On a hike this morning, my heart was aching, longing, crying, to experience God and I had the thought full of feeling, "I am so tired of being "me"". The ludicrousness of this statement puzzled me leading to the next question. "Who is tired of being "me"?" Awareness just opened and for a moment it was clear that angelina/me doesn't have a thing to do with it...doesn't need to get enlightened or become better, more spiritual or anything. She doesn't need to save anything or anyone. In fact it was like seeing angelina as a pin point in the expanse of what I am. It really is just a case of mistaken identity isn't it? That which I am...truth...whatever feeble word I use to describe it...doesn't need "my" help. Of course "me" wanted to hold onto the "experience" and it was gone. In its wake it was abundantly clear that "me" "angelina" isn't going to "wake up" or get enlightened. It is a waking "from" but the wakefulness/truth/consciousness is always present. Always. It doesn't matter what angelina is doing. It is here, now, even if I can't feel it.
Grief is defined as a deep or intense sorrow. I have been thinking a lot about grief, about it's wide and sticky reach, about the watery quality of it's absorption and the agonizing effort of swimming to shore. Intense sorrow happens. It is a part of life. Yet we press against it. We try to eradicate it. How? We encapsulate our grief in a story, thus effectively removing us from the immediacy of the pain. The mind promises salvation and begins to tell a story, over and over and over. We listen to the inner ramblings, the constant diatribe, the neurotic attempt to avoid the experience. When someone is hurting we listen to their story, we talk about it, we recount our own story, but we certainly don't jump in the waters of sadness, instead we sit on the bank of our familiar longing. Once, when I was floundering in deep grief, my youngest brother knelt next to me and held me for over an hour. He didn't speak. He didn't commiserate. He just jumped in the
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Richard Sylvester