Month: September 2015

The Wave and the Ocean

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I’m feeling a lot of love and openness today.  The rise and fall of ease. And the ease beneath that, the wave and the ocean.

I wrote those words earlier today to my beloved.  It was after responding to an online discussion for a course I’m taking with Saniel Bonder about living in what he calls the Core Wound.  It’s a way of talking about the difficulty at the core of our being in living our divinely human paradox, being both form and formlessness, finite and infinite.  Living what Saniel calls the spirit/matter split.

Living the dharma that Saniel and his circle of founding teachers have manifested comes to living in and as this Core Wound.  A life of apparently unending dropping into and merging with our own individual realization of the Core Wound.  Our core issues and conditioned patterns.

As I continue to drop, rappelling down the spider web of Being, I come up against my own particular issues.  And today I landed in an awareness about myself that is captured in the title of this post.  It draws on and deepens the non-dual teaching about the wave and the ocean.

In my case, I happen to be wired with what is called in Human Design as an emotional wave.  My emotions come up organically out of the ocean of my Being.  This sounds obvious and self-evident as I write it, but it landed in me quite profoundly and surprisingly just a while ago.

The way I experience the Core Wound, my frequent sense of discomfort mediated by an underlying wellness of Being is the way the wave arises from the ocean.  Tsunami or wavelet, their source is the same.  Under the wave there is always the ocean.  Within the ocean is the wave.

Being is everything.  We flow like water in its myriad forms: mist, rain, hail, ice, snow, rain, river, stream, lake, bay, sea, wave and surface and depth.  When we stop looking for ourselves, we land in this realization that we are in all and all is in us.

Resting in Sorrow

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Life gives us so many opportunities to experience its innate sorrow.  Being alive as a human being is to know sorrow intimately, if we are willing to open to it, to allow it to take root in our hearts.  Take root seems an apt phrase now that I’ve written it.  Our lived experience sheds the seeds of sorrow, every loss, misunderstanding, disappointment, every illumination of our powerlessness.  Every encounter with aging, sickness and death.  With scarcity, chaos.

My life has been a paradoxical relationship with sorrow.  There’s a way in which it has been my constant companion and a way in which I’ve treated it like an embarrassing relative.  When I was a child, one of my mother’s constant refrains to me was “why are you crying?”  As a college student, publishing my first poems, neighbors asked “why are they so sad?  You’re always so happy!”  I learned to put a happy face on my own innate melancholy.  It took a lot of years, is TAKING a lot of years, to slip once and for all out of the mask, to come out of the closet and live freely as a melancholic.

Today, I’m feeling the juicy fruits of sorrow.  The soil is moist and receptive.  I feel pregnant with it.  The seeds continue to fall–an email ending a particular sort of relationship, a conversation with my mother in which we trade “can you hear me? How do you feel?  How is your weather?  Thank you for calling.”  It’s the lingua franca of our family for “I miss you.  I love you.  Are you alright?  Are you still there?  When will I see you?”

People come and go through the doors of our many rooms.  They brush against us with the fibers of their Being.  They leave their scent, their texture, “an impression” as Joni Mitchell once sang “of their loneliness.”  And yet, and so, we do and we must embrace them and what they bring and what they leave.  We must gather the flowers of every passing, every meeting.  We must allow ourselves to rest in the bed of our sorrows.