whole: day 10

Something has reached out and taken in the beams of my eyes.

There is a longing, it is for his body, for every hair of that dark body.

All I was doing was being, and the Dancing Energy came by my house.

His face looks curiously like the moon, I saw it from the side, smiling.

My family says: “Don’t ever see him again!” And implies things in a low voice.

But my eyes have their own life; they laugh at rules, and know whose they are.

I believe I can bear on my shoulders whatever you want to say of me.

Mira says: Without the energy that lifts mountains, how am I to live?

‘All I was Doing Was Breathing’ 

Mirabai (16th. century Hindu mystic poet), translated by Robert Bly

It is one thing to try to convince my mind to change the scripts it keeps repeating to me; it is quite another to wade into the unknown depths of my heart, when I don’t know whether it can speak, let alone what it might say.  For ‘heart-knowing’ is very difficult for me, as I have a highly calibrated sense of not being able to trust myself.  That is, not just feeling I cannot trust what my mind tells me, as it twists and turns the messages of pain and depression and religion around into bizarre distortions which can make me act in strange ways.  It is that as a whole person I do not trust myself to do ‘the right thing’.  I do not trust myself not self-sabotage my healing journey.  Some days, I do not trust that I can ever be whole.

heart knowing

Knowingdarkly is about developing this ‘heart knowing’: creating a space within for not knowing, for not even asking any questions, but for listening, for just being.  Knowingdarkly is about being prepared to quiet my mind so I might descend to the ‘eye of my heart’, where I might glimpse the Dancing Energy in the dark, where all I need do is be and breathe.

If I am able to loose my controlling hold, I might be able to hear my heart-instinct quiet the head-voice that tells me I am untrustworthy.  Then it just might be possible to hear how to maintain that small connection with the Hope enshrined in knowingdarkly, which I described in yesterday’s reflection.  Once again,

you are a story. You are not merely the possessor and teller of a number of stories; you are a well-written intentional story that is authored by the greatest Writer of all time, and even before time and after time.  The weight of those words, if you believe them even for brief snippets of time, can change the trajectory of your life.

Dan Allender

You cannot heal a heart

with one that has not been pierced.

You cannot see the Truth

with eyes that have not wept.

You cannot touch a soul

with one that has not known the darkness of night.

You cannot mop a brow

with a cloth that has not bandaged a wound.

You cannot hold a hand 

with one not shaped by love.

You cannot carry a burden 

with a back not already broken with a load.

You cannot rise

unless you fall;  

You cannot see

unless you are blind;

You cannot live

unless you die;

You cannot hold

unless you let go.

James Percival

beginning to know my dark glistening heart. (iPhone image)