Thursday, December 15, 2011

accessorize your scars


I have a wall of teachers in my new room. I also have the letter M A X.   A friend questioned why I do not have a picture of Max up there with the other open-hearted heretics. My teachers do all share a certain quality of revolutionary .  And Max certainly rubs elbows with these masters.  I have, however very intentionally never printed a picture of him. Pictures of him decorate the desktops of my electronic devices and yet to frame him on a wall in his perfect form that he didn't stay long in seems futile.

He is changeless, yet changing forms all of the time.  A frame seems too little for his great bigness.   For the first few weeks after he left his little body the two of us once again shared skin suits. He came from my cells and I felt him return into me. He moved from my uterus to my heart-erus. The veil became so thin between birth, life, birth, death we wanted to stay very close to each other so not to just disappear. As soon as we figured out how to communicate he quickly found an additional form, and another form, and another form.... he is always recognizable and always beyond the scope of my imagination. He both evolves alongside of me and shows me the way on a path that demands all of me.

Sometimes he wears roller skates and feathers, while sometimes he wears war paint and armor. Sometimes he is as gentle as a chinook wind,  while sometimes as fierce as flooding water. Sometimes he has very furry large feet and a little clumsy while sometimes he has perfectly coordinated bird wings.   Sometimes he is an absolute planetary marble playing mastermind while sometimes he is two good friends having a salad.

He is omnipresent, omniscient,  ineffable, and loves girls singing Kirtan.

He is also happy to just be my son. 

We long for each other. 

This is the beauty of the beloved. The beloved is a perpetual state of longing for the other. When I talk about the awakening that Max shared with us, it is the awakening that essentially we are all in a state of longing that doesn't come from incompleteness. It comes from our heart's longing to be in our baseline state of absolute unconditional love. We loose it somewhere along the line. We forget. We let strange things block us from feeling it. Then we will find it.  Then we loose it again. This cycle continues.  Then one day we get lucky (when I say lucky I am talking about the lila kind of lucky, not the winning the lottery kind of lucky) and something radical happens.  And when radical strikes it is insane. But If we rise up and really meet it... inevitably we will be ripped open and the raw space of revelation gives us another taste of the sweet perpetual deep longing of the heart. This is beloved. 
Evoking a broken heart doesn't take much when we loose are children... and still the work is to stay both broken hearted and ripped wide open. We are actually designed to be in this state. Our cells know what to do. Our hearts know how to connect. 

 The choice between tragic and triumphant is a very thin sharp sharp razor.  Both edges will cut you open.  Our work is not so much to heal these kind of wounds as it is so much to accessorize our scars. I wrote a few blogs back that "our beauty is our broken". Dare to stay triumphantly broken hearted.   Dare to stay triumphantly broken hearted.  It will look amazingly good on you.

Let Love In
H. 

2 comments:

L. Marie Cook said...

You have become my grief guru :) as well as my life guru.

You really inspire me to live openly and open hearted.

I have my own grief that I deal with and have decorated my life with. And you give me the courage to be proud of it!

Thank you always, for your wisdom and deep thinking about infinitesimally difficult subject matter. Somehow you manage to make it not difficult, but challenging and possible to accept pain and sadness as a necessary gift in life and growth.

I am honored to know you and be on the receiving end of your heart and message.

Unknown said...

thank- you H for the reminder and permission to be raw and open.........love you....