it, easily, effortlessly, elegantly. But I cannot remember, cannot grasp how I ever achieved it before. How to Focus and Flow, Hold and Release? Simultaneously? How can I be spirit and form at once?
This is a paradox I cannot fathom.
In the park, I sit under a huge elm tree, whose branches and roots extend far past its trunk and my body resting against it. I am in its shade and I am embraced by its singular energy. The leaves extend outward and shape a frame for my view of the lake and sky on the horizon. The water moves continuously in ripples and waves that appear autonomous, separate from each other.
I watch them and think of the breeze playing with the surface, and the currents pulling below, of the great liquid body that responds in tides to the face of the moon.
Suddenly, wordlessly, I understand. The paradox is no more.
I chat with my mother, casually, about her childhood in El Barrio, in Tucson. We look at the picture of her, her siblings, and cousins, next to her Tata’s house on 5th Avenue, gathered for a brief moment in stillness before they all burst into movement and are off playing. She shares little, careless, details, to which neither of us give much thought: Richard, always dressed like a cowboy, my aunt’s penchant for standing up to their father, René’s constantly scraped knees. She talks of her school, and the house her father built, then she mentions my grandmother, and the dances she and my grandfather often attended.
Afterwards, I am left thinking of my grandmothers: Gama and Oma. Their form is long gone now. Yet, in some ways, they are more present to me now, than they could have been in life, because they lived half the country and (almost) a hemisphere away from me, respectively.
But today, I hold in my mind’s eye the elegant woman in a shimmering dress, her lightly veiled hat and long gloves — the Gama from the black and white photograph. I think of all the details of her life that are lost to me, things that may have mattered to her: what secret ingredient went into her Capirotada; why she was so captivated by all things Asian; how many nights she spent staring at the ceiling, wondering about her boys across the seas with the armed forces, or her daughter who was living so far away. What do I know of the secrets she shared with her closest friend, or what she really said to my grandfather’s ghost when he sat at the end of her bed at night? What of the dreams she never realized? And the ones that came true? I will never know. And some day, no one will know the things that mattered to her.
That awareness twists inside of me.
But a moment later, I am touched in my core by the presence of permanent flow, from one from to another, that I recognize as Eternity, Oneness. I am overcome with a quiet that stills the twisting anxiety within me and softens every edge.
I am aware, then, that, ultimately, none of it really matters.
When my Bleeding Days end, I feel a disquieting sense of loss.
Without having full consciousness of it, I hold a fear that I may find myself suddenly disconnected from my oneness with the Earth, disconnected from the comforting knowing that I am soil and loam and humus.
I fear that I will be unable to experience simultaneously my wholeness and my fragmentation.
I feel a disquieting sense of loss.
And it is true that my body eases me into awareness of my oneness and my individuation, that the veil thins for me in this time. But it is also true that, at this time, I stop to notice, that I allow awareness to become humility.
I accept an invitation out of my hiding place in the small closet, where I am cramped and tight, where I can only whisper. I step out, expecting to find a huge room, maybe a ballroom.
But I am in a grassy field high in the mountains, surrounded by dandelions blooming bright. I look around and recognize this place, I can see the familiar Andes stretching in the distance, beyond the shimmering forest that grows at the field’s distant edges. My heart expands with gratitude and joy, for this is home.
But suddenly I am drawn halfway down the mountain, towards a small, young forest of silvery eucalyptus trees. I am drawn there, and, unexpectedly, I am the forest, feeling each tree and its roots stretching into the soil. I am that soil, particle by particle. I am the grass, blade by blade, and the field entire, lapping up to the forest edge. I am the pond beyond that, molecule by molecule of water. I am the mountains pushing up out of the crust of the earth and tripping on themselves away, away, here. I am the distance and the very air. That is my body.
I can see my own eyes, soft and loving, silver-grey in the blur of silver and grey and brown and green and blue and white that is me. I can see the waves that radiate through me, and I can feel them rippling outwards in my human heart.
Reflections From My True Self 