friday afternoon update! 13: the late edition

all will be revealed

i can smile about it now but at the time it was terrible
—morrissey “shakespeare’s sister”

wow. what a week! starting out with the proclamation of 2009 as the year of self healing, which segued into this 1st week of the year as the week of holding a vision of myself in wholeness and light, and finishing with the admission that i, like stephen patrick morrissey, can smile about it now…

and in between?

well, looking in reverse i declare the instititution of the all will be revealed tag–my way of looking back at all the sandbagging that i am doing right now for the purpose of protecting the innocent, and recognizing that sometimes telling the story when it’s hot is a good way to burn down the house. i’ve survived one house fire in my life, which is def a story for another day, (hey! another tag!), and i have no wish to survive another on purpose!

backing up

it’s worth noting that strange things happen when you hold a vision of wholeness: it starts to happen! and the thing about wholeness is–wow! it’s a great place to be! and oh my effing god the journey can be hell!

so this whole mysterious series of events (which of course are meaningless in detail to a certain extent, since your own adventures in holding a vision of wholeness and light are or will be completely different than mine) was presaged in a series of comments left by richard reeve of catskill cottage seed fame. so let’s pull out the quotation indenter:

Shadow work, so much of it being acceptance, has that subtle gift held within it, namely, that in it’s collective aspects we can learn to disentangle and not beat ourselves up for their presence. Identification with either the light or the shadow can lead to serious inflation (setting us up for one of those metaphorical or literal crashes).

which of course is what happened as i suddenly found myself staring into the abyss, and finding that the abyss was staring into me. and in that instant i saw that all of my attempts to control this world and its circumstances were not only ugly and stupid, they were in vain as well. not gonna happen. and in that moment of emptiness and despair, when my very existence itself seemed unbearable, and visions of horror and violence unmentionable in a blog such as this welled up in my mind, in that very moment i felt a sense of peace, a sense of relief, and a feeling of release as i suddenly realized:

this too shall pass.

that the day always follows the night, that freedom always follows oppression, that love always follows hate. and so i let go of control, and vowed to let go also of all the ways of control, and to eat the whole cosmic pizza pie just as it came to me, right out of the box, eggplant and all!

up pops tantra

it was also a week of extreme tantric influence, from the discovery of daniel odier’s tantric quest: an encounter with absolute love, to an enlightening reading from the osho transformation tarot, and tantra being the supreme philosophy of wholeness, that is of course apropo. and then jumping back to the end of the week, i’m in my car driving to a pre-natal massage appointment (i’m the giver!), with literally 2 minutes to spare as i eased out of the chaos of the middle to end of my week (someday, i promise, all will be revealed), and what pops up on the shuffle but an old 23 lies song:

i had to give up all those things that were killing me
i had to give up all those things that were killing me
now i don’t deserve to die young
i deserve to live a long long time
forever maybe
living with the things that i’ll make happen
stepping out of my long dark shadow

which brings us back to richard reeve, shadow work, and  wholeness and acceptance–and the irony of that: when we accept the things about ourselves that we don’t like–say our falsity, then the very act of accepting that we are liars is a truth, and it brings more truth into our lives; just as the very act of admitting and accepting our brutality is a gentleness, and brings more gentleness into our lives.

in this same way, by beginning with a vision of wholeness and light, i have also conjured up for myself a vision of my fracturedness, and my darkness, of my falsity and my brutality, of my self centeredness and my weakness, all of which have revealed to me my truthfulness, and my concern and regard for others, and my strength.

and this being january, and the first week of january at that, this global general view is fine for me right now. there are 11 months beyond this one to drill in with greater and greater specificity, 47 weeks beyond january to explore in more detail the many levels of my discontinuity, and to bring out some needle and thread to stitch up this patchwork quilt that is my self in this lifetime–to heal the wounds and scars of yesterday and long ago, and bring that vision of wholeness to greater fruition.

and yours?

pax