Bodhi leaves half eaten apples, and the occasional pear, all over the house. I find them beneath couch cushions, on side tables, in sock drawers, abandoned and discarded, rotting. Bodhi is all about that first bite, the conquest. A dozen clean and shiny apples arrive in the fruit basket every week, each one new and unexplored. He waits, knowing if I see him I will take the apple, cut it in half, remove the seeds and offer it to him. In these instances, he eats the entire apple, leaving nothing behind but he doesn’t ask me to cut the apples. He prefers to grapple with what is too large, too much and more than he can ingest. Bodhi approaches life like half eaten apples, nothing needs to be finished, it is about the next great thing, the next forbidden something to monopolize his interest.
Some days, you just have to forget about ‘healing’. You have to stop trying to feel better, trying to overcome your emotional wounds, or trying to be anywhere other than where you are. You have to embrace the day as it is. And you have to give yourself the most sacred permission of all: To shatter. To break. To be an ugly mess. To lean into a place of utter humility and powerlessness in yourself. To cry out to the heavens, “I can’t do this!” To admit utter defeat in the loss of the life you had imagined. To crumble to the ground, lonely and hopeless and profoundly ruined. To want to die, even. And there, in the darkest places, in the blackness of the underworld, you may begin to rediscover... life. And learn to love the beginnings. A sacred reboot: A single breath. The way the sun warms your face. The sound of a tiny bird singing in the tree over there. The raw simplicity of a single moment of human existence. Hell has been transmuted, thr...
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