Light At Last

It's been two darn good weeks for me and I'm just feeling so damn grateful today.

Three days ago (only three?) we elected a new president and I'm still trying to integrate that one in my mind and believe you me- NO PUN intended. "Integrate" is a word that we used back in the old hippie days to represent the sort of processing that change in the brain requires.

I'm so glad I got to be a hippie.

I was talking to my yoga teacher this morning and I told her that two things really profoundly affected the way I see the world. Of course there are far more than two, but these are really important.

One was being lucky enough to travel to Europe when I was seventeen. I turned eighteen in Paris, France. I was able there to see that the way we do things here in the USA, which I had always been told was the greatest country in the world, was not necessarily the only way and besides that, seeing Michelangelo's David sort of gave me the insight that maybe the US hadn't quite come up to the level of culture and achievement that other countries had.

Among other things, including the way their soup tasted.

The other influence on my life which opened my mind to a completely different way of thinking was taking hallucinogenic drugs.

Yeah. I did it. More than once. And I'm mighty grateful I did.

My yoga teacher was curious about that one. She's never done any such a thing but just recently had to detox from the "medications" her doctors had her on for pain and it was a difficult process, to say the least. She asked me how I'd "gotten" off the hallucinogens.

I explained to her that for me, at least, hallucinogens are the opposite of addictive. It's sort of like childbirth, only without the physical pain. Not something you need to do all the time. I did it until I figured out that I'd learned all I needed to learn from that particular teacher and then I quit.

And I think that's true. They weren't a recreational experience for me, but an opening of the mind.

Mindbirth?

Soulbirth?

Not unlike seeing The David or a giant Sequoia or holding your just-born baby for the first time and realizing that there is far more going on in this world (and perhaps others) than my little mind had ever possibly perceived.

There are keys to the doors of perception, as old Aldous Huxley pointed out and I've been blessed to hold a few of them in my hand.

But you know what they say- Before enlightenment, chop wood, haul water. After enlightenment, chop wood, haul water.

Not saying I'm enlightened. Oh hell, no. But I've had my moments where I believe I was pretty darn close.

Moments when I realized viscerally to the tiniest particles of my bones and blood that yes, we are all one. Not that we are just a part of it all but that we ARE it all. Along with the trees and the rocks and the birds, this oak table I'm writing on, and that redneck down the road.

And that the divisions we see are merely illusions.

But like waking from a dream that we desperately want to hold on to, these sudden beams of enlightenment, whether chemically induced or not, are difficult to keep with us in the form of their original full power and harder still to explain.
I think perhaps there are people who can do this, who are even born knowing these things. The Dalai Lama? That homeless guy who walks down the road with his eyes closed, chanting and blissed out? Keith Richards?

Haha.

Just making sure you're paying attention.

But for the rest of us, life is a constant road of knowing and not-knowing, of seeing and not-seeing, of remembering and forgetting, of being reminded and remembering again.

At least for me.

And in the last few weeks, my soul has been at rest enough to take in so much goodness and to remember a few of the things I've learned. To be at peace enough to be grateful, down to that place where I know what's important and what's not and to feel blessed beyond measure.

My family and the love we share is something I never thought I'd have. Not like this. Not like it's turned out to be. It's blown all my perceptions of what a family can be.

My friends and the support and humor they've offered me is something I'll never be able to express my gratitude for appropriately.

The people I get to play with at the Opera House give blessings to me that they have no idea they are offering.

My home.

This country that I now have more love for than I ever knew I could have.

The simple joys I experience while metaphorically chopping wood and hauling water, whether it's digging in the dirt or sweeping the floors of this house I love or baking a loaf of bread.

Sleep and it's soft curtain of darkness which is the sort of darkness which is light-shot.

The very basic gratefulness of living in a world filled with the sounds of birds and the wind moving through the trees and taking tongue in the windchimes.

The water that bathes our planet.

The ability to write down and share what I feel and dream about and am grateful for.

A body which is aging but which is still strong and which has served me so well, especially when it came to creating life and delivering it and nurturing it.

The experiences I've been blessed to have, both the ones that seemed ecstatic and the ones that seemed too hard to bear, because they've made me who I am.

My husband, whom as we grow older together, I cherish and adore more each day.

These things and so much more I am blessed with.

I was blessed with them a few months ago, too, when I was crazy, but I couldn't register them, not in any constructive or real way. The place I was in was so dark that I couldn't see them, even though I knew they were all around me. And so, in some ways, I am feeling most blessed to be at this more peaceful, sane place where I can feel them, where I can hold them and see them and study them and know them.

I find myself tearing up a lot recently. Joyful tears. Not just at the big, huge things like seeing Obama get elected and seeing the faces of his wife and children. But at the smaller things, too, the more personal. Trying to tell a friend how much she means to me. Attempting to do the same with my husband, his arms around me. Telling a child of mine how proud I am of the person he or she has become.

Pure, simple, open-hearted gratefulness fills my heart and my eyes leak that which over-fills.

And I have no elegant words of ending today. This is just what it is. I feel enlightened in the sense that my being is filled with light and in the sense that my soul feels light, as if a huge weight has been removed from it and I can breathe again, smile again, feel all my blessings again, remember the lessons I've learned again and honor them all again.

Amen. Again. And again, and again, and again.